Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-dlnhk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-23T20:55:15.551Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Infant Abandonment in Early China

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 March 2015

Anne Behnke Kinney
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Examining the birth and population control methods employed by a given culture reveals much about the power and politics of its religious and legal institutions; it can also yield important conclusions about the hierarchical relations between young and old and male and female. But conventional methods for controlling the size and gender composition of a family in the early phases of Chinese history have received little attention. In this essay I will focus on the ways in which one important form of population control, infant abandonment, was discussed and practiced in Han times, paying particular attention to the various rationales given for it and the arguments made against it.

Type
Articles
Information
Early China , Volume 18 , 1993 , pp. 107 - 138
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Study of Early China 1993

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1. When referring to the practices discussed in this paper, I have tried to avoid using the term “exposure,” a term often employed in western language studies of infant abandonment. I thereby hope to distinguish infant abandonment from two varieties of exposure practiced in early China that are unrelated to the topic at hand. The first is the ritual exposure of shamans, discussed by Schafer, Edward in his article “Ritual Exposure in Ancient China,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 14 (1951), 130–184.CrossRefGoogle Scholar The second is the Han custom whereby infants were ritually exposed by being placed temporarily on the ground on the third day of life (see discussion below). In classical Chinese, abandonment is most often expressed by the word ch'i , meaning “to cast out.” Other terms that refer to infant abandonment are euphemistic and are often stated in negatives, such as pu chü “not to raise” or pu-yang , “not to care for.” These terms tend to disassociate abandonment from infanticide, which is baldly expressed by the term sha tzu , “to kill a child.”

Naturally, there is a distinction between leaving a child to die and actively killing it. Those who practiced infant abandonment sought to magnify this distinction and those who censured abandonment sought to eliminate it. Thus, in many cases it is impossible to tell whether a text refers to infanticide or abandonment. I have tried to limit my discussion as much as possible to those examples which clearly refer to abandonment. The reason for this decision is that abandonment is discussed much more frequently than infanticide and therefore provides a much broader set of perspectives on the issue of “family planning” in ancient China. In some cases, however, I will address the larger question of infanticide with the understanding that abandonment is regarded as one method of infanticide.

2. A Han counterpart to the Ch'in legal text found at Shui-hu-ti has been discovered at Chiang-ling tt but has not yet been published. For a preliminary report see Chang-chia-shan Han mu chu-chien cheng-li hsiao-tsu, “Chiang-ling Chang- chia-shan Han-chien kai-shu” , Wen wu Wen wu 1985.1, 9–15 Google Scholar; Chang Ting-hao , “Chiang-su Lien-yun-kang-shih ch'u-t'u ti Han-tai fa-lü pan-tu k'ao-shu” , Wen po 3.29. I am grateful to Susan Weld for directing me to these sources.

3. Pan Ku , Po-hu t'ung te-lun (Ssu-pu ts'ung-k'an éd.), 4.5b; translation based on Tjan Tjoe Som, “Po Hu T'ung,” Sinica Leidensia (Westport, Connecticut: Hyperion Press, 1973)Google Scholar, vol. 2, 456. For Han references to parents killing their own (often adult) children, see Hulsewé, A.F.P., Remnants of Han Law (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1955), 88–89 Google Scholar, and Noboru, Niida , Chūgoku hōsei shi (Tokyo: Tōkyō daigaku shuppankai, 1968), 177.Google Scholar

4. Kung-yang chuan in Shih-san-ching chu-shu 2 vols., ed. Yuan, Juan (rpt. Peking: Chung-hua shu-chü, 1982)Google Scholar, 10.56a (vol. 2, 2250). The Tso chuan , however, states that Shen Sheng hung himself; Tso chuan (Shih-san-ching chu-shu ed.), 12.91c (Duke Hsi, year 4; vol. 2, 1793).

5. Hulsewé, A.F.P., Remnants of Ch'in Law (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1985), 139 Google Scholar (italics added); Yun-meng Shui-hu-ti Ch'in mu cheng-li hsiao-tsu, Yun-meng Shui-hu-ti Ch'in-mu (Peking: Wen-wu ch'u-pan-she, 1981 Google Scholar), plate 89, strips 439-440.

6. Tso chuan, 6.48a-49a (Duke Huan, year 6; vol. 2,1750c-1751a); also see Ta Tai Li chi (Ssu-pu ts'ung-k'an éd.), 3.1a.

7. “Nei tse,” Li chi , (Shih-san-ching chu-shu ed.), 28.241a-c (vol. 2, 1469a-c).

