The Fields Are Gone; the Ancestral Hall Still Stands

The genealogy, the old photographs, the ancestral house: most people keep them as keepsakes, leafed through at the festivals and left to gather dust the rest of the year.

Money and equity can be written into a will and settled neatly by a lawyer. But a family’s old stories are quietly “lost”: if the elders do not tell them, the next generation does not know them. The families that have lasted have all put work into this.

The year Fan Zhongyan (then still called Zhu Yue) turned twenty-nine, he came back to Suzhou to reclaim his ancestry and rejoin the clan. He had lost his father at two, followed his mother into her second marriage, into the Zhu family, and carried the name Zhu ever since; only two years after passing the jinshi examination, the highest degree of the civil service, did he come back from the north. The clan elders were on their guard, and someone put the word about that this jinshi had come for a share of the family property. He is said to have promised again and again that he wanted only to restore the Fan surname and not one share of Fan property, and to have burned incense and knelt before the ancestral graves to tell the forebears why he had come; only then did the elders nod. The letters in Fan Zhongyan’s collected works record that he wrote that year to his third elder brother with one line: “The ways of Gusu are thin indeed.” Gusu is the old name of Suzhou.

Thirty-two years later he had served as vice grand councilor (canzhi zhengshi, deputy chancellor, a vice premier of the State Council in today’s terms), and in those years had been driving the Qingli Reforms with Fu Bi and Han Qi. Transferred from Dengzhou to Hangzhou, he stopped in Suzhou on the way and did four things: bought charitable fields, repaired the ancestral graves, asked his third elder brother and his second son to draft the rules of the charitable estate (yizhuang), and, one more, continued the family genealogy. The preface he wrote himself, setting out plainly where this branch had come from: the ancestor was Fan Lübing, a chancellor of the Tang; in the Xiantong era one branch crossed the Yangtze southward, and its founder, Fan Sui, served as assistant magistrate of Lishui County in Chuzhou. He also wrote a Letter to the Clan’s Juniors (Gao zidi shu), saying that with so many Fan kin in the Wu region, some were naturally close to him and some distant, “but seen through the eyes of our ancestors, all alike are descendants, and there is no near and no far.” The rules were copied out fair in several sets, one kept in the Suzhou ancestral hall, one in his Hangzhou study. The hall held one thing more: the Eulogy of Boyi (Boyi song) in the hand of Han Yu, which he had treasured in his lifetime as the family’s heirloom.

A garden bought for nine thousand nine hundred silver dollars

Another family in the city of Suzhou, the Peis, rebuilt their ancestral hall after it burned. The year the Taiping soldiers broke into Suzhou, the ten thousand volumes of rare editions and thousand pieces of calligraphy by famous hands that Pei Yong of the tenth generation had gathered over decades burned to ash with the ancestral house. After the war, Pei Kanghou of the twelfth generation came back to Suzhou from the staff of Zuo Zongtang, bought nearly a hundred rooms on Lion Grove Temple Lane to rebuild the hall, and gave five hundred mu of good farmland, roughly eighty acres, to found the Liuyu Charitable Estate, the name meaning “hold something in reserve.” Clan members who could not support themselves drew more than twenty jin of rice a month, upwards of ten kilograms; the charitable school was free; sons who passed the county examination for the xiucai degree got a bonus in silver besides.

Among the children raised on that monthly rice was one named Pei Runsheng. He belonged to another branch, thin in numbers and long since fallen, and his kinship with Pei Kanghou lay more than five generations apart; Kanghou treated him as family all the same. At sixteen the estate fitted him out with luggage and sent him to Shanghai to apprentice at a dye shop. That small shop only ever took two apprentices; the one before him was Yu Qiaqing. Pei Runsheng went on to become the dye king of Shanghai, and at forty-five he paid nine thousand nine hundred silver dollars to buy the Lion Grove, derelict for many years, from the Li family, then bought up the land and houses around the garden piece by piece until they joined into one. The restoration took nine years. How much the surrounding land cost, the accounts disagree. What is certain is that once restored, the garden did not become his private residence. The whole clan’s ancestral hall, its school, and the newly founded Chengxun Charitable Estate all had their offices here; the two characters Chengxun mean carrying on the precepts of the forebears. In those years, when Suzhou people spoke of the Peis, they simply said “the Lion Grove.”

