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Feb. 5th, 2021 22:13![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
superborbSince I've been reading a lot of random Chinese culture stuff lately and have amassed some fun facts, but it felt weird to just share them as one offs? I will vaguely theme this set "stuff that shows how heterogenous practices can be in time."
1. The degree of relation which counts as incest has varied considerably throughout history and cousins-who-don't-share-a-surname have not counted as incest for most of it. In general (exceptions blah blah), there was a taboo on marrying someone with the same surname (this comes from the Book of Rites), but cousins where your fathers weren't brothers? Marriage material. To emphasize this,rekishi linked an interesting paper by Bret Hinsch called "The Origins of Han-Dynasty Consort Kin Power," which describes how during not only was marrying your maternal cousin extremely common among royalty in the Han and Zhou dynasties, the word 舅, now used for maternal uncles only, was also used for fathers-in-law, and they were often one and the same.
2. In the past, it was actually common to prepend the husband's surname to the woman's name. The uh, first English language citation I found was in a pinyin guide ahaha, "Chinese Romanization: Pronunciation and Orthography" by Yin Binyong and Mary Felley, which lists it as a separate class of proper names. (For the curious, this is one case where pinyin uses the hyphen; you hyphenate the two last names.)
An interesting side note when I was trying to research this practice: there's actually a perspective that NOT changing your name is more patriarchal because you're always an outsider (https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/12/world/asia/china-women-surnames.html).
3. I had known that the left-over-right cross collar rule for hanfu came from the development of agriculture, where it becomes convenient to store small items in the collar, and conveniently distinguishing Han Chinese from "barbarians" who wore right-over-left for a wider range of motion for archery. This article (https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/27924723) explained how the 马山楚墓 archeological dig, which dates to the Eastern Zhou dynasty, has clothing with both right-over-left and left-over-right in evidence, while the 马王堆 dig, which is from the Han dynasty, only has left-over-right clothing. The article also goes on to explain that in the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, which was an unrecognized state that tried to overthrow the Qing, they wore right-over-left as a symbol of resistance.
1. The degree of relation which counts as incest has varied considerably throughout history and cousins-who-don't-share-a-surname have not counted as incest for most of it. In general (exceptions blah blah), there was a taboo on marrying someone with the same surname (this comes from the Book of Rites), but cousins where your fathers weren't brothers? Marriage material. To emphasize this,
rekishi linked an interesting paper by Bret Hinsch called "The Origins of Han-Dynasty Consort Kin Power," which describes how during not only was marrying your maternal cousin extremely common among royalty in the Han and Zhou dynasties, the word 舅, now used for maternal uncles only, was also used for fathers-in-law, and they were often one and the same. 2. In the past, it was actually common to prepend the husband's surname to the woman's name. The uh, first English language citation I found was in a pinyin guide ahaha, "Chinese Romanization: Pronunciation and Orthography" by Yin Binyong and Mary Felley, which lists it as a separate class of proper names. (For the curious, this is one case where pinyin uses the hyphen; you hyphenate the two last names.)
An interesting side note when I was trying to research this practice: there's actually a perspective that NOT changing your name is more patriarchal because you're always an outsider (https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/12/world/asia/china-women-surnames.html).
3. I had known that the left-over-right cross collar rule for hanfu came from the development of agriculture, where it becomes convenient to store small items in the collar, and conveniently distinguishing Han Chinese from "barbarians" who wore right-over-left for a wider range of motion for archery. This article (https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/27924723) explained how the 马山楚墓 archeological dig, which dates to the Eastern Zhou dynasty, has clothing with both right-over-left and left-over-right in evidence, while the 马王堆 dig, which is from the Han dynasty, only has left-over-right clothing. The article also goes on to explain that in the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, which was an unrecognized state that tried to overthrow the Qing, they wore right-over-left as a symbol of resistance.
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Date: 2021-02-07 14:40 (UTC)(Ooh, when you have more bandwidth, I'm always down for talking about papers!)
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Date: 2021-02-07 18:27 (UTC)(It's on surname changes in China and when it was done and by whom and it's so interesting but in order not to make half the people with Chinese heritage in any location yell at me I need to write something more extensive about it. Because I know this is a Difficult Topic and there has been a lot of grievance when MDZS hit western fandom, lol, I've heard the tales.)
ETA: I keep forgotting, I didn't know about the collar! I thought it was just a....fashion choice. dang.
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Date: 2021-02-08 02:20 (UTC)Ooh, interesting! Like any population of course surname changes happen, and even the concept of the surname as we know it has changed over time
Oh yeah, it's quite taboo to do it wrong, because it's the way Han Chinese do funeral dress. In several shows it's used as an Implication
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Date: 2021-02-08 05:59 (UTC)I love that you can just do casually blow my mind. Fandom teaches me something new every day. <3
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Date: 2021-02-08 13:46 (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-02-08 14:32 (UTC)Okay I mean....Okay, let me put it like this, going wayyyyy back to high school, there were in a graduating class of 130 people (so not that many, I'm from a small town) maybe 3 people who had the same family name and that was a real common one like the equivalent of Miller or Smith. Not sure how variabilty is in China, but at work there are on my projects 3 people with the same given and family name (I'm sure the hanzi for their given names differ, but their surname hanzi don't). They are not related.
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Date: 2021-02-09 01:49 (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-02-11 20:12 (UTC)Anyway yes, perspective matters here, of course.
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Date: 2021-02-11 20:23 (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-02-11 20:29 (UTC)That is amazing.
I've only ever met one person with my surname who did not belong to my immediate family (i.e. parents or grandparents) and he turned out to be my third cousin. XD
In my whole 100k employees global company there is only me with that surname.
(And 新年快乐 in case you celebrate)