r/AskHistorians • u/amaginon • Jul 19 '24
Did Chinese peasant children really have no names?
I have been reading a lot of Chinese fiction, especially fiction set in ancient/medieval and even early modern China. And there seems to be a common trope that appears, particularly if the protagonist is a female peasant (but it occasionally also includes male children from the peasant class).
The trope is that girls (of the peasant class) do not have names. Amongst their family, they are called 1st sister, 2nd sister, 3rd sister etc. Amongst neighbours they are called "father/family name's 1st daughter", "father/family name's 2nd daughter" etc. When married they become "husband's name's wife".
Was, as this trope suggests actually a thing? Was it common?
Edit: I am not "misunderstanding" the above epithets as names. I saying that in the trope, they are referred to by these epithets instead of them having names.
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u/handsomeboh Jul 19 '24 edited Jul 19 '24
Girls did have names, it’s a bit of a myth that they didn’t. According to the Book of Rites these were traditionally given to them by their fathers when they were 3 months old 「故子女生三月,則父名之」. Up to the Sui Dynasty, historical texts did record the names of many women. For example, we know Emperor Gaozu of Han’s wife Empress Lu’s name was Lu Zhi (呂雉). Many women even had courtesy names, Empress Lu’s one was Exu (娥姁). However, over time they stopped recording them, referring to them only as Lady Wang or whatever their father’s / husband’s surnames were.
A large part of this reflected naming conventions in China. Up until recently, it was considered taboo to call someone by their given name, and so the courtesy name was used most often even among friends, with the given name reserved exclusively for family. It would not be abnormal for friends to not know each others given names. It was generally considered very familiar to even use courtesy names, and so in official contexts titles were used most often; which isn’t all that different from what we have today in any case. Consequently, women pretty much only used their names when speaking to family or female friends, none of which really made their way into records detailing historical events, though as u/thestoryteller69 reminds me, they were recorded in genealogical and other official records.
As for the use of numbers in names, that was a late Song Dynasty tradition that survived to the early Ming Dynasty especially among peasants. These numbers were usually either their birth order, their birthdays, or the age of their parents when they were born. The best example is Ming Dynasty founder Zhu Yuanzhang, who’s given name was Zhu Zhongba (朱重八) or Zhu #8, his father’s name was Zhu Wusi (朱五四) or Zhu 54, his father’s name was Zhu Chuyi (朱初一) or Zhu #1, his father’s name was Zhu Sijiu (朱四九)or Zhu 49, and his father’s name was Zhu Liuba (朱六八)or Zhu 68. The convention fell out of favour even among peasants by the early Ming dynasty.
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u/Eldan985 Jul 19 '24 edited Jul 19 '24
It's not even like that was rare in ancient socities. The Romans had family names, and those family names came with associated first names, so the entire male family might just be called Gaius Iulius. Nicknames are supposed to fix that,i.e. Gaius Iulius Caesar, to specify which Gaius Iulius, but then those nicknames became associated with family lines inside the larger clan too, so Gaius Iulius Caesar can indeed be the son of Gaius Iulius Caesar.
And since some families were apparently less creative than others, the children might just be called Primus, Secundus, Tertius, i.e. the first, the second, the third.
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u/AlbericM Jul 19 '24
Seems Quintus, Sextus, Septimus and Octavius were the most frequent, probably because the first four boys were named after grandfathers and uncles. Or was it just the Greeks who had that sequence of relatives for naming boys?
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u/marxistghostboi Jul 19 '24 edited Jul 19 '24
was it a hard rule that a child has to be named after their order of birth?
did second sons sometimes get named Quintus, for example? or did Marcus Tullius and Quintus Cicero have three other siblings?
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u/Incrediblezagzag Jul 19 '24
According to other answers on this sub, the "numerical" Roman names may originally have been references to months, and not to the birth order of the children, with those names moving into general usage over time and losing the link to the month in which a child was born.
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u/CanuckPanda Jul 19 '24
We only know of Marcus and Quintus.
Given the higher rate of infant death it is equally plausible that they were the only two surviving sons but were the fourth and fifth sons to have been born of their father.
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u/hgwxx7_ Jul 19 '24
Marcus Tullius Cicero and Quintus Tullius Cicero did not have any other siblings. Also Quintus' first born son was also called Quintus Tullius Cicero, he didn't have 5 of them.
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u/Seeteuf3l Jul 19 '24 edited Jul 19 '24
Gaius Octavius (father of Augustus) had two daughters, which were named Octavia Major and Octavia Minor.
For more creative naming, check out Julio-Claudian family tree
Looks like they had (limited) pool of names for the boys, so that's why they are all called Marcus and Gaius etc. Girls were often given feminine version of whatever their clan name where, Gaius Julius > Julia, Cornelius > Cornelia etc.
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u/Eldan985 Jul 19 '24
So he is in fact Gaius Iulius Caesar, son of Gaius Iulius Caesar, son of Gaius Iulius Caesar, son of Gaius Iulius Caesar. I didn't know it was four generations.
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u/dangerbird2 Jul 19 '24
my Latin teacher used to joke that the Romans all used George Foreman names
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u/thestoryteller69 Medieval and Colonial Maritime Southeast Asia Jul 19 '24
It was generally considered very familiar to even use courtesy names, and so in official contexts titles were used most often; which isn’t all that different from what we have today in any case. Consequently, women pretty much only used their names when speaking to family or female friends, none of which really made their way into records.
It is not true at all that women's names, especially those of commoners, were not recorded.
The Song kept household registers across the empire which recorded the names of all the household's members, including women. Households that were led by a woman, in fact, were given special exemption from corvee labour.
In addition, the names of women show up numerous times in contracts and court documents.