More than thirty years later his grandson handed the Lion Grove to the state under the name of a donation, and in the mid-1950s it opened to the public. The estate and the hall were abolished in the political campaigns that followed, and the family’s mainland branch was broken up and scattered. Pei Runsheng’s daughter Pei Juanlin had married in Shanghai, and the mansion she lived in was called the Green House; late in the campaigns, when policy loosened and the authorities offered to return it, she declined, saying that even if she took it back she could not get back the grandeur of those years. The overseas branch produced the architect I.M. Pei. He named his three sons Dingzhong, Jianzhong and Lizhong; read in a row, the names say: make China stable, build China up, a China of propriety. The year he was eighty-nine, the new Suzhou Museum opened next door to the Lion Grove. He called it his “beloved little daughter.”

The same pocket watch and the same reader

The summer Henry Ford was thirteen, in the farmhouse at Dearborn, Michigan, he took apart the pocket watch his father had given him to see how it worked, the parts spread out under an oil lamp. That spring his mother had died in childbirth, at only thirty-seven. He recalled later that the house in those days was like a watch that had lost its mainspring: the gears still there, but no longer keeping time. His mother had taught him his letters from a McGuffey Reader. As a youth he apprenticed by day and repaired watches for a jeweler’s shop at night.

Seventy-one years later he died. On the eve of the funeral, two things lay on the desk of his daughter-in-law Eleanor: a Waltham pocket watch, the same model as the one his father had given the boy Henry, and a McGuffey Reader worn soft with turning. The watch was not the original; where the original went, the family’s records do not say. What is certain is that Henry left no written family creed and never wrote a charter for how the company was to be handed down. Fan Zhongyan left the rules of an estate, Qiao Zhiyong left a family creed, Pei Kanghou left an ancestral hall and an estate; Ford left nothing. At half past two on the afternoon of the funeral, every Ford plant stopped work for one minute. The company then had more than a hundred thousand employees.

But a pocket watch and a reader were passed down. His great-grandson Bill Ford never met his great-grandfather; he has taken apart a watch of the same model and read the same reader. His senior thesis at Princeton was titled “Henry Ford and Labor: A Reappraisal,” and it ran from the five-dollar day to the union contract. A family with no creed carried its narrative through four generations on two physical objects. The vehicle of an inheritance can be a set of rules carved in stone, or a pocket watch taken apart and put back together.

Visitors to the courtyard

The Qiao Family Compound in Qi County, Shanxi, was begun in the Qianlong reign: six great courtyards, twenty small ones, more than three hundred rooms. In the main hall hangs a couplet: wealth gathers wide on trust and honor; a legacy endures on loyalty. The hall at the center is called Zaizhongtang, the Hall of Keeping to the Center, a name Qiao Zhiyong gave it, and the family’s great matters were all settled there. The compound once kept a family school with noted scholars hired to teach, its stated purpose being study not for office, only for commerce. Qiao Zhiyong said it himself: “Though I divide the property among my sons, the family’s ways and the family’s precepts must not go unkept.”

In the nineteenth year of the Republic, 1930, the Qiaos divided the house. Each branch ran its own businesses and kept its own accounts, and Zaizhongtang managed nothing from then on. Eight years later, with the Japanese army closing in, the family abandoned the ancestral house and scattered; after the war some came back once, briefly, then left Shanxi altogether and never returned. In the early 1950s, during the review of assets, the last head of the house is said to have divided the remaining cash in two, half for the branches and half for the old employees; the buildings and land went to the managers who had served the family for years.

The Qiaos are now in their ninth generation, more than seventy people, most of them ordinary salaried workers. Of Qiao Zhiyong’s twenty direct descendants, two hold doctorates, three hold master’s degrees, and twelve are university graduates. Every few years they arrange to go back to Qi County together, stand before the ancestral tablets and bow, and when they have bowed, walk out through the gate like any other visitor. The compound has long been a museum.

