The home must have its basis in marriage, and to that important episode in woman’s life the greatest attention is given. In China, as in India, the betrothal ceremony is as binding as the marriage, although I am told that the “new woman” of China is rebelling at the child betrothals and the lack of freedom granted her in the choice of a mate. It is said that in Shanghai a couple who have been betrothed in childhood by their parents, on arriving at marriageable age, may go before a magistrate and repudiate the agreement, and in many instances their cases have been upheld even against the protests of father and mother. This shows the most extreme progressiveness of present-day China, as hitherto a child, especially a girl, was simply a chattel to be disposed of according to the dictates of the nearest male relative. Still, with the exception of the foreign settlement of Shanghai, the old customs of betrothal and marriage prevail, and the principals in the marriage have very little to say in regard to the disposal of their future. Often children are betrothed before their birth by parents, who, being good friends and desiring to unite the families, agree that if a boy is born in one family and a girl in the other, they shall marry. Other matches are made by a professional “go-between,” who is employed by the parents of either the boy or girl to find a suitable alliance for their child. This “go-between” is so thoroughly recognized that the Chinese have a saying, “Without a go-between no happy marriage can be effected.”

After the search culminates in the discovery of the bride and groom of equal social standing and endowed with the proper amount of this world’s goods, the names of the girl and boy are written upon a paper and taken to the necromancer, who decides whether the marriage will be fortunate. Every child is born under the protection of some animal; if the protecting animal of the daughter is a sheep and that of her fiancé a lion, naturally they should not marry. But if the guardian animal of the bride-to-be should be a bird, they will live in peace with one another. The girl must be thirteen or fifteen or seventeen years of age, as an even number would be most unlucky. Seventeen years is about the average marriageable age of a Chinese girl at present, although formerly they married when hardly more than children.

The marriage customs are essentially the same all over China. The husband gives a certain sum of money to the bride’s parents, which varies with the position of the families. Among the poor the girl is practically sold, although the money is supposedly used for the purchase of the wedding outfit. The bride’s standing in the family of the husband often depends largely upon the trousseau and the furnishings she takes with her to her new home.

The outfit a girl of the middle class should take with her, in order that she might command the proper respect of her new relatives, should include three red trunks, one table, two chairs, one wardrobe, three tubs, two buckets, one washstand, one dressing-case, a set of scissors, a footstove, a teapot, wine-pot, two candlesticks, a basin, sugar-bowl, tea-caddy, one set of cups, a complete set of bowls and dishes, two wadded quilts, two embroidered pillows, embroidered curtain for the bed, and a complete outfit of clothing.

This donation of the bride’s parents to the formation of a new home is carried before the bride in the wedding procession. Often musicians herald the coming of a bride, who, from her closely covered red chair, watches with beating heart the procession taking her to her new mother-in-law, who can make of her future home a prison or a palace of love. When she finally arrives at the house, that is decorated with red hangings and long scrolls of red silk and flowers, both real and artificial, she sees her husband for the first time as she steps over the threshold. After the one quick look, they go before the ancestral tablet, and, kneeling, touch their heads three times to the floor. Thus she shows that she is now one of the family, worshipping her husband’s ancestors instead of those of her own family; and after prostrating themselves before her husband’s parents and drinking from the same cup as a symbol of their unity, they retire to a room, where they sit upon two red chairs and the merry-making begins. Their friends come in, and, facing them, try to make the bride laugh, showing that she will be a most frivolous woman. There is much music, feasting, and playing of tricks on this joyous occasion, and for this little woman, dressed in red satin embroidered in gold, with a big crown upon her head and bead-fringe hanging over her face, the three days of the wedding festivities are most wearying. But she realizes that she must enjoy them if she can, because after they have passed she settles down into the daughter-in-law, which too often proves to be almost the place of a slave, or at the most a household drudge. One can imagine the discord and strife there is within a household where there are several sons who are married, each bringing his wife to his parents’ home. I knew a family of grandparents, parents, and children numbering thirty-eight, all living in one modest house. We can understand the Chinese savant making the character for discord a roof with two women under it.

Often in a rich girl’s dowry are slave-girls, and although it is really against the law to own slaves, it is, in fact, one of the great evils of China. These helpless people are owned by even the poor. The mother of my maid possessed two slave-girls whom she had bought when very young. She treated them well, and when they grew to marriageable age expected to find husbands for them, giving them an outfit of clothing and a small dowry. In times of famine girls are sold for very small amounts of money or exchanged for the more precious rice. This seems most cruel; but in order that the rest of the family may live, one must be sacrificed. When everything of value is sold, when the winter clothing is in the pawnshop, when there is no rice to give to crying children, then there is but one thing left for the despairing mother, she must sell her daughter. Chinese mothers are the same as mothers from all over the world, and she only parts with her little girl as a last resort, to the merchants who follow the disasters and fatten on the misery of the Chinese peasant. When it has become known that a famine has made desperate the poor of a province, the merchants from the tea-houses and the brothels of the great cities go to the little towns and villages in the track of the famine, and buy the girls from the fathers and mothers, who can see nothing but death ahead for all unless they sacrifice one. The clever, pretty girls are trained for the tea-houses, inmates of brothels, or concubines of rich men. The ugly, stupid ones are domestics, and often are most cruelly treated.

