CHINESE MARRIAGE CUSTOMS. 241 



CHINESE MARRIAGE CUSTOMS. 



By ADELE M. FIELDE. 



SEXUAL selection, which has doubtless greatly influenced the 

 development and advancement of certain races, has been in- 

 operative in China during many centuries, because, under the 

 prevailing usages, the contracting parties have, before espousal, 

 no opportunity to judge of the strength, beauty, or intelligence 

 of their consorts. Romantic love has no part in marriage or its 

 issue. This may be one of the causes of China's arrested civiliza- 

 tion, and of the astonishing fact that her astute people have in- 

 vented nothing and discovered nothing during hundreds of years. 



Although polygamy is legal, it is practically so expensive and 

 inconvenient as to be uncommon among the masses. Under the 

 law, no man may have more than one wife, though he may add to 

 his household any number of helpmeets. The wife, brought home 

 with unique ceremony, may under no circumstances be super- 

 seded in her well-defined sphere, the penalty of an attempt to put 

 an ir.ferior in her place being a hundred blows. In all cases the 

 marriage engagement is made by the senior members of the fami- 

 lies concerned, and is usually made without the knowledge of the 

 future husband or wife. 



Marriage being essential to the continuance of the line of 

 worshipers before the lares and penates, a man who will not 

 marry is reckoned guilty of filial impiety. Spinsters are unknown 

 and bachelors are few. The universal and intense desire for pos- 

 terity in the male line of descent leads to much self-sacrifice on 

 the part of parents, in order to secure wives for sons, and causes 

 them to make provident arrangements for their marriage at an 

 early age. Betrothals of expected infants, conditional upon their 

 being of different sexes, are not rare. Among the poor it is not 

 uncommon for a newly-born daughter to be given away, that a girl 

 of another clan may be taken by the mother, reared at her breast, 

 and bestowed upon her son in after-years. In many families there 

 is at least one little daughter-in-law that is being brought up in 

 the house of her future husband. 



Parents of moderate means endeavor to provide wives for their 

 sons by the time they are twenty years old, while but few keep 

 a daughter after she is sixteen. Those who have a marriageable 

 son, and the means of meeting the expense of taking a daughter- 

 in-law, place their case in the hands of an old female friend or 

 of a matrimonial agent, called a go-between, who finds among her 

 acquaintances that which is required by her client. The parents 

 of the two young people do not meet for conference, and are not 

 usually known to each other even by name. The negotiation is 



VOL. XXXIV.- 



