A Chinese kin, lineage or sometimes rendered as clan, is a patrilineal and patrilocal group of related Chinese people with a common surname sharing a common ancestor and, in many cases, an ancestral home.
Han Chinese culture is the culture of Han Chinese people. Various parts of Han Chinese culture may be shared with other ethnic groups in China and the Sinosphere while other parts of the culture differ greatly.
Description Chinese kinship tends to be strong in southern China, reinforced by ties to an ancestral village, common property, and often a common spoken Chinese dialect unintelligible to people outside the village. Kinship structures tend to be weaker in northern China, with clan members that do not usually reside in the same village nor share property.
Han marriage taboos Han Chinese traditionally regard patrilineal cousin marriage between paternal relatives of the same patrilineal clan (who carry the same surname) as taboo for example, the children of two brothers marrying each other. However marriage to non-patrilineal cousins is allowed such as marriage to a father's sister's children's or children of the mother's sisters and brothers. This taboo differentiates Han people from other ethnicities such as Hui people who marry their own paternal cousins.
Han funeral practices Han Chinese traditionally buried their dead and abhorred cremation.
Balinese women, Bugis women and other native women in Indonesia who married Han Chinese men were buried according to Chinese custom with Chinese characters on their gravestones instead of being cremated.
Han patrilineal identity The Han Chinese traditionally viewed Han as a patrilineal ethnicity traced only through the father's lineage, with all Han Chinese ultimately claiming descent from the Yellow emperor and organizing themselves in patrilineal clans. People of non-Han paternal lineages were rejected as Han which led to ethnic minorities to forge genealogies tracing ancestry to a male Han ancestor in order to attempt to pass as Han people.
A quote falsely attributed to Confucius claims that barbarians came become Chinese and Chinese could become barbarians by adopting each other's culture. This quote was actually made by Han Yu and falsely attributed to Confucius and the Classical Confucian texts which never said this and Han Yu was in fact only emphasizing one point, claiming that Buddhism, which he hated, might turn Chinese into barbarians and he was not discussing the possibility of barbarians becoming Chinese.
Han ethnicity is traced through the father and mothers are seen as empty receptacles.
Patricia Buckley Ebrey showed that traditionally Han Chinese traced their ethnicity through paternal descent and not only culture or language, those with Han fathers were Han regardless of the mother's ethnicity and Han Chinese never viewed anyone as "creoles" or "half breeds", rejecting the idea of blood quantum, viewing children solely as their father's ethnicity regardless of their physicals characteristics, even if they looked mixed Eurasian or white, as long as their father was Han Chinese, they were Han. Han Chinese believed that parents and children had the same blood and that they would mix together when put into water. Ebrey pointed out Han Chinese identity was affectively a massive group centered around paternal lineages and not on where someone was born, or their language or their physical looks (phenotype) but solely on their father, in contrast to western ideas about race. In order for non-Han people to claim to be Han and try to pass to assimilate, they had to fabricate genealogies tracing their paternal ancestor to a Han Chinese in order to convince other Han people that they were Han. Patricia Buckley Ebrey noted that since the Song dynasty tons of genealogies were written down, and in southern China, not a single Han Chinese ever traced their paternal ancestry from one of the local native ethnic minorities of the south, despite historical records showing that Chinese governments brought Confucian culture and beliefs to the local non-Han by opening schools. Believing in the genealogies alone as a truthful source would mean that not a single non-Han male who accepted Confucian culture ever left a descendant. Ebrey pointed out that there must have been at least some people in southern China who had native southern ethnic minority paternal origin in the Qing, Ming and Song but that they created genealogies showing northern Han Chinese ancestors who moved south in order to claim to be Han, because Han identity centered around paternal descent and not culture. Their genealogies all said their paternal ancestors were Han Chinese who came south in the Yuan, Song, Tang or Han dynasties. It was not about class but about ethnicity, since many southern Han claim ancestry from humble merchants and peasants and not only high status positions, but would never admit their paternal ancestor were natives. Han Chinese collectively called themselves the hundred surnames and viewed themselves as a collection of paternal clans. Henan was the place of origin of the Chen surname but people with the surname Chen outside of China and in China like Hebei, Guangxi, Shaanxi, and in Fujian where most of them live today are all potentially linked by the paternal lineage. Han Chinese paternal lineages could split apart for centuries and move to different areas but still recognized themselves as the same clan. The Han Chinese conception of ethnic identity as solely paternal meant hat Han Chinese could intermarry with non-Han women and the children would be considered Han so there was never such a concept as "half-breed" or "creole" in traditional China. So tens of thousands of people at a time could claim to be Han via just 1 Han man moving to southern China in the Song, Tang or Han dynasties.