The owners prefer buying the girl very young, from five to seven years of age, when she can be more easily trained. If she is a pretty girl, her feet must be bound, and if this is a cruel operation under the tender hands of a mother, how much more dreadful it may become when attended to by some one whose only thought is to profit by the girl’s beauty!

The slaves in a rich family fare very well. Each child is given one or two personal servants, and when the children grow up and marry they follow them to the new home. Often a pretty, attractive slave-girl becomes the secondary wife of her master, and if she should be so fortunate as to bear him sons, she ranks with her mistress in the honour given her within the household.

There is a home in Shanghai for the rescue of little girls whose mistresses are more than ordinarily cruel. There is also a branch of the Florence Crittenden work for the rescue of girls sold to tea-houses. It is very hard for the people who are engaged in this good work to obtain the girls unless they are so badly treated that it comes to the notice of the magistrate, who may send the girl to the home for a given period.

I saw a pitiful case at a hospital at Soochow. We were sitting in the clinic when a very pretty woman came in and threw herself on her knees before the doctor and began to cry. She said between her sobs: “Oh, foreign doctor, help me to get away, help me, help me!” She was a respectable girl from Ningpo who had been sold by her husband to a place in Soochow for four years. She loathed the life, and when for the first time she had eluded the old woman who always goes out with these unfortunates to see that they do not get away, she had appealed to the only hope she knew. Yet that appeal was useless, as nothing could be done for her. She was nothing but a chattel of her husband, according to Chinese law, and he had a perfect right to sell her if he wished. I saw another pretty girl of sixteen who had been sold for eighty dollars to the same place. She came to the hospital to have her back treated, as she had been severely beaten with a brick because she would not make herself sufficiently pleasing to a guest.

But the average Chinese girl goes to her husband’s home quite likely within a short distance of her girlhood village, and passes a most uneventful life, one day being exactly like another unless broken by the ceremonies attending the births, weddings, and deaths of her husband’s people. Every village is surrounded by trees and is exactly like its neighbour, with its one-story, thatched-roof houses, or, perhaps, if the owner is especially prosperous, the pointed roofs may be formed of blue-grey tiling. Part of the front yard is beaten and made smooth to be used for threshing the rice, the front room of the house is used for the storing of the farming implements, and the other rooms are given to the different members of the family according to their needs. There is no light and little ventilation in these rude village homes. Windows are expensive and cold, as the houses are not heated in the winter. The mothers may be seen sitting in their doorways, holding in their hands brass hand-warmers, in which are a few burning coals of charcoal, and under their feet are the braziers which provide the only heat for these poor people during the cold months of the year.

The life lived by these village people is life reduced to its simplest form. The main food is rice and a little cabbage. Meat is an unknown quantity unless on special feast days. Beef is not used, as the cow is a beast of burden, and the Chinese have the same feeling in regard to its flesh that we have for the flesh of horses. Ducks, chicken, eggs, fish, crabs, snails, and clams are the poor man’s luxuries. No hole is too muddy nor water too filthy for a fish-net to be drawn across it, or for the little crowd of boys who catch the crabs to help fill the family pot.

The question of clothes is a simple one and easily solved. The father wears a pair of blue cotton trousers in the summer, while the mother wears the same style garment with the addition of an apron effect which covers the bust. An amulet and a string are sufficient clothing for the children during the warm days, but when winter comes the wadded clothing must be brought forth, often from the pawnshop, where it goes in the spring to obtain money to buy the seed for planting.

The great prayer which rises from the heart of all Chinese women, rich and poor, peasant and princess, is to Kwan-yin for the inestimable blessing of sons. “Sons, give me sons!” is heard in every temple. A woman is not honoured until she has sons to worship at the tablets of her husband’s ancestors. One of the chief reasons for divorce in China is the lack of sons, and if the first wife has no male children, and the secondary wife has borne sons to her lord, the lot of the first wife is very bitter. In one of the foreign hospitals in Shanghai for Chinese women, the wife of an official in Tientsin gave birth, much to her sorrow, to a girl. She was inconsolable, and would not allow the dreadful news to be sent to her home, and the doctors feared that she would take her life. But through a servant the unhappy woman saw a way to regain the love and respect of her family. At the same time that the daughter was born to her a beggar-woman in the charity department gave birth to a boy. She bought the boy and telegraphed her husband, “Thou art the father of twins.”

One of the upper servants in a consulate, growing rich on the foreign spoils, took to himself a second wife, giving as his excuse that he had four daughters and no sons. At the birth of a son to the new wife the first wife tried to starve herself to death, and failing that, took opium and gained her wish. She could not survive the ignominy of being only the mother of girls.