8. It is also possible that the version of this rite as described in the Li chi was not well known in the early Han. In the Han s hu , Chia I (ft. 200–;168 B.C.) explains the rite to Emperor Wen (r. 180–157 B.C.), which suggests that the emperor was unfamiliar with the ritual of lifting up a newborn. Chia furthermore characterizes the rite as a practice of the kings of antiquity; Ku, Pan , Han shu (rpt. Peking: Chung-hua shu-chü, 1962)Google Scholar, 48.2248. For a brief discussion of the obscurity of pre-Ch'in rites in Han times, see Chi-yun, Ch'en, “Orthodoxy as a Mode of Statecraft: The Ancient Concept of Cheng,” in Orthodoxy in Late Imperial China, ed., Liu, Kwang-ching (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 35–6,Google Scholar et passim.

9. Ssu-ma Ch'ien , Takikawa Kametarō , annotator, Shiki kaichū kōshō , (Tokyo: Tōhō bunka gakuin Tōkyō kenkyūjo, 1932–34 Google Scholar; rpt. Taipei: Hung-yeh shu-chü, 1977), 75.4.

10. Han shu, 27B.3988.

11. Fan Yeh et al., comp., Hou-Han shu (rpt. Peking: Chung-hua shu-chü, 1965)Google Scholar, 67.2216.

12. Hulsewé, Han Law, 89. Also see Ch'eng Shu-te , Chiu-ch'ao lü-k'ao , (revised ed., N.p.: Shang-wu yin-shu-kuan, 1955), 109–110 Google Scholar.

13. How-Han shu, 77.2501.

14. See, for example, a passage from the lost history of the Later Han by Hsieh Ch'eng , preserved in the Pei-t'ang shu-ch'ao (facsimile of a Sung, ed., Taipei: Hung-yeh shu-chü, 1974)Google Scholar, 75.6b, and other cases cited below.

15. Tung Chung-shu , Ch'un-ch'iu chueh-shih , in Yü-han shan-fang chi i-shu , ed. Ma Kuo-han (Taipei: Wen-hai ch'u-pan-she, n.d.), vol. 2,1180 (1.1b).

16. Welch, Holmes, “Introduction,” in Facets of Taoism: Essays in Chinese Religion, ed. Welch, Holmes and Seidel, Anna (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 6 Google Scholar.

17. Yü Chi , T'ai-p'ing ching Ming, Wang , ed., T'ai-p'ing ching ho- chiao (Peking: Chung-hua shu-chü, 1960), 34–36 Google Scholar (chapter 41, “Fen-pieh p'in-fu fa” ); Max Kaltenmark, “The Ideology of the T'ai-p'ing ching,” in Facets of Taoism, 19–52.

18. T'ai-p'ing ching, 34-35; also see Kaltenmark, “The Ideology of the T'ai-p'ing ching,” 38.

19. Kaltenmark, “The Ideology of the T'ai-p'ing ching,” 38.

20. This attitude is also revealed in the Ch'in law that prohibited exposure and infanticide in cases where the infant was healthy but permitted the disposal of deformed infants who would be of no future use to the state.

21. On the issue of individual rights in early Chinese law, see Turner, Karen, “Rule of Law Ideals in Early China?” Journal of Chinese Law 6.1 (Spring, 1992), 1–44 Google Scholar.

22. See Hulsewé, Remnants of Han Law, 5.

23. Hou-Han shu, 67.2216.

24. Han Ying , Han-shih wai-chuan (Ssu-pu ts'ung-k'an cheng-pien ed.), 3.6b (vol. 3, 23); translated by Hightower, James, Han Shih Wai Chuan: Han Ying's Illustrations of the Didactic Application of the Classic of Songs, Harvard-Yenching Institute Monograph Series, vol. xi (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1952), 87.Google Scholar

25. It is interesting to note that in early Western history, the Christian church was able to evade such criticisms by prohibiting all marital sex except that which was intended for the purpose of procreation. In this way, the onus to provide for unwanted children was placed on the individual rather than the state.

26. Mencius 1A/20–21; translated (modified) by Legge, James, The Chinese Classics, 5 vols., (1871; rpt. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1960), vol. 2, 147–148.Google Scholar

27. Sun I-jang (1848–1908), annotator, Mo Tzu chien-ku (Taipei: Hsin-wen-feng ch'u-pan kung-ssu, 1978)Google Scholar, 1.24; translation based on that of Mei, Yi-pao, The Works of Motse (Taipei: Confucius Publishing Co., 1971), 34 Google Scholar.

