During the early stages of quarantine last year, I steadily worked my way through the cdrama The Princess Weiyoung, a drama set in Northern Wei in the middle of the fifth century. It gave rise to some questions about social dynamics that the show takes for granted, but which are unfamiliar to me.
A lot of the first half of the show is taken up with household politics, particularly dealing with the relationship between the first wife/her children and a concubine/her daughter. So basically: what were the general family dynamics within imperial or aristocratic harems at this time? I know that all of the children were considered the wife's children, legally, but was there any sense of the wife's biological children being higher status or more legitimate heirs?
I understand that the Tuoba clan was (possibly? probably?) from Mongolia; did they have some relationship to the nomadic Rouran?
While looking at the Wikipedia pages for the actual history that the show is very, very loosely based on, I saw this:
Emperor Taiwu created him the Prince of Gaoyang, but then reconsidered, believing that a princely title was inappropriate for his oldest grandson, and therefore cancelled the title—signifying strongly that he intended for Tuoba Jun to succeed him.
What is going on here? What was the meaning of princely titles, if having one made a person seem less likely to be selected as a successor to the emperor?
The family structure during the Northern Wei was quite complicated, especially in the nobility. Part of this is due to natural complications in one husband-one wife-multiple concubine structures-though as we'll see they are even more complicated than that. A lot was also due to competing and changing cultural influences between Han and Xianbei, this period coming off of the tail end of a period of warfare and chaos, and so on.
In general, in the Northern Wei, women would have more power and freedom than before. Part of this was due to the influence of Xianbei culture, as well as the diminished status of Confucianism and increased statuses of Buddhism and Doaism: women would generally know how to ride and sometimes shoot, outside of managing household affairs would conduct external business and be allowed to leave the house unattended, and so on. The last part for aristocrats encompassed both business and leisure, for example visiting friends, even staying quite late or overnight, as well as other activities such as picnics or watching farmers or laborers. At the same time, Han culture was similarly influenced, with some Han girls learning to ride and enjoying greater freedom as well, though generally less than that of the Xianbei. Finally, religion offered an escape from a broadly sexist society, and women often used Buddhist temples as a socialization point with other women, and would retreat to religious roles if not wishing to (re)marry. As we'll see, not everything is marginally better, but this had large impacts on families.
#Structure of the Family
The husband/father would be the head of the household, and have general powers related to this. The rights to teach and punish would ultimately be his, though often delegated, and general control over many details of the lives of his concubines, servants, and children, and to a lesser extent wife. It seems men had ownership of family wealth and property, but wives seem to have had some personal property they would use to make gifts (perhaps dowries sent with them?), and some concubines do to, though the sources and legal status of it is unclear.
The wife would have had more equality in this period, as mentioned above. Somewhat unusually, it wasn't uncommon for woman to marry men several years their younger, especially among the Xianbei. They would occasionally use their freedoms to conduct affairs, and even when discovered their husbands wouldn't always be able to stop them. In the early stages of the dynasty the children of nobility would be able to freely choose their marriage partners to a large extent, and when their husband died, they would have more options available-for example, they would be more likely to be able to refuse to remarry, often times through joining Buddhist organizations. That said, control over marriage would decline over time as the Xianbei moved into the central plains, especially after moving the capital to Luoyang and enacting widespread Sinicization reforms, so widows could be forced to remarry against their will.
One of the most striking features of wives at this time was widespread jealousy of wives towards concubines. Primary male sources are generally very negative on this, blaming inter family discord on jealous wives, but a Lady Liu, when forcing her husband to not take concubines, had a great quote on this about a poem on the virtues of womanly tolerance (translation from Lee):
The Duke of Zhou was a man and wrote these poems for his kind. Now if it was the Duchess of Zhou, the tradition would not have been such!
She compiles a small set of statistics showing that wifely jeaolousy was generally unpunished in the north, and resulted in severe punishment or execution in the south.