Sons mean so much to a Chinese mother that she feels that the gods must be jealous of her happiness, consequently she puts an ear-ring in one ear of her boy to deceive the god and make him think the loved one is a girl. She also calls him her “ugly one,” her “stupid one,” or simply gives him a number so the gods will not see how much he is loved and covet her treasure. There is an economic reason behind all this love for the man-child. A poor Chinese, a workman, cannot save enough money to provide for even his simple wants in his old age. Try as he may, he can only earn enough to live upon from day to day, but if he has sons he knows that when old age comes, and he can no longer work, that care will be given him and he will not want. There is no crime so great as the lack of filial piety, and the State punishes severely the son who does not provide for his aged parents. Indeed, of the five punishments of the criminal code directed against three thousand offences, disobedience or neglect of parents is the most severe.

An illustration of this occurred not long ago in the interior of China. A man arose in the night at the sound of a burglar, and in the struggle in the dark the robber was killed. On bringing a light it was found that the robber was the father of the man whose house he entered. He was known to be a ne’er-do-well, but the unparalleled act of killing one’s own father aroused intense excitement in the whole province. The case was deemed of such importance that it could not be tried by the local magistrate, but it was transferred to the courts in Peking, which condemned the man to death, not because he killed the robber, but because his father had evidently been compelled to rob for a living.

Another similar case came to the notice of the foreigners in Shanghai. A man accidentally hit his father with a hoe, causing his death. The whole village took the man to the city, but while on the road they met the magistrate, who asked them not to bring the dreadful case before him officially, but for the clan or village to mete out the punishment and then report to him. They buried the son alive.

Missionaries from a town in the interior asked the American Consul to intervene in the case of a boy nine years old, who, while in play, allowed a stool accidentally to slip from his hand, hitting his mother on the head and killing her. He was condemned to death, but because of his youth was to be kept in prison until he was sixteen, when he would pay the penalty. The Consul did all in his power to save the boy, but, outside of friendly arguments, nothing could be done, as he was a Chinese subject and came under the jurisdiction of Chinese courts of law.

Because of this necessity for the provision for the old age of parents, there are no homes for the aged nor houses for the poor in China, unless one excepts those established through foreign influence. Each family must take care of its own helpless, and if a person is so unfortunate as to have no family, the begging-bowl by the roadside is the only recourse when the years are many and the once strong arms are weak.

The filial piety and respect for parents that are so strongly entrenched in the Chinese character causes the son to obey his father until the day of his death. I know a man fifty years of age who was offered the post of secretary of the Embassy in London, but who declined this very advantageous position because his mother did not want him to go to a foreign land. He gave up willingly the chance of a lifetime rather than cause sorrow to his mother in her old age.

A mission in a certain town was very desirous of buying a certain piece of ground on which to erect a church, and the plan was balked by the local official. The missionary conducting the negotiations could find no suitable reason for the official’s action in the matter, and finally asked the help of his consul. The taotai was firm in his refusal, and offered the mission land in another part of the city for their church. When pressed for a reason for his refusal he finally said: “My mother passes that place each time she goes to her favourite temple, and she objects to a building holding a foreign god being erected there. She thinks it would pollute the good spirits of the air. I know it is what you call superstition, but she is my mother and I must obey her wishes.”

Family life has been from time immemorial the foundation-stone of the Chinese Empire, and filial piety is the foundation-stone of the family life. The Chinese is taught that the interest of the family is always of greater importance than the interest of the individual. This respect and veneration is not only for the living, but also for the dead. The death days of two generations of parents are kept sacred with solemn rites, and every home has its family shrine, to which all the members must pay due reverence.

This respect and worship is paid by the woman to the ancestors of her husband’s family, as it is her destiny on reaching womanhood to go to a new home and live in submission to her new parents, and burn incense before the shrines of her husband’s people. When she marries she practically leaves her home for ever. If she is returned to it—that is, if she is divorced—“shame shall cover her to her latest hour.” Divorce is very rare in China, but there are seven reasons given for divorcing a wife. The first is disobedience to father- or mother-in-law, barrenness, lewdness, leprosy, overmuch talking, and stealing.

The woman is taught that her lifelong duty is obedience. Her husband must be looked upon as “heaven itself,” and she must pay all outward respect to his parents. Her first duty each morning is to bring a cup of tea to the bedside of her husband’s mother, and to bow her head before her as a sign of submission and respect. She is taught that the only qualities that benefit a woman are gentle obedience, chastity, quietness, and mercy, and that the five worst infirmities that may afflict a female are indocility, discontent, slander, jealousy, and silliness. Confucius says: “These five vices are found in seven or eight out of every ten women, and it is from these that arise the inferiority of the sex.”

Generations of this teaching has made the Chinese woman into a modest, quiet, lovable woman, to be protected and cared for, appealing to all that is chivalrous in her menfolk, her very weakness her greatest strength.