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Zhang Yang
zhangy49@gmail.com
MOST people can learn about their ancestors by looking at their family tree. But China has a history of thousands of years, so it is difficult for Chinese people. It is a good start to learn about Chinese genealogy.
Last Saturday, a famous Chinese genealogist guided Shenzhen citizens through the origin of Chinese genealogy and its culture.
Wang Heming, a research fellow with Shanghai Library, gave a lecture at Shenzhen Library. He said Shenzhen leads the way in the maintenance and repair of genealogy.
Genealogy is the history of a family. It not only records a family’s origin and its migration tracks, but also covers every area of the family’s life style, including life, reproduction, marriage, family rules and contacts.
Part of traditional Chinese culture, genealogy has a history of a few thousand years. It dated back to the latter part of the matriarchal clan society when humans kept family records by oral tradition and tying knots. During the Zhou Dynasty (1,100-256 B.C.), “Shi Ben,” the first book that recorded the royal family’s life and history in a comprehensive and systematic manner, was published. This gave birth to Chinese genealogy.
The genealogy started to develop during the Period of Disunity (220-589), which include the Three Kingdoms of Wei (220-265), Shu (221-263), and Wu (220-280), the Jin Dynasty (265-420), and the Southern and Northern Dynasties (386-589). A state office was set up for genealogical maintenance and a great number of famous genealogical books sprang up during the period, which was regarded as the Golden Age of Chinese Genealogy. At that time, a person’s social status was closely related to his/her genealogical history. When people elected an official or got married, a candidate’s genealogical history would always be one of the most important criteria.
During the Tang Dynasty (618-907), emperor Li Shimin tried to raise his family’s status above the aristocratic families in East China’s Shandong Province by recompiling the genealogy of the empirical family. Emperor Li stratified Chinese surnames into nine castes with the emperor’s family name, Li, at the top. After Wu Zetian became the first empress of China and recompiled the genealogy, her family name, Wu, rose to the first class.
Chinese genealogy began to transform during the Song Dynasty (960-1279). The content and pedigrees had become standardized, especially in the genealogies of Ouyang Xiu and Su Xun, two famous poets. The genealogy of that period also started to include “three cardinal guides and five constant virtues” advocated by Zhu Xi, the most influential rationalist Neo-Confucian in China. The emperor of the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), Zhu Yuanzhang, proposed six principles that should be abided by in the compilation of genealogy and contents about ancestral halls could also be found in the genealogies of the Ming Dynasty.
From the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) to the Republic of China (1912-1949), the amount of genealogy increased dramatically. Thousands of existing genealogies are from this period.
Wang said the compiling and maintenance of genealogy have become popular in the past 50 years. Two genealogy-compiling projects are being completed in Shenzhen: the Ye family and the Qiu family, which are the largest in scale and most invested of its kind.
Wang is devoted to collecting genealogical literature and studying Chinese genealogical culture since he started working at Shanghai Library in 1995. He participated in several large projects of genealogical compilation including the Shanghai Library Genealogy Feed, the Chinese Genealogy Head and the Chinese Genealogy General Theory.
About 52,000 Chinese genealogies have been kept and passed along, Wang said. With a collection of more than 20,000 genealogies, Shanghai Library accounts for over a third and is the largest collector of Chinese genealogy.
Wang is now collecting and studying the genealogies of some Chinese ethnic minorities. He said genealogy is of great historical value and has a profound function in social education.
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