Lineage Society on the Southeastern Coast of China: The Impact o ...

projects and others were even hired as mercenaries, a situation facilitated by the conversion of service levies into silver payments, which stimulated demand for such services. Hence, as the increased incidence of wokou raids began to impinge upon the awareness of the Ming court and to take on the proportions of a crisis, the lijia household registration system was becoming nothing more than an empty and onerous shell burdened with increasingly heavy surcharges on land taxes and various miscellaneous levies (for instance, roof tax, bridge tolls, and excises on wine and vinegar) that were imposed by the authorities to defray defense costs.⁵⁴ Registered households, seeking alternatives to the lijia, therefore began to reorganize themselves in terms of the institution known as the lineage; through dissociation from their fiscal obligations and participation in the civil service examinations, groups used the much-idealized and state-sanctioned principle of descent-line ethics as justification for their actions. The social status conferred by lijia registration eventually gave way to the symbolic and cultural capital embedded in the style of the legally defined ancestral hall.⁵⁵

Much of this process was perhaps expedited by the appearance, within these lijia groups, of officials, degree-holders, and men educated in the Confucian tradition who adopted certain practices considered the special privileges of the educated elite.⁵⁶ The practices that formed what Patricia Ebrey termed the “cultural repertoire” of the literati included offering sacrifices at ancestral halls, maintaining ancestral trusts and estates in the interest of the corporate descent group, compiling genealogies that acknowledged agnatic relations, and upholding family rituals ( jiali) as propounded by the Song-era neo-Confucian philosopher Zhu Xi (1130–1200).⁵⁷ The various combinations of these practices came to be associated with the institution of the lineage, which not only became increasingly prominent in late imperial China as the basic building block of local society but was also looked upon as a creation of the literati elite—one that enhanced their dominance over the general populace.

In Haining, genealogical records apparently made their appearance during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The relationship between gaining literati status and the compilation of genealogies is apparent