This special issue of the Journal of Chinese History is dedicated to the studies of family relations. This introduction gives a brief survey of recent scholarship, puts the seven articles in this issue into conversation with each other, and identifies four main themes that emerge from this collection of essays.

This essay analyzes the early Chinese elite discourse on filial death rituals, arguing that early Chinese texts depict these rituals as performance events. Building on spectacle of xiao sacrifices in the Western Zhou Dynasty, Eastern Zhou authors conceived of filial death rituals as dramaturgical phenomena that underscored not only what needed to be performed, but also how it should be performed, and led to an important distinction between personal dispositions and inherited ritual protocol. This distinction, then, led to concerns about artifice in human behavior, both inside and outside the Ruist (Confucian) tradition. By end of the Warring States Period and in the early Western Han Dynasty, with the embracement of artifice in self-cultivation, the dramatic role of the filial son in death rituals became even more developed and complex, requiring the role of cultivated spectators to be engaged critics who recognized the nuances of cultivated performances.

In Qin and Han times, the establishment of a complex legal system that applied to every member of the empire brought about an unprecedented transformation of the husband–wife relationship, changing it from a bond largely determined by custom, ritual, and family concerns to one regulated by law. Laws recorded in the Zhangjiashan bamboo legal texts reveal that women's legal status in Qin and Han times was far higher and allowed for greater autonomy than previously imagined. Their increased legal standing may be traced to reduced household size, a policy set to counteract the mounting death toll and social chaos that followed Qin expansion and the transition from Qin to Han rule. I analyze exemplary cases to demonstrate how the small family system in conjunction with a legal order that empowered women as household heads created a new space for widows and wives to exercise their autonomy.

Based on a close reading of 118 Tang epitaphs for those who died young, this paper explores how Tang parents remembered and recounted their children's lives as well as factors that contributed to the rise of intense expression of mourning. It finds that while descriptions in epitaphs for adults largely followed Confucian ideals of life course and gender roles, the epitaphs for the young are much less formulaic, allowing space and latitude for parents and families to impart anecdotes and emotions. More importantly, it argues that the rise of epitaphs for children (especially for daughters in the ninth century) reflected a strong influence of Buddhist perception of death and Buddhist mourning rituals. As a result, Tang parents ignored the restrictions and decorum stipulated in The Book of Rites and mourned their children with outward grief, regardless their age and gender.

This is a case study of Han Qi (1008–1075), one of the most influential statesmen in the Northern Song. Drawing on his funerary biographical work and other writing, it places at the forefront Han's family life and relationships, especially his role as a brother, uncle, and family head. The goal of the study is threefold: first, to establish Han as a “family man,” in contrast to his conventional image as an outstanding political figure; second, to illustrate how seemingly random occurrences shaped Han's life and fortune in significant ways. Finally, this essay aims to enrich scholarly understanding of family preservation in the Northern Song. For many years, the possibility of the Hans failing in this regard remained a source of anxiety for Han Qi. This fear shaped his interaction with members of the younger generations in tangible ways and created noticeable undertones in his writing on family matters.

Here we have a pair of brothers whose relationship is known to us primarily through the hundreds of poems they exchanged with each other through their lives, during which they spent more time apart than together. To have a relationship rooted in literary work this way was not unusual in Chinese life. What was unusual was the fame these particular brothers attained, even while still alive. This article explores the nature of the brothers’ relationship as best we can discern it through their actions and what they wrote to each other, including their mutual affection, disagreements, and competition. Their lives were played out against a backdrop of high office, empire-wide renown, and political persecution. We see that their relationship to each other was in some ways the most enduring and sustaining aspect of their lives, even when their ultimate ideal of spending their final days together went unrealized.

One of the young couples that exemplified the “perfect match” marriage in Qing history, Sun Xingyan 孫星衍 and Wang Caiwei 王采薇 left behind personal records that give us a glimpse into the intimate world they created, from intellectually stimulating post-marriage courtship, to mourning and pledge of fidelity when Wang Caiwei died. Analyzing this record in the contexts of the Qing literati glorification of “perfect match” marriage and the couple's familial and social lives, this article pieces together a personal story about youthful passion and love and considers questions about the shapes of emotion and marital companionship and the ways the young couple navigated emotional and social complexities in their pursuit of an ideal companionship.

This article uses a new theoretical and methodological framework to reconstruct a story of two children from fieldnotes collected by anthropologists Arthur and Margery Wolf in rural Taiwan (1958 to 1960). Through the case of a brother–sister dyad, it examines the moral life of young children and provides a rare glimpse into sibling relationship in peer and family contexts. First, combining social network analysis and NLP text-analytics, this article introduces a general picture of these siblings’ life in the peer community. Moreover, drawing from naturalistic observations and projective tests, it offers an ethnographic analysis of how children support each other and assert themselves. It emphasizes the role of child-to-child ties in moral learning, in contrast to the predominant focus of parent–child ties in the study of Chinese families. It challenges assumptions of the Chinese “child training” model and invites us to take children's moral psychology seriously and re-discover their agency.