Marriage Stories on China’s ‘Miao Frontier’

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When he arrived in Tianzhu County, Guizhou Province, in the 1740s, Magistrate Xie Shenglun was aghast at the kinship and marriage practices of local “Miao” communities, including open courtship among youths and marriage between cousins. Around this time, local families began compiling linage genealogies which reflected imperially sanctioned patrilineal kinship norms. However, a 1919 genealogy belonging to the Pan family—which I photographed during fieldwork in 2018—shows that kinship and marriage practices in Tianzhu did not conform to the imperial ideals propagated by officials.The Pans’ genealogy includes unusually detailed records of the lineage’s wives and daughters dating back to the eighteenth century. My research suggests that the Pans practiced delayed-transfer marriage, where a women moved into her husband’s home only after bearing a child. The genealogy also includes detailed records of widow remarriage and cross-cousin marriage, which local officials had attempted to outlaw. These records provide rare insight into marriage practices and women’s lives on the “Miao Frontier,” but they also illuminate the complicated dynamics between the “civilizing center” and the imperial frontier. Unorthodox marriage practices occurred across the empire, but they were often stigmatized and unlikely to be recorded. The Pan genealogy suggest a different set of values in which these practices were accepted and important to record. These records also draw attention to the gulf between the representation and practice of kinship and marriage in the empire at large.<h3>About the speaker </h3>Joel Wing-Lun is Lecturer in History and Asian Studies at UNSW. His research uses fieldwork and local documents to examine the impact of imperial expansion on communities in Southwest China from the seventeenth through the twentieth century. He graduated from the University of Sydney with honours in Chinese Studies and holds a PhD in History and East Asian Languages from Harvard University. He is the translator of <a href="https://www.routledge.com/The-Chinese-Empire-in-Local-Society-Ming-Military-Institutions-and-Their/Szonyi-Zhao/p/book/9780367431846" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">The Chinese Empire in Local Society: Ming Military Institutions and Their Legacies </a>(Routledge, 2020)."Talks in Chinese Humanities" are co-presented by the China Studies Centre, the Disciplineof Chinese Studies and the Australian Society for Asian Humanities at the University of Sydney and the Faculty of Art, Design &amp; Architecture at UNSW.

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