EXOGAMY IN CHINA 



H. P. WILKINSON, B.C.L. 



Anyone who in his College days read the works 

 of Sir Henry Maine, and read them with pleasure, 

 would thereafter be interested in social origins, the 

 foundations of human society. 



In China one comes in contact with what is, 

 admittedly I think, the oldest existing, living civiliza- 

 tion : A state of human society where the tiller of the 

 fields lives with little, if any, change in the same way 

 and with the same relation to his family, his clan, 

 and his neighbours, friendly or hostile, as he did when 

 first settled on the upper-waters of the Yellow River, 

 "the river" of primitive China; and to the banks of 

 which he brought with him the framework of a social 

 system bearing the stamp of what may have been the 

 earliest form of human association. 



Chinese family law and custom has been shortly, 

 but most ably, dealt with by Herr von Mollendorff in 

 "The Family Law of the Chinese" published in 1878, 

 by Professor E. H. Parker in "Comparative Chinese 

 Family Law," published in 1879, and by Mr. George 

 Jamieson, c.m.g., in his "Translations from the General 

 Code of Law of the Chinese Empire" and "Cases in 

 Chinese Criminal Law," on "Marriage" published in 

 1881. 



The great work of Father Pierre Hoang "Le 

 Manage Chinois au point de vue Legal" published in 

 1898, is the classic as to the law relating to the Chinese 

 Family, and Mourning, and the sources from which it 

 is derived. 



Since von Mollendorff, Jamieson and Parker 

 wrote, Sir J. G. Frazer completed the "Golden Bough" 

 and has written his "Totemism and Exogamy," those 

 storehouses of the customs and observances of primitive 

 races, with which those of China can now be compared 

 and co-related. 



