RITUAL SUCCESSION AND KIM TIU
The words kim tiu are the Cantonese rendering of two characters which are pronounced in standard Chinese as chien t’iao. On the surface, they have no connection with marriage at all and signify the conjunction of two lines of ritual succession in one and the same person.
It is well known that the corner-stone of the old Chinese family system was the virtue called hsiao, usually translated into English as ‘filial piety’. This was defined by Confucius as: ‘that parents, when alive, should be served according to propriety; that, when dead, they should be buried according to propriety, and that they should be sacrificed to according to propriety.’2 A law book of the Southern Sung dynasty (twelfth and thirteenth centuries ad) states the matter more plainly. ‘The reason a man begets sons’, it says, ‘is so that they may support him during his lifetime and bury him when he is dead’.3 But, as an extension of this doctrine, just as one has a duty to render piety to one’s ancestors, so one must, for their sake, see to it that one leaves a successor behind to venerate their memory. ‘There are three things which are unfilial,* says Mencius, ‘and to have no posterity is the' P. 14.
2 James Legge (trans.), 7%e Chinett Clastic), and edn., 1895, Vol. 1, p. 147.
2 S. Shiga, Chugoku kcqpkuho-ron, 2nd edn., Tokyo, 1951, p. 9, n. 1.
greatest of them’.1 ‘Posterity’ means sons, as females had no capacity to continue a succession.
It follows from this that a man was under the strongest moral obligation to marry and beget offspring. If he had the misfortune to remain childless, then the same duty impelled him to adopt a successor. The choice was however governed by strict conditions. The adopted person must be a male from the same clan, and he must be one generation junior to the man he was to succeed.1 In other words, you could not appoint your brother or your cousin to be your successor.
Of the innumerable crimes of the Empress Dowager, none probably shocked public opinion more than her choice in 1875 of her nephew, Kuang Hsii, as Emperor in place of her dead son T’ung Chih. At least one eminent mandarin committed suicide in protest against the atrocity?There was another condition. The person chosen must not be an only son, whose adoption would deprive his own parents of a successor? Yet this restriction sometimes clashed with other Confucian prejudices. Suppose that of two brothers, A, the elder, had no sons, and B, the younger, had only one. It would be unacceptable for the child to abandon his own father, but on the other hand B had a recognized obligation of deference towards his elder brother, and in the clan structure it was considered to be important to keep alive a senior line. In such a case, the law was relaxed to permit B’s son to succeed to both lines. This double succession was called chient’iao, the kim tiu of modem Hong Kong, and in the Manchu statute law it was permitted solely to preserve the line of an elder brother. But as succession was not merely to the duty of ritual commemoration but also to the deceased person’s estate, it is not surprising that custom extended the scope of Jam tiu to provide successors for younger brothers, and even for cousins.
Even so, great care was taken to ensure that the lines temporarily brought together in one person should be kept distinct, and that they should be separated in die next generation. The most effective way to do this was for the kim tiu successor to sustain two personalities. As the successor of his own father B, he married a wife and begot a family. As the adopted successor of A, he married another wife and had a second family, complete in every detail with its own property? Nothing, or so it might appear, could be tidier and more effective.
1 Legge, op. cit., Vol. II, p. 313. 1 Shiga, pp. 20-9.
1 J. O. P. Bland and E. Backhouse, China Under the Empress Dowager, 1910, PP- «32-47
4 Shiga, pp. 29-30. 5 Shiga, pp. 31-2.