If this were an online response, I would click on “like,” because this book is a gem. On the basis of sound historical detective work, Ivy Maria Lim has produced a creative, interesting, and carefully researched study that juxtaposes an underworld crisis, imperial court policy, and local response to provide a new perspective on the wokou (Japanese pirate) crisis of the mid-sixteenth century, portraying it as the catalyst for lineage formation in southeast China.

The focus of the book is the transformation (or evolution) of local society from the lijia household registration system to lineage as the primary form of social organization, in the town of Yuanhua in Haining County, Zhejiang Province, during the sixteenth century. This change, according to the author, was intensified by, even if not necessarily caused by, the wokou crisis. Drawing on the rich holdings of family genealogies in the Shanghai Municipal Library for the four great families of Yuanhua—Zhu, Zha, Dong, and Xu—the author discovered that between 1550 and 1560, at the height of the wokou crisis, narratives of lineage creation far overshadowed those of anticipated physical destruction. In puzzling out an explanation for this disparity, Lim begins the book with an account of the wokou raids in Zhejiang and analyzes the ramifications of the wokou suppression campaigns to argue that even areas not necessarily ravaged by the wokou were nevertheless affected by them. According to Lim, this was because the two major problems surrounding the suppression endeavors were how to identify the individual wokou to be targeted and how to finance the campaigns against them from local, rather than central government, resources. Herein lies the nexus that enables her to link the two issues of wokou and lineage, and to speculate that the early deployment of troops, particularly outside reinforcements, may have heightened officials’ sense of crisis and caused them to indiscriminately apply the label wokou as a term of treason, not only to coastal marauders, but also to refugees, tax evaders, and others, such as saltern households, who were outside the lijia system. In this context, where it became necessary to establish one's status as a “good person” (liangmin) in contrast to wokou, local residents responded by creating lineages with impressive lines of descent and by constructing expensive ancestral halls in order to obtain the “potency of legitimacy-conferring labels and actions of political alignment” (p. 241), i.e., as means of acquiring ritual and political legitimacy through the establishment of literati credentials, formal alliance with the court, and fulfillment of their tax obligations.

At the same time, lineage creation and the construction of ancestral halls, endowed with corporate holdings to finance their upkeep, allowed “good people” to shift much of their tax burden from their individual persons to their corporate estates and tenants. Lim surmises that, after the construction of ancestral halls, the incentive for newly incorporated families to expand their landholdings in the name of charitable endowments or the education of youth may have stemmed from the anti-wokou campaigns and the increased demand for taxes and corvée that resulted therefrom.

The question of why lineage formation prevailed over some other form of social organization is answered by the explanation that the Ming court's 1536 change in ritual law may have paved the way for ordinary folks to build ancestral halls while also popularizing the idea of descent-line ethics among the non-elite. Thus the growth of lineages, according to Lim, was the logical outcome of “the spread of literacy and Confucian values, facilitated by the national school system and by the increasing prosperity that allowed families to ensure a Confucian education—and hence, upward social mobility for their sons” (p. 242). The long-term result was the expansion of imperial authority in rural society, as “ritualistic and political alignment with state-sanctioned practices allowed the self-professed groups in Haining—hitherto, groups on the fringes of littoral society on account of their lijia status or lack thereof—to enter the administrative embrace of the Chinese state” (p. 244).

Although Lim is judicious in her assertions and takes great pains not to overstate what is at best a speculative, albeit convincing, hypothesis based on a limited locale, one wonders to what extent the experiences of Yuanhua Town and Haining County are representative of the wider southeast China littoral, and to what extent lineage formation experienced the same impetus and followed the same patterns elsewhere. Nonetheless, in the context of this original contribution, Lim has also produced in clear, crisp English a fascinating recital of political intrigue and familial interaction that should hold the interest of undergraduates and could serve as the basis for broader discussion of China during the Ming dynasty.