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

Western genealogies, which are limited to family trees and biographical records—contain not only descent-line charts and pedigree trees, biographies, rules for ritual sacrifices, and management records of corporate estates, but also information about the group’s settlement in the locality, its foundation history, and the location of its burial grounds, as well as chronicles of trust estates and even contracts and records of tenant farmers (though there is by no means a uniform format among the genealogies that have been consulted for the purposes of this book).

The decision to focus on Haining for this study was made by default rather than choice. The genealogies of many lineages resident in the northern parts of Zhejiang province were lost or destroyed during the Taiping Rebellion (1850–1871) and even more met the same fate as a result of the general destructiveness of the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and 1970s. The latter destroyed, among many cultural and historical artifacts, numerous long-standing ancestral temples in the province. The impact of the Cultural Revolution on the physical representations of lineages in this part of Zhejiang today was perhaps more devastating than events of earlier times inasmuch as villages in the region, including those of Haining, today no longer boast of active free-standing ancestral halls, the likes of which can still be found in Guangdong and Fujian.⁴ The extent of the decline in lineage consciousness and activity in Haining can be seen in the fact that although a modern-day descendant of one of the four purported great surname groups in the town of Yuanhua in Haining revealed to me that he knows who his zuzhang (lineage elder) is, the zuzhang no longer manages affairs. That the group no longer has an ancestral hall standing and that the extant copies of the genealogy are located in the Shanghai Municipal Library suggest that lineage-based activities—for this group, at least—must have ceased.⁵

Of the extant Zhejiang genealogies consulted for this study, many of the relevant compilations were, in fact, made during the Qing dynasty or the republican period but contain essays, documents, and information dating from the earlier Ming period.⁶ Among these, the genealogies compiled by the lineages resident in Haining are among the most complete and best preserved. Turning to the extant genealogies of several