Engraving Genealogy: The Emergence of New Epigraphic Practices and Lineage Formation in Yuan-Ming-Qing North China

• In Event: New Traditions in Local Settings in Post-Mongol China: The Adaptation and Localization of Ritual Practices and Religious Beliefs

Abstract

This paper explores the way that an epigraphic practice which emerged under Mongol rule served as the focal point of kinship formation through dynastic transitions in north China. The commonly accepted narrative argues that Mongol rule brought about a rupture in lineage evolution in the north, such that the spread of southern kinship institutions such as genealogical texts and ancestral halls swiftly assimilated the northern families with their southern counterparts during the Ming and Qing. Based on epigraphy this paper discusses that, after the social upheavals of the Jin-Yuan transition, steles with genealogical records installed in ancestral graveyards flourished as a medium of permanently recording genealogy in the north. This epigraphic genre was also favored by the Mongol imperial house as a legitimate way to bestow imperial grace on meritorious subjects. Even after the demise of the Yuan, the genre persisted in the north, with families seeking to maintain their kinship solidarity typically focusing on cemeteries rather than compiling genealogical texts. Meanwhile, northern kinship organization in general sustained a strong tendency to focus on tangible material and ancestry in lineal terms as visualized in graves, in stark contrast with contemporary southern lineages’ weaving of distant, often remote collateral relatives into a cohesive kinship. Even after genealogical steles declined as an epigraphic genre during the late sixteenth century, the steles remained the axis of ancestral narrative until the Republican period.

Author

• Tomoyasu Iiyama, Waseda Institute for Advanced Studies