In late imperial China, as many as 10 per cent of all peasants were unfree. The most common form of unfree labour was state populations organized under the Eight Banners, an elite military organization. This article discusses household succession and household division in three such banner populations organized under the imperial household agency (neiwufu).

The banner household, called hu in Han Chinese or boigon in Manchu Chinese, was defined by common residence and common consumption. Household members lived together, ate together, and farmed together. They did so, however, on state land as hereditary state peasants, albeit elite peasants. Provided with ample land, their principal functions were to provide the state with agricultural goods, as well as with labour and military service.

The Qing state organized the banner household according to two contradictory principles. On the one hand, by encouraging late household division many banner households evolved into large joint households. On the other hand, by enforcing a system of primogenitary household headship and by granting household heads considerable power over the persons and property of all household members, banner households also resembled stem households. This combination of exclusionary headship and inclusionary membership was a source of tension and potential conflict within banner households. The purpose of this article is to compare Daoyi to two other banner populations, Dami and Gaizhou, in order to ascertain if household behaviour in Daoyi was common elsewhere in northeast China. This is of particular interest since our previous reconstruction of social organization in Daoyi, Fate and fortune in rural China: social organization and population behavior in Liaoning, 1774–1873 (1997), revealed a society dominated by multiple-family households sharply stratified by generation, seniority within generation, and gender.

Specifically, we compare headship succession and household formation rules among these three populations between 1789 and 1909. The article is divided into three sections. In Section I, we describe the three populations and the household registration system that provides most of our information on them. In Section II, we analyze household structure and the patterns of household transition. Finally, in Section III, we contrast two different rules of headship succession among these populations and discuss the consequent patterns of household division.