Chapter Ninety: Imperial Power Does Not Reach the Countryside

After Zhen Qian moved to Luquan County, he gradually amassed a considerable household. On the surface alone, he now controlled four or five hundred male and female servants. Only a very small portion of them had originally come with him when the Zhen family property was divided. Some had been servants belonging to the Zhen household itself; others had been brought by his mother from the Wang family when she married into the Zhens. By now, all of them had become Zhen Qian’s private property.

At this point, it is necessary to say a few words about the marriage and property system of the Tang dynasty.

First, the legal marriageable age in the Tang was set in the first year of the Zhenguan era under Emperor Taizong: men at twenty, women at fifteen. In the twenty-second year of the Kaiyuan era, however, Emperor Xuanzong, wishing to increase the population, lowered the age to fifteen for men and thirteen for women.

The first step in establishing a marriage in the Tang was the drawing up of a marriage contract. Because Tang law allowed elders to arrange the marriages of their children, and because children who disobeyed could be punished with one hundred blows of the rod, marriage in that age was by no means a matter of free love. In general, it could not reflect the personal wishes of young men and women.

Besides the marriage contract, the customs inherited from the Wei, Jin, and Northern and Southern Dynasties made marriage by financial transaction extremely common. As recorded in the New Book of Tang, in the biography of Gao Jian, Tang marriages were such that “weddings must involve abundant gifts, and thus people called it the selling of marriage.”

The Tang also imposed restrictions on marriage between different social ranks. The Commentary on the Tang Code states: “Each person should have a mate, yet their kinds and stations must correspond; since the noble and the lowly differ, how can they be joined in marriage?” In other words, everyone ought to marry, but only within a matching social station. Since distinctions between high and low existed, marriage across them was not permitted. The code further provided that if a man of humble status took a respectable woman as his wife, he could be sentenced to a year and a half of penal servitude. Close-kin marriage was likewise forbidden. Tang law prohibited marriage between people of the same surname and between cousins; violators faced penal servitude or corporal punishment. Widows, however, were allowed to remarry. In the first year of Zhenguan, Emperor Taizong issued an edict declaring that women who had completed their mourning period might marry again.

Taking concubines was legal in the Tang. The code provided that if a maidservant was favored by her master and bore him a child, she might be accepted as a concubine. A husband might also take a concubine if his wife had passed the age of fifty without bearing children.

The Tang marriage system chiefly concerned three matters: the formation of marriage, the dissolution of marriage, and the restrictions upon marriage. In the matter of forming a marriage, the Tang Code required the command of parents, the word of a matchmaker, and the traditional procedures of the Six Rites as necessary conditions for a valid union. It also specified concrete requirements such as submitting the marriage contract and prohibiting private agreements. As for dissolution, there were two main methods in the Tang: compulsory divorce and divorce by mutual agreement. The former included judicial separation and repudiation of the wife; the latter was called an amicable separation.

According to the Tang Code, there were chiefly two circumstances in which the authorities would compel a separation. The first was an unlawful marriage, one contracted in violation of legal norms. The second was the occurrence of a complete rupture of moral obligations between the families. In such cases, the government forcibly dissolved the marriage. As for restrictions, they concerned both the limitations on contracting marriage and the limitations on dissolving it.

The Tang Code chiefly forbade marriages that violated statutory rules, and in matters of divorce it still upheld the traditional principle of the three situations in which a wife must not be sent away.

A properly wedded wife in the Tang held a very high status, and the old division by which the man managed affairs outside while the woman governed those within the household has endured even to the present day.

The Book of Rites, in the section on the meaning of marriage, records: “In general, the reason lies in the great expense of marrying off a daughter. Among the people, there is no family that does not prepare fully for a daughter’s marriage. Some spend several hundred taels of silver, some several thousand; even the least must spend over a hundred pieces of gold. Though they sell fields or borrow money, they must somehow make it up. The groom’s family takes pride in a rich dowry and mocks a poor one; indeed, parents-in-law often determine their affection or dislike for a daughter-in-law according to the richness or poverty of her trousseau.”

The Tang inherited these institutions from earlier dynasties. A daughter’s marriage could cost her family dearly; some would even sell land or incur debt in order to marry her off in splendor, because the size of her dowry was tied directly to her standing in her husband’s household. A woman with too meager a dowry would be looked down upon by her husband’s family.

A provision of the Household Ordinances from the Kaiyuan era states: when fields, residences, and property are to be divided, brothers divide them equally. After the father or grandfather dies, if the sons establish separate households and live apart, then after a certain number of years, or after a family member has been absent for a specified period, division may proceed. If there are no ancestral fields and houses, shops, mills, dependents, or servants currently existing for division, then no arbitrary further claim of partition may be made. Property obtained from the wife’s family does not fall within the portion subject to division. Even if the wife has died, her property and servants may not be reclaimed by her natal family. If a brother dies, his son inherits his share; the same applies where an extinct line is continued. If all the brothers die, their sons divide equally. An unmarried son is to be separately provided with betrothal wealth. Unmarried aunts and sisters within the household receive half of what is given for a man’s betrothal gifts. A widow or concubine without a son inherits her husband’s share. If the husband and his brothers are all dead, she receives the share due to one son. If she has a son, she may not claim a separate share; if she remains chaste in her husband’s house, that is one matter, but if she remarries, the dependents, servants, fields, and houses then in existence may not be taken with her and must instead be divided equally among those entitled.

