Hi guys, I was watching a movie called "Raise the Red Lantern" which is based on "Wives and Concubines".
In the story, a wealthy master has 4 concubines, and one of them is executed for having an affair.
I don't seem to understand because it was never explicitly shown that the master was of royalty (though he was indeed wealthy).
I would like any leads for me to understand why he had the power to execute one of the concubines, unless this was pure murder rather than execution due to law.
The master has servants, so I don't know if this is just from wealth or if this is from royalty.
Please let me know of how Concubines lived during this time, and laws and punishements. I'm looking for context to understand this film and book better.
I'm not a professional historian but I'll attempt to answer this to the best of my ability. Feel free to correct me if anything here is wrong.
First of all, it's necessary to understand that in China there was a sort of household hierarchy, in which the first woman a man married, which would have been arranged by his parents, was considered the sole "wife" and any woman subsequently chosen and purchased by a sufficiently wealthy man was considered a "concubine". The wife occupied a higher position in the hierarchy than the concubines, and would have had some degree of power over them, and the concubines held a higher position than the maidservants of the household (who generally wished to win their master's favor so that he would "promote" them into concubinage). This was of course a patriarchal system, so all of these women were primarily required to be subservient to the man, but they were also subservient to each other depending upon their role's position in the hierarchy. In "Raise the Red Lantern" the eldest of the women was the man's wife, only three of the characters were actually concubines. If I remember correctly the wife in this movie was a somewhat detached figure, but it wasn't uncommon for them to be cruel to their husband's concubines historically. Chinese households frequently pitted women against each other in this way, as you can see in the movie between the three concubines themselves. Concubines also had a pretty insecure position, and the only way to gain security and boost their status in the household was for them to bear a male heir for their master (who would then frequently be adopted by the wife and raised as hers, but it still gave the biological concubine mother some leverage and social standing within the household). That's why the main character of the movie pretended to be pregnant, her plan if I remember correctly was just to actually get pregnant before the master caught on to her sham.
The movie takes place during the Warlord period, so it's important to point out that the conception of concubinage underwent a sort of transformation during the Qing and late Ming dynasties. Prior to this concubines were typically seen as a form of chattel, but Qing and late Ming law began to recognizes concubinage as a form of semi-legitimate marriage, and by the late Qing period concubines were essentially seen as "minor wives" while mens' first wives became something more along the lines of "primary wives".^1 This came with increased legal rights, but it was still contingent upon the concubine's acceptance of a subordinate role to her master/husband.
In 1914, approximately six years before the movie is set, the newly established republican government was desperate to modernize China and improve its image abroad, so the Dali Yuan, basically the Chinese Supreme Court established by the Republic, pronounced that marriage would now be defined as being between "one husband, one wife", meaning that concubinage was no longer considered a legally valid form of quasi-marriage as it had been during the Qing dynasty. The courts legally redefined concubines as being "household members" (jiashu 家屬) who now merely had a contractual arrangement with their husbands/masters, which had the effect of reversing the equalization between wives and concubines accomplished over the course of the Qing period and reverting the practice of concubinage to something similar to its pre-Qing state.^2 Concubines weren't necessarily as dehumanized as they were in early Imperial China, but they did experience a significant loss of rights and status. It wasn't until the communists came to power in 1949 that concubinage was actually officially outlawed.
The master's execution of his concubine in the film I believe would have actually qualified as murder in 1920, but this is legally murky. It was considered legal in China for a man to kill, beat, or divorce his wife if it was discovered that she was adulterous, as the woman the master killed in the film was (and it's implied he was following the old customs of his family by executing her in that particular way for her adultery). The issue here is that only a few years prior, concubines lost their status as wives, and I'm unsure whether adultery laws applied to concubines or not. Regardless of the legality though it's unlikely that the master would have ever been prosecuted for this by a Chinese court for a number of reasons: 1) regardless of the Dali Yuan's ruling the idea of concubines as a form of wife had already entered the public consciousness and courts often had a difficult time distinguishing concubines from wives in legal cases 2) concubines historically occupied such a low position in Chinese society that their deaths were basically just overlooked, it wasn't even uncommon for primary wives to beat concubines to death and face no legal repercussion, so a man being punished for it is even less likely 3) men who could afford concubines generally would have been wealthy and well connected, and thus harder to punish and 4) this was the Warlord period, in which military cliques dominated the country and the central government actually had little power, so it was an incredibly chaotic time in which not many people would have likely even cared enough to attempt to punish a powerful and wealthy man for his murder of an adulterous lowly concubine.
So if it sounds like this entire system was horrifying, that's because it was. Not everything portrayed in the movie was really an accurate depiction of what would have commonly been seen in Chinese households though, even the wealthy ones. For instance, I've never heard of anything like the movie's eponymous lantern ritual (for lack of a better word), none of their feet appeared to be bound, and I personally find it highly unlikely that the master would continue to allow the main character to live in his household and support her after she went insane considering that since she was a concubine he had no legal obligation to do so.
thank you so much! this will give me a great start to looking into this more
there were a few things you mentioned that Id like to ask more about...
is there a specific law name or bill for that? when you said it was legal for husbands to kill and beat adulterous wives? and im guessing this was still legal during this time?
lastly, are their historical examples of first wives beating concubines to death?
this is such a scary system.