Marriage and Sexuality in China, 960– 1368 CE

Summary

THE SONG (960– 1279) and Yuan (1271– 1368) dynasties regulated betrothals and marriage in order to secure a lasting social order among the living and the dead. Marriage reconfigured boundaries of kinship and thereby altered rights and obligations of persons living and deceased: rights to property and sexual intercourse, enhanced and reduced punishments for criminal offenses against kin, the status of offspring, and obligations of mourning, burial, and sacrifice. The Song Penal Code (Song xingtong, 963 CE), like the code of the Tang dynasty (618– 907) on which it was based, laid out a comprehensive, universal hierarchy of moral obligations. Because marriage changed the status of individuals within this hierarchy, the Song Penal Code precisely defines the stages by which their new rights and obligations took effect as well as the stages by which they became obsolete upon divorce or death. The Yuan court, however, rejected the universal moral hierarchies of the Song code. Founded by the Mongol Khan Khubilai (r. 1260– 1294), the Yuan dynasty protected the power and prestige of Mongols by replacing the universal moral hierarchy of Song law with a hierarchy of ethnic groups, each with its own customs and laws: Mongols, miscellaneous aliens (such as Persians and Central Asians), Han (subjects of the former Jin dynasty, defeated in 1234), and Southerners (subjects of the former Song dynasty, defeated in 1276). Although the Yuan court gradually enacted most of the marriage laws from the Song code, the moral universality of those earlier laws became circumscribed as a mere ethnic characteristic of the Han and the Southerners. The Yuan moreover regulated practices that had not been regulated before. It formulated ritual protocols and sumptuary regulations for weddings, prohibited customs deemed to deviate from proper ethnic practice, and addressed common but non-canonical practices such as charivari, wedding banquets, and uxorilocal marriage. Apart from producing and reproducing the ethnic hierarchy of the Yuan Empire, its marriage laws assisted the Yuan court in its more general ambition to extract revenue, limit mobility, and prevent litigation.

In spite of their important ideological differences, the marriage laws of the Song and the marriage laws of the Yuan (for Han and Southerners) treated sexuality as an element of a patrilineal, virilocal property regime.