Family and Property in Sung China: Yuan Ts'ai's Precepts for Social Life

by Patricia Buckley Ebrey (Translator)

Providing the best surviving evidence of the everyday thinking of the Sung upper class, Yuan Ts'ai's twelfth-century manual is the advice of a typical educated man on the concerns of managing a family, from rearing children and arranging their marriages, to avoiding social conflict, training servants, and managing property and preserving it for the next generation.

Originally published in 1984.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

382 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1984

About the author

Patricia Buckley Ebrey is an American historian specializing in cultural and gender issues during the Chinese Song Dynasty. Ebrey obtained her Bachelor of Arts from the University of Chicago in 1968 and her Masters and PhD from Columbia University in 1970 and 1975, respectively. Upon receiving her PhD, Ebrey was hired as visiting assistant professor at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She became an associate professor in 1982 and a full professor three years later. She is now a professor at the University of Washington.

Ebrey has received a number of awards for her work, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, and the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation. Ebery's The Inner Quarters: Marriage and the Lives of Chinese Women in the Sung Period received the 1995 Levenson Prize from the Association for Asian Studies. Her 2008 work, Accumulating Culture: The Collections of Emperor Huizong, received the Smithsonian Institution's 2010 Shimada Prize for Outstanding Work of East Asian Art History.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Mel · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of her older books but I'd not managed to get around to reading it before. I thought that it was about Neo-Confucians, which I tend not to like, so put it off. But I needed more social history background for my dissertation so picked it up. I'm glad I did. Yuan Tsai was an elite figure in Song China but he was not a neo-Confucian. This book is divided up into two parts, the first Ebrey's analysis of social history and her interpretations from using the book, the second half is a direct translation of Yuan Tsai's 12th century work. I have to say I enjoyed Yuan's book much more than I thought I would. He came across as a very sensible man. I was also particularly impressed by (some) of his ideas about women, on the down side he did say that widows would sleep around on you, slave girls were prone to gossip etc. But he also said that women could perform the ancestral rites for you and were just as good as men. He also said that if a woman was widowed it was good for her to be able to read and do maths so she'd be capable of running her husband's family and business. It was interesting to see how very sensible he was about family relations and why people had problems getting on. This was contrasted with his very snobbish opinions about how the lower classes were all out to rob you. There was quite an interesting bit about how to prevent suicide among your servants (because suicide was a common problem for the elite families). As well as the right and wrong way to attempt to revive a servant you found hanging. From a printing point of view this book was interesting as he said he had many friends copy the work before it was printed and later had it printed because demand for copies was so high. It was printed twice during his lifetime (though none of these copies survive). And was later reprinted in collections in the Ming and Qing dynasty. I enjoyed this very much. I think this was one of the most readable primary sources I've found and I enjoyed Ebrey's insights.

[Hao Ca Vien · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great! Good introduction to Chinese Literature. Didactic prose of a Yuan Cai, a Song Dynasty official.

[William · Rating 4 out of 5]

An important study of family structure in Song China and precepts for clan and family.