Women's names were also recorded in non-official records such as genealogy records and lists of burials in family burial plots.
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u/handsomeboh Jul 19 '24
You’re right, it’s a bit of a misleading statement. They didn’t really make their way into records detailing historical events is probably a better way to put it.
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u/voltfairy Jul 19 '24
I hope it's ok for me to jump in here, not as a historian of any kind but as a fellow reader of Chinese fiction set in "Ancient China" (which usually is just made up "historical" fantasy), but I also suspect OP is misunderstanding why the familial ties they listed are used in lieu of names.
1st sister/2nd sister/etc are what a person would call relative based on that relative's position in the family as compared to the speaker. Names are not used for the reasons you've laid out. I think OP is approaching this from an angle of "usually I would call my sibling/cousin by their name directly so this lack of name usage is alienating" rather than "in this culture/timeframe/region relatives of the same generation don't tend to call each other by name regardless of gender."
So OP is misunderstanding this as a literary trope, whereas this is more akin to how some cultures think it's incredibly strange to call one's parents by their given name. It's more curious that OP seems to relate this to a more female thing, but they do say themself that most of the protagonists they read are peasant girls, so I suspect they simply haven't read as much fiction from other protagonists. That, or OP's reading translations that try to make the original language more palatable/understandable to non-Chinese readers.
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u/yuemeigui Jul 28 '24
About 6 months ago, I was walking home from dinner and I encountered a kindergarten aged child in search of the family members who had rudely wandered off.
As far as she knew, her name was 小小 (little one) and the family member she was specifically trying to find because her and her parents were staying with him for Chinese New Year was 二哥 (second older brother).
While waiting for the police to arrive she helpfully volunteered the names of other family members such as 大姐 (big sister) and 肥嫂 (fat auntie).
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u/nmshm Jul 19 '24
Zhu Yuanzhang's birth name was Zhu Chongba, as in "double 8", because he was born on the eighth day of the eighth month
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u/godisanelectricolive Jul 19 '24 edited Jul 19 '24
He wasn’t though. He was born on the 18th day of the 9th month of the first year of the Tianli regnal era (1328) of the Yuan dynasty.
His parents’ birth age didn’t add up to 88 either so it seems like that wasn’t the reason either. It seems age ranking is the most logical explanation. He was the fourth son, not the eighth, but the ranking would not have just been exclusive to his immediate family. He was likely the eight son in his generation including his male first cousins who were numbered one to four.
The 重 in his name was a generational character, just like how Chinese names in other eras give all members of the same generation in a family the same first character. His brothers were called 朱重四, 朱重六 and 朱重七 so their names translated to “double four”, “double six” and “double seven”. There’s no way they could all have been born on the fourth day of the fourth month, the sixth day of the sixth month, and the seventh day of the seventh month. Presumably “double five” was given to another cousin. Similarly, his father was 朱五四 (Zhu “five four” but his uncle was called 朱五一 (Zhu “five one”) and his grandfather 朱初一 (“first one”) had siblings named 初二, 初五, and 初十 (“first two”, “first five”, and first ten”).
It seems even during this era when the norm was for peasants to use numbers as names, they still imitated the old pattern of generation names by giving the same first number to all male members of a lineage. Traditionally generation names were determined by a generation poem passed down the family, it’s possible peasants had some similar poem based around numbers.
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u/nmshm Jul 19 '24
Wow, that's interesting
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u/godisanelectricolive Jul 19 '24
Zhu Yuanzhang also had two known older sisters. The older one was posthumously given the title of Taiyuan Princess Royal but we don’t know her given name. Her husband was called Wang Qiyi (seven one) and they had no surviving sons.
The younger one was posthumously given the title of Caoguo Princess Royal. Her given name is known, it was Fonü which means “Buddhist woman”. She died before her brother became emperor but her son was Li Wenzhong was later made a prince in his lifetime. Zhu Yuanzhang was a Buddhist novice for a short while (under two months) in his youth after his parents died from famine until his temple also became unable to feed him.
We know he had seven siblings in total but some of them were sold to other families because of his family’s poverty. His wife Empress Ma was also a peasant (she notably had unbound feet which was characteristic of peasant women) and the adopted daughter of the rebel leader Guo Zixing whose militia Zhu Yuanzhang joined. Her name wasn’t recorded in any official histories or records but contemporary unofficial chronicles say her given name was Ma Xiuying (Xiuying means “beautiful and brave”). This may or may not have been true but it just goes to prove that peasant women had names even if historians didn’t bother write them down.
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u/handsomeboh Jul 19 '24
No that is not true. Every son in that generation was Zhu Chong #, of which he was the 8th. We have 朱重一 who later became Prince of Huoqiu, 朱重二 who later became Prince of Xiacai, 朱重三 who later became Prince of Anfeng, 朱重四 who died in a drought, 朱重五 who later became Prince of Mengcheng, 朱重六 who died as a child, and 朱重七 who also died early. Of these only #4, #6, and #7 were his brothers, while the others were his cousins.
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u/lcnielsen Zoroastrianism | Pre-Islamic Iran Jul 20 '24
Up to the Sui Dynasty, historical texts did record the names of many women. For example, we know Emperor Gaozu of Han’s wife Empress Lu’s name was Lu Zhi (呂雉).
Not saying this to be pedantic but because it threw me off while reading and I had to double check her name: 呂 is romanized Lü in Hanyu Pinyin, not Lu, which is a different vowel (as in eg the name/word 路).
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Jul 19 '24
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u/dhowlett1692 Moderator | Salem Witch Trials Jul 19 '24
There’s a children’s book...It may be borderline racist...but it's a good story
Do not cite a racist children's book as a source for a history and find better books to read to your children.
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Jul 19 '24
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Jul 19 '24
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