Han Chinese organized their polygamous families around patrilineal descent and divided their wealth among their sons. Ebrey pointed out out that Han Chinese identity was constructed around patrilineal ancestry from Han and Confucianism, and that non-Han Chinese tribals had to adopt Han surnames and fabricate genealogies showing Han Chinese paternal ancestors and the legendary ancestor of all Han Chinese, the Yellow Emperor as their ultimate ancestor. It was not based on language or race.
Ebrey wrote about how Han Chinese society was organized around patrilineal lineage clans with shared rites and rituals, graveyards, shared family property and wealth. Han Chinese lineage are paternal clans and keeps people linked after hundreds of years of separation with communal ancestral services and rituals as ancestral temples and communal resource pooling. Sons inherit property divided from their parents which helps the government collect taxes while daughters do not receive them since they marry into other families.
Late 19th century reformers like Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao did not copy word for word western racial theorists like Herbert Spencer or Charles Darwin, but simply took the word "race" and applied traditional Han Chinese definitions to the western word "race", such as merely using race as synonymous with traditional Chinese patrilineal lineages. They then compared indigenous traditional Han Chinese lineage feuding between different clans to competition between different races like red, black, browns, whites and yellows.
Ebrey wrote about the ancestral halls Han Chinese built for their paternal lineages.
Many Han Chinese Cantonese in the 19th century Pearl river delta had genealogies claiming their paternal ancestors migrated in the Song dynasty to Guangdong from central China, after the Southern Han was conquered by the Song dynasty, as their genealogies were examined by David Faure. There was only sea in the region in the 10th century during the Southern Han.
Official dynastic views on Han identity Han people originally used Hua as their endonym to call their own ethnic group. The Xianbei Tuoba wanted to make Hua into the cultural and civilisational term so they could be included under it by culture and civilisation and make Han the ethnic term for what was previously called Hua. for The Xianbei emphasised that Han was a distinct ethnic group by blood from Xianbei, with them encouraging use of the Han term, in order to include themselves under the cultural and civilisational terms Hua and Zhongguoren while still maintaining Xianbei and Han as different ethnic identities. The Manchu Yongzheng emperor maintained that Han was a distinct ethnic group and that Manchus were not assimilating into Han, saying that when using Hua as an ethnic term for Han, Manchus were not Hua, but Yi (which meant non-Hua), but only if Hua purely mean civilized and was not used as an ethnic term, then Manchus were culturally part of Hua/Zhonghua and culturally Chinese, saying "Manchu blood differs from Han blood, in the same way as Mongol and Tibetan blood too differs from Han blood", emphasising that Manchu and Han would always be different ethnic groups by blood but by culture and civilisation both Manchu and Han were Zhonghua.
The first Ming Emperor Zhu Yuanzhang and a Ming officials quoted the Chinese classic Zuo zhuan which said "fei wo zulei, qi xin biyi" (the thoughts and feelings of those who are not of our descent group are invariable different) when they were against Han surnames being adopted by non-Han such as Mongols, and said that non-Han ethnicities and Mongols should not confuse themselves with Han by adopting Han surnames but instead take their own unique surnames. The Ming Emperor reprimanded non-Han ethnicities like Hui (seren) and Mongols for changing their original names and trying to hide their barbarian origins saying they would forget their origins in 1370. This indicated many Han were rejected the idea that non-Han could become Han solely by adopting Han culture and Confucianism, and thought only people of Han paternal descent could be Han.
The Qing dynasty used Han as a descriptor of a coherent ethnic group apart of the Yi (barbarian) ethnic minorities of southwest China in the 19th century such as an 1803 memorial which talks about trying to differentiate Han from Yi.
Paternal Descent from the Yellow Emperor Han dynasty historian Sima Qian traced ancestry of people in China back to the Yellow Emperor and this habit in China stretched back to his time, and continued to the Qing dynasty where Han Chinese viewed him as ancestors of the Han race. Many people with the same surname and lineages traced their ancestor back to one primal ancestor, the shizu and all the branches claimed descent from them, and by analogy all Han lineages were descended from the Yellow Emperor.
Ebrey noted that Song and Tang dynasty era genealogies and Han dynasty era genealogies (Sima Qian) claimed the Yellow emperor has their ancestor.
The Yellow Emperor was claimed as the ancestor by the Song Zhenzong emperor.