28. Sun I-jang, Mo Tzu chien-ku, 1.30; translation based on Mei, The Works ofMotse, 38-42.

29. Han shu, 72.3075-3079.

30. Hou-Han shu, 3.148-154.

31. For example, Hans Bielenstein has attributed to infanticicde the “stubborn refusal of the Chinese population to increase” from the Later Han to A.D. 742; The Restoration of the Han Dynasty, vol. 3, Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities 39 (1967), 15–16.Google Scholar

32. See, for example, Shih-chi, 75.4–5; Wang Ch'ung , Lun-heng, Huang Hui , ann., Lun heng chiao-shih 2 vols. (Ch'ang-sha: Shang-wu yin-shu-kuan, 1938 Google Scholar; rpt., Taipei: Taiwan shang-wu yin-shu-kuan, 1969), vol. 1,6.260–261.

33. Lun-heng, 23.974-976.

34. See Wang Ch'ung, Lun-heng, 23.974–75; Ying Shao , Wang Li-ch'i , annotator, Feng-su t'ung-i chiao-chu 2 vols., (Peking: Chung-hua shu-chii, 1981)Google Scholar, vol. 2, 561 (“I-wen” ).

35. Wang, Feng-su t'ung-i, vol. 2,560–562 (“I-wen”).

36. Wang, Feng-su t'ung-i, 560.

37. Wang, Feng-su t'ung-i, 560–561.

38. See A History of Private Life From Pagan Rome to Byzantium, ed. Veyne, Paul, (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1987), 9–13 Google Scholar; Noonan, John T., Contraception: A History of Its Treatment by the Catholic Theologians and Canonists (New York: Mentor-Omega, 1965), 111–118 Google Scholar. John Boswell also discusses the frequency with which children were abandoned during Europe's medieval period and the Renaissance in The Kindness of Strangers (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988)Google Scholar.

39. See Noonan, John T., Jr., “An Almost Absolute Value in History,” in The Morality of Abortion: Legal and Historical Perspective, ed. Noonan, John T., Jr. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970), 7–13 Google Scholar.

40. Huang, Lun heng, vol. 2,20.873-874,879.

41. Huang, Lun heng, vol. 2,20.879.

42. See Charlotte Furth, “From Birth to Birth: The Growing Body in Chinese Medicine,” in Chinese Views of Childhood, ed., Anne Behnke Kinney, forthcoming.

43. See Cheng Hsüan's (a.d. 127–200) comment on “T'an kung” , Li chi, 6.48a; and I li (Shih-san ching chu-shu ed.) 31.167c.

44. See, for example, Tso chuan, 26.204c (Duke Ch'eng, year 10; vol. 2,1906).

45. Tso chuan, 44.348a–b (Duke Chao, year 7; vol. 2,2050).

46. See Yun-meng Shui-hu-ti Ch'in-mu, plate 134, slip 844 verso and slip 846 verso.

47. See Shih chi, 9.5,21.

48. See for example, “Sheng-min” (Mao no. 245), Mao shih, , 17.1.263 ([Shih-san ching chu-shu ed.] vol. 1, 530), and Tso chuan, 21.168a (Duke Hsüan, year 4; vol. 2,1870).