That is to say, once a woman had married into her husband’s family, if her husband was the owner of property and died leaving no son, then his wife or concubine could inherit all of his estate. If the deceased husband was himself an heir to a larger inheritance, then his widow or childless concubine could inherit in his stead the share he should have received, dividing it along with his brothers under the principle that all sons share equally.

If the widow or concubine had a son, then that son inherited his father’s property in his stead, and the wife was not entitled to a separate portion. Within the same larger clan, moreover, the dowry and other property that a wife had brought from her natal family could not be reclaimed by that natal family; it passed entirely into the husband’s inheritance.

Of course, the trousseau a woman brought with her upon marriage existed as her private property. If husband and wife divorced, the husband was obliged to return it to her. More humanely still, in the Tang, when a couple separated by mutual agreement, the husband not only sent his wife away with good wishes, but also provided her with clothing and grain for three years. Plainly, this was a measure by which the husband’s family offered the woman some economic compensation and support.

When the Zhen family estate was divided, Zhen Qian received an enormous amount of property. A large portion of it had been left by his mother, namely the trousseau she had brought with her when she married into the Zhen family. This part should have been inherited only by Zhen Qian and his elder sister, but since the sister had already married out, she lost her right of inheritance.

This vast wealth, including household retainers and servants, real estate and farmland, and commercial shops, provided Zhen Qian with the first capital for his ventures.

Unlike a man forced to build everything from nothing, Zhen Qian first purchased large amounts of land in Xiantai Village of Luquan County. Added to the lands he had inherited, he had by now become one of the greatest landlords in the village, holding four or five thousand mu of land, together with forests and lakes.

Under the feudal order, imperial power did not truly descend into the countryside. Below the county there were only the clans; the clans governed themselves; self-government rested upon ethics; and ethics gave birth to the local gentry.

For any feudal dynasty, the land under Heaven was too vast and the population too numerous. For an ancient centralized government to penetrate local society with state power the way a modern state does was almost an impossible task.

Whenever one speaks of a feudal dynasty, one inevitably mentions officials. Yet in truth there was an unbridgeable gulf between officials and clerks. Officials had to pass the imperial examinations; clerks did not. The lowest-ranking official, the county magistrate, governed a jurisdiction with anywhere from several thousand to over ten thousand households.

What is interesting is that, in order to avoid conflicts of interest, a county magistrate was required to avoid serving in his native place and had to take office elsewhere. Thus the gravest problem he faced upon arrival was often simple incomprehension: he could not understand the local speech. At such a moment, the official necessarily had to rely upon the local elite who had long been rooted in regional society—clerks and gentry. An official’s term was very short; nominally it was three years, but in reality he was often transferred after barely two.

During his tenure, so long as he could ensure that taxes were collected and no disorder broke out, he would usually turn a blind eye to everything else. Since the official knew nothing of local affairs and had little interest in learning, the common practice was to contract them out, as it were, ceding a portion of public authority to the clerks.

The clerks were mostly locals. Unlike the officials, they remained in the same yamen year after year, assisting one magistrate after another. Most could speak the official language and communicate with the magistrate. They generally drew no salary and could support themselves only through that share of power tacitly yielded to them. For example, suppose an official had to remit one thousand taels of tax silver. Because he did not understand local conditions, did not know who had money and who did not, and could not speak the local tongue, he had no choice but to hand this public authority over to a clerk familiar with local society and let him manage it all. As for how the silver was afterward collected, how much each household paid, and how much the clerk lined his own pockets with, the official would usually ignore it—as long as the clerk submitted the full one thousand taels on time and no unrest resulted. At the same time, the centralized governments of ancient China may broadly be regarded as states of low taxation and low welfare.

Unlike the feudal countries of contemporary Europe and Japan, China’s centralized government maintained a certain distance from local society and, unless special circumstances arose, was unwilling to intervene in it. Welfare, public order, and infrastructure were in large part burdens that local society itself had to bear, and thus local communities had no choice but to govern themselves. Correspondingly, the proportion of income taken in taxes was far lower than in the feudal states of the same era.

Officials and clerks rarely went down to the villages; even tax collection was simply apportioned among them. It was therefore no surprise that what happened in Xiantai Village could not easily be noticed in the short term.

Since it was a secret, there would inevitably come a day when it leaked out. Yet by then it would no longer matter. Before long, the An Lushan Rebellion would plunge the whole Tang realm into the chaos of war. Who would still pay attention to what had happened in a tiny place like Xiantai Village?