It's not a coincidence that one of the few emperors to not take concubines until his empresses death was Yang Jian, the founder of the Sui dynasty who ended the Northern and Southern period. However, wifely jealousy had a much darker side: more freedom also meant the freedom to make concubine's-and their children's-lives completely miserable.
A few other notes: while generally only one, the influences of non-Han culture combined with wide spread dislocation and conflict as the Wei were founded meant that there were cases of husbands having multiple wives. Similarly due to warfare and conflict, in the early Wei forced marriages where men would simply seize wives were not unheard of, though over time the Wei would restrict the ability of nobel men to marry "base" women or to simply take them by force (this didn't apply to concubines or slaves).
The status of concubines during this period in the north was quite low. Part of this was due to reasons mentioned about: the general strength of wives weakened their positions, but part of it seems to have been inherited from the Han dynasty, while the position of concubines in the south with regard to wives improved from there. In many ways they were just sex slaves: they utterly lacked bodily autonomy, could be freely bought or sold, given as gifts, or seized during war. They were expected to show deference to the wife as well as husband, and when the husband died were often sold off to various new husbands as their concubines or servants. They would also at times be abused by jealous wives, such as being physically or verbally abused, forced to act as servants, and so on. They were exposed to a Central Asian tradition where the eldest son could take concubines of his father as his concubines on his death, and also had no choice over the matter: one concubine of the emperor, when being abused and forced to act as the concubine of the heir upon his death was brutally punished or killed when she refused to obey.
Despite this their status was higher than servile slaves: they were generally considered part of the family, and though would expect to be deferential to the eldest son, the other children of the wife would be deferential to them if the had a son. Furthermore, there were still plenty of cases were both the husband and wife treated them fairly and as family members, but that was generally out of their control. Finally, there were cases where concubines were able to get the upper hand in the family, generally through some mix of "youthful beauty", as Wang puts it, as well as force of will and essentially political acumen.
##Other members of the household between concubines and slaves
I'm not sure how to translate this term: they were similar to courtesans in that they were trained in music and entertainment, but were bought by men to act as exclusively as their entertainment and concubines (in the general sense and not sense mentioned above). They were given a bit more latitude in day to day lives as parts of their jobs, for example traveling with the husband as entertainment, but were generally held to be below concubines. The husband could elevate them as concubines and recognize their children, but that was seen to be an exception, and in existing sources they are written as being elated when elevated. They were also slaves, similar to concubines could be bought and sold, had no control over their body, and could be brutally punished.
At the start of the Wei dynasty, wet nurses were very common, normally taken from peasant or slave families to raise children of wives or concubines. They started off as despised, but due to a nasty tradition in the royal family greatly grew in status over the period. In order to limit the influence of empresses, the founder of the dynasty reinstituted a Xianbei tradition (though just how traditional it was is unclear) of murdering the mother of the heir once he is chosen. He would then be given to a wet nurse to raise. This was utterly ineffective as the influence of empresses was based on personal relationships and emotional ties and not blood ties, so in a completely unsurprising irony a series of wet nurses rose to control the empire, which greatly enhanced their status.
There was a wide range of other relationships that I'll gloss over. For example, "cimu" is a term where a sonless concubine is given a son by another concubine to raise, and another term I have no idea its translation. There was also adoptive relationships, both within the family-especially due to widespread death and conflict in early Wei-and without, as well as step parents due to remarrying and so on.
Royal families would control a wide variety enserfed peasants, paid laborors, and servile slaves (distinguished from concubines who were sex slaves, and Ji, who were enslaved entertainers/sex slaves). They performed a wide range of tasks from farming to weaving and so on. Slaves, unsurprisingly at this point, had no autonomy and were fully available to their male masters (relationships with male slaves and wives and concubines being illegal, but did happen). Unless on the rare occasion they were recognized as the children of their fathers, they would remain slaves. The status of this group of people seems to have improved somewhat following the enactment of the equal-field system midway through the Wei dynasty, where peasants were granted titles to land to farm in their own name. This was almost certainly not universally enforced, but it still would have had a large impact.