This chapter traces the rising visibility of commoner households and the growth of extrafamilial networks of homosociability in early Ch'ing to 1800. Both were intimately related to the population growth and patterns of mobility during this period. The expansion of arable land and a commercial revolution in farming, proto-industry, and trade; the growth of guilds and native place associations; intense competition for upward mobility; and the movement of male sojourners and migrants all make this a crucial period in the history of the Chinese family.

An elite model of family relationships, complete with surnames, ancestors, and rituals, was widely embraced in commoner households during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Historians have generally treated this “traditional” Chinese family as the culmination of a long-term and continuous civilizing process. In this chapter, by contrast, the commoner household is analyzed as a contingent historical phenomenon, the result of conditions unique to the seventeenth century: late Ming tax reforms, the breakdown of hereditary occupational barriers from the late Ming onward, the increased popular interest in rituals and lineage formation that followed the Ch'ing conquest, and so on. The commoners registered in “households” (hu), the “families” to which this chapter refers, are the explicit subject of early Ch'ing tax records, statecraft writings, legal cases, fiction, and drama. Their prominence in the early Ch'ing period is coupled with a parallel development: the growth of sojourning networks that enabled households to strategize to improve their prospects both economically and socially by deploying male labor abroad while keeping female labor at home.