The thread that runs through four families

Fan Zhongyan bought charitable fields, repaired the ancestral graves and continued the genealogy; the estate held on for nearly nine hundred years after him. Pei Kanghou rebuilt the ancestral hall after the war and founded the Liuyu estate; the estate raised Pei Runsheng, and Pei Runsheng bought the Lion Grove as a common space for the whole clan. Ford left no creed and no charter; a watch and a reader passed down four generations, and a great-grandson traced his way back to his great-grandfather through a thesis. Qiao Zhiyong divided the property among his sons but left one sentence: the family’s ways and precepts must be kept.

Four families across nine hundred years, each story different, and the watershed is not how much money there was. The Pei hall burned; the Qiaos divided the house; the fields of the Fan estate were dispersed; Ford left nothing at all but a watch and a reader. Money scatters, power changes hands, institutions get abolished. But so long as the stories and the rules can be passed down, the family’s sense of who it is remains.

On the day Fan Yanqiao handed over the ledgers, he said: the fields are gone, the spirit is not; the hall still stands, and the descendants are all still here. Pei Juanlin said that even if the Green House came back, the bearing of those years would not; what she had lost was not a building but the feeling that the family was still there. The Qiao descendants bow before the ancestral tablets and walk out of the gate like any other visitor. The compound has long been a museum, but they know who they are.

The core of succession is not arranging money and power well. It is passing on the stories and the rules. Money and power settle the question of distribution. Narrative and institutions settle the question of identity: who you are, where you came from, and where you are going.

A family left with nothing but money scatters once the money is divided. If the stories remain and the rules remain, then even with the money gone and the hall burned, there will still be descendants, generation after generation, telling and retelling.

How to manage a family’s history

Two psychologists at Emory University put twenty questions to a group of children: did they know where their parents had met, where their grandparents had grown up, who in the family had been seriously ill, who had made a mistake. The more a child could answer, the higher the child’s self-esteem, and the better the child stood up to setbacks.

The two researchers also found that the best family history has rises and falls, a narrative that comes through the storm to the rainbow at the end; it beats both the story that only climbs and the one that only sinks. A family history told only in its glossy parts does less for a child’s resilience than one that records even the failures, because the second kind tells the child: this family has been through the trough and come out the other side, and so can you.

First, revise the genealogy at set intervals, with each generation adding its own record.

Nearly a hundred and fifty years after Fan Zhongyan continued the genealogy, his fifth-generation descendant rebuilt the estate on its ruins, and once the land was accounted for went straight on to the genealogy, adding back one by one the clansmen scattered in the seventy years since the court’s crossing to the south. A family today can keep its genealogy more broadly: one family yearbook a year, recording who was born, who married, who did what. Look back after twenty or thirty years and it is a ready-made family history.

Second, build an archive, and keep it in tiers.

A family’s history lives in three kinds of thing:

• documents: genealogies, deeds, family letters, account books;
• images and recordings: photographs, audio, video;
• objects: old houses, artifacts, inscribed plaques.

Name a custodian for each kind; write down who may consult it and under what conditions it may be lent out; keep backups in two places. By the Qianlong reign, the Fan estate overhauled its account books every three years and had them cut into printed volumes. On the eve of the war with Japan, the clan secretly moved the core archives, account books, genealogy and rubbings, into Shanghai’s French Concession, and only in the year the war was won did they go back to Suzhou.

Third, build an oral record, gathered year by year.

Fan Zhongyan’s great-great-grandson Fan Gongcheng wrote down one by one the old family matters his father told him. The result, the Guoting lu (Notes from Crossing the Courtyard), is among the most important sources later generations have for the study of the Fans. What can be done today is a recorded interview with the family’s elders once a year, catalogued by person and by event, and stored; whether it is ever written up into a book is a separate question. Who writes it should also be settled in advance: the head of the family writes it himself, an outsider is commissioned to write it, the descendants write it themselves. The three can coexist.

Fourth, fix a place for honoring the ancestors and a date for remembrance.

The Chia family of Thailand’s CP Group traces its ancestral home to Waisha, in Shantou. Every year on the fifteenth of the ninth lunar month, kin from China and overseas return to the great ancestral hall of the Xie clan, as the name is written in Chinese, to honor the ancestors; inside the hall a space is set aside for an exhibition on CP’s history in China. The group’s corporate university uses the family’s founding story as teaching material, and every Lunar New Year the family writes