49. Using the census figures provided in the treatise on administrative geography in Han shu 28Bb.49b, Hans Bielenstein has shown that in a.d. 2, the average household was made up of 4.7 family members. Other figures found in sources from the Later Han show the total number of members per household fixed between 5.0 and 5.8; The Restoration of the Han Dynasty, 11-16. Scholars such as Ch'ü T'ung-tsu have suggested that throughout most of the Ch'in and Han, families were small, typically consisting of a couple and their unmarried children; Han Social Structure (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1972), 3–9 Google Scholar. But because of a paucity of statistics, it is difficult to judge how factors such as the typical life expectancy of adults, age of marriage, and rate of infant mortality affected practices such as abandonment and infanticide in early China. While the average life expectancy in Han China cannot have been great, Han sources do not mention the age of death consistently enough to compute an average. The same rule limits information concerning the average age of marriage, and for women, the span of child-bearing years. According to ritual texts, men were to marry at age thirty and women at twenty; see, for example, Po-hu-t'ung, 9.1b. But as Ch'ü T'ung-tsu points out, Han sources indicate that women (whose age at marriage is mentioned more consistently than that of men) seldom married at such a late age; see Han Social Structure, 33. Wooden documents inscribed with administrative records from Han settlements in China's Northwest (now in northwest Inner Mongolia) found between 1927-34 at the sites of Edsen-gol or Chü-yen list the names of family members, their ages, gender and the grain allotments granted to each family member; see Loewe, Michael, Records of Han Administration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967)Google Scholar, vol. 2,83-91 (MD 9-10). Nonetheless, these statistics are extremely limited in scope and cannot be used to represent conditions in other sectors of Han society. As John Boswell has noted in his study of child abandonment in Western Europe from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance, “There is, indeed, remarkably little certainty about the most basic biological aspects of human population and its reproduction, and lively disagreement about the significance of what little is known. It is not possible to say what are ‘natural’ fertility rates for couples … what are average rates of infant mortality … these are dependent on particulars of climate, nutrition, social structures, and economic realities as much as they are on any biological attributes of the species. Even aspects of reproductivity one might guess are constant and predictable at the population level — the effect of nursing on fertility, the age of menarche, the average incidence of sterility—turn out to be variable, not only from person to person but over time and according to place. … Comparisons to the industrial democracies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, for which much more detailed demographic evidence is available, would be misleading. … In the ancient world even the most prosperous societies subsisted in precarious balance with natural disaster and uncertain food supplies, and no generally effective means of contraception (except abstinence) was known to any social class”; The Kindness of Strangers, 47-48. Also see Stone, Lawrence, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800 (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 63–66 Google Scholar.

50. For the net as a metaphor for human relationships, see “P'an keng” part 1, in Shang shu (9.57 [Shih-san ching chu-shu ed.], vol.1, 1696), and “Yü-p'u” (Mao no. 238) in Mao shih 16.3.247a (vol. 1; 515a); and Po-hu t'ung-te lun, 7.11a-b (vol. 22, p. 59). Hugh D.R. Baker's metaphor of the rope also illuminates the position of the individual in the traditional Chinese family: “Descent is a unity, a rope which began somewhere back in the remote past, which stretches on to the infinite future. The rope at any one time may be thicker or thinner according to the number of strands (families) or fibres (male individuals) which exist, but so long as one fibre remains the rope is there. The fibres at any one point are not just fibres, they are representatives of the rope as a whole. That is, the individual alive is the personification of all his forbears and all of his descendants yet unborn. He exists by virtue of his ancestors, and his descendants exist only through him … the rope stretches from Infinity to Infinity passing over a razor which is the Present. If the rope is cut, both ends fall away from the middle and the rope is no more. If the man alive now dies without heir, the whole continuum of ancestors and unborn descendants dies with him. In short, the individual alive now is the manifestation of his whole Continuum of Descent. His existence as an individual is necessary but insignificant beside his existence as the representative of the whole.” See Baker, Hugh, Chinese Family and Kinship (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), 26–27 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

51. See Furth, “From Birth to Birth,” 48–49.

52. Han shu, 72.3064–3065.

53. Han Fei-tzu (Ssu-pu ts'ung-k'an ed.), 18.1b (Chapter 46, “Liu fan” ); translated by Lee, Bernice J. in Women in China: Current Directions in Historical Scholarship, ed. Guisso, Richard W. and Johannesen, Stanley (Youngstown, New York: Philo Press, 1981), 164 Google Scholar.

54. Hou-Han shu, 66.2161.

55. Ssu-yü, Teng, Family Instructions for the Yen Clan: An Annotated Translation with Introduction (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1968), 19Google Scholar.

56. Han shu, 72.3064-3065.

57. Han shu, 97B.3988. Further evidence suggesting the importance of observing the three day time limit for infant exposure may perhaps be found in the Han shu biography of the same empress depending upon how one interprets the chronology of these events. When Emperor Ch'eng died under suspicious circumstances, an investigation of his death was made and the Bright Companion Chao (the sister of the Empress) became a prime suspect in the case. In the course of the investigation, it was discovered that a slave woman, Ts'ao Kung, had given birth to a son of Emperor Ch'eng. Immediately after the birth, Ts'ao Kung and the child were imprisoned. Three days later, the emperor sent a messenger asking Chi Wu, the prison warden, if the child was dead yet. When the emperor and the Bright Companion Chao discovered that the child was still alive, they angrily inquired why Chi Wu had not followed their instructions to kill the child. Chi Wu sent a message back asking the emperor to reconsider murdering the child who would constitute his only male heir. The emperor thereupon made arrangements for a wet nurse to be provided for the child, but told the nurse to keep the child's identity a secret. Unfortunately, on its eleventh day of life, the child was taken away by the chief of palace women and was never seen again. It is interesting to note that on the third day of the child's life, although the emperor was roused to anger because Chi Wu disobeyed imperial orders to kill the child, his anger may also be attributed to the fact that the three day time limit, during which time the child's existence was not officially recognized, had expired. Wu Chi's protection of the child for three days may have therefore forced the emperor's hand, prompting him to assign a nurse to the child. See Han shu, 97B.3990–3991. The toleration of infanticide in Han times is also revealed in a memorial written during the reign of Emperor Ai (7–1 B.C.) justifying Emperor Ch'eng's hand in the death of this child and that of another son born to him by a rival of the Bright Companion Chao; Han shu, 97B.3996–3997.

58. Han shu, 27C1.1473.

59. Hou-Han shu, 41.1417.

60. See for example, Nyitray, Vivian-Lee, “Mirrors of Virtue: Four Shih-chi Biographies,” (Ph.D. dissertation: Stanford University, 1990), 64–65 Google Scholar, and Alter, Robert, The Art of Biblical Narrative (New York: Basic Books, 1981), 95–96 Google Scholar.

61. “Nei tse” , Li chi, 28.241–242 (vol. 2,1469a–1470c); Legge, James, trans., Li chi: Book of Rites (1885; rpt., New York: University Books: 1967), vol. 1, 471–476 Google Scholar.

62. Pan Chao , Nü chieh , in Hou-Han shu, 84.2787.

63. The T'ai-ch'an shu or Book of Fetal Development and Childbirth found at Ma-wang-tui may also refer to a version of the practice of placing the infant on the ground. The text implies that to strengthen the infant's muscles it should be placed on a mound of purified earth shortly after birth and then bathed immediately afterwards. No reference is made to a three-day waiting period. See Ma-wang-tui Han-mu po-shu (Peking: Wen-wu ch'u-pan-she, 1985), vol. 4, 139 Google Scholar. Apart from the need to make decisions about whether or not to raise a child, other reasons why the infant was not immediately accorded formal recognition may have been due to a parenf s unwillingness to perform rites for a child who might not survive the first few days of life. The prohibition against introducing a newborn into the household immediately after birth was also probably influenced by the desire to avoid the pollution of childbirth. See Lun heng, 23.971–974.

64. Hou-Han shu, 84.2787.

65. For Sheng tzu, see Yun-meng Shui-hu-ti Ch'in-mu, plates 127–128, slips 869–878; for Jen tzu see plate 128, slips 879–883.

66. Ma-wang-tui Han-mu po-shu, vol. 4,133.

67. Shih-chi, 127.8.

68. Tso-chuan, 37.288c (Duke Hsiang, year 26; vol. 2, 1990)Google Scholar.

69. Tso-chuan, 21.167c (Duke Hsuan, year 4; vol. 2, 1869)Google Scholar.

70. Hou-Han shu, 53.1741–1742.

71. Liu Hsiang , Lieh-nü chuan (Ssu-pu ts'ung-kan cheng-pien ed.), 1.3b. This account is based on the story as told in Shih-chi, 4.2–3.

72. See “Sheng min” (Mao no. 245), Mao shih, 17A.260–264 (vol. 1,528–532).

73. For mothers abandoning their children, see Han shu, 27c.l.l473; Shih chi, 75.4; Hou-Han shu, 67.2216, 53.1741–1742; Wen hsüan, 23.15b–16a, 46.26b; Lun heng, 2.81. For fathers who order the abandonment or preservation of the child, see Tso chuan, Duke Hsiang, year 26 (according to Legge's interpretation; The Chinese Classics, vol. 5, 525); Shih chi, 75.4; Han shu, 38.2001; Hou-Han shu, 53.1741–1742.

74. See, for example, Shih chi 75.4–5; Tso-chuan, 21.167c (Duke Hsüan, year 4; vol. 2, 1869)Google Scholar; Han shu 38.2001–2002.

75. See Yates, Robin, “War, Food Shortages, and Relief Measures in Early China,” in Hunger in History: Food Shortage, Poverty and Deprivation, ed. Newman, Lucile et al., (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 167–168 Google Scholar; and Chien-nung, Li , Hsien-Ch'in Liang-Han ching-chi shih-kao (Peking: Chung-hua shu-chü, 1962), 162–164 Google Scholar.

76. Occasionally, the observance of ritual or the fulfillment of one's duty to another person motivates a parent to abandon his or her child.

77. Hou-Han shu, 33.1150–1151.

78. T'ung, Hsiao , complier Wen hsüan (Peking: Chung-hua shu-chü, 1981), 23.15b–16a Google Scholar (vol. 2, 329); translated by Watson, Burton, The Columbia Book of Chinese Poetry: From Early Times to the Thirteenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 106 Google Scholar.

79. Chan, Wing-tsit, translator, The Way of Lao Tzu (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963), 197 Google Scholar. This passage may simply refer to the golden age of antiquity as mentioned in Huai Nan-tzu (Ssu-pu ts'ung-k'an ed.), 8.5a, (“Pen ching” ), which describes an age of great “naturalness,” when infants could be left in bird's nests and when creatures such as tigers and scorpions would not harm men. Tao te ching scholars might also look into the significance of the numbering of this chapter as fifty-fifth in the text in view of the custom of abandoning children born on the fifth day of the fifth month.

80. Hou-Han shu, 41.1417.

81. This criticism may have been partially due to objections concerning new laws allowing eunuchs to pass on privileges and wealth to adopted sons. Also see Wang Fu , Ch'ien-fu lun , (Ssu-pu ts'ung-k'an cheng-pien ed.), 6.2a–b (chapter 25, “Pu lieh” ), translated by Kinney, Anne Behnke in The Art of the Han Essay: Wang Fu's Ch'ien-fu lun (Tempe: Arizona State University Press, 1990), 107–108 Google Scholar; and Feng-su t'ung-i, vol. 2,591 [”I-wen”].

82. The ode “Hsiao yüan” (Mao no. 196) is discussed in Tung Chung-shu's Ch'un-ch'iu chüeh-shih; see Yü-han shan-fattg chi i shu, vol. 2,1180 (lb).

83. For the role of children in Han slavery, see Wilbur, Martin, Slavery in China during the Former Han Dynasty, 206 b.c.-A.D. 25 (New York: Russell and Russell, 1967), 88Google Scholar, 218–219, 240.

84. See Harper, Donald J., “The Sexual Arts of Ancient China as Described in a Manuscript of the Second Century b.c.,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, 47.2 (1987), 548 Google Scholar.

85. Shan hai ching , (Ssu-pu ts'ung-k'an cheng-pien ed.), 2.15a, 5.13b; the Huai nan wan pi shu , quoted in Li Fang et al., T'ai-p'ing yü-lan (Taipei: Ming-lun ch'u-pan-she), 946.3a, also states that daubing gecko on the navel prevents childbirth. I am grateful to an anonymous reader for Early China for these references. For a Later Han account of the use of abortifacients, see Hou-Han shu, 10B.449.

86. Hightower, Han Shih Wai Chuan, 98; Han-shih wai-chuan, 3.11b.

87. Tai-p'ing ching, chapter 42, 37–38; see the discussion in Kaltenmark, “The Ideology of the T'ai-p'ing ching,” 38; Tung Chung-shu , Ch'un-ch'iu fan-lu (Ssu-pu ts'ung-k'an cheng-pien ed.), 16.3a–6b (chapter 74, “Ch'iu yü” ); for a discussion of this chapter, see Bodde, Derk, “Sexual Sympathetic Magic in Han China,” History of Religions 3.2 (Winter 1964), 292–299 Google Scholar.

88. Hulsewé, Remnants of Ch'in Law, 139; Yun-meng Shui-hu-ti Ch'in-mu, plate 89, strips 439–440.

89. Lieh-nü chuan, 5.5a; translated by O'Hara, Albert, The Position of Woman in Early China (Taipei: Meiya Publications, 1971), 137 Google Scholar.

90. Wu Hung, “Private Love and Public Duty: Images of Children in Early Chinese Art,” in Chinese Views of Childhood (forthcoming).

91. Hou-Han shu, 39.1295–1296.

92. Kan Pao , Sou-shen chi (Shanghai: Sao-yeh shan-fang, 1923), 11.3b.

93. Feng-su t'ung-i, vol. 1,127–128.

94. “Sang ta chi” , Li chi, 45.353c ([Shih-san ching chu-shu ed.] vol. 2,1581c).

95. Meng tzu IVA, chapter 26; translated by James Legge, The Chinese Classics, vol. 2, 313. As Legge observes, this fault is the greatest because, “it is an offence against the whole line of ancestors and terminates the sacrifices to them.”

96. Hou-Hanshu, 66.2159–2160.

97. Feng-su t'ung-i, vol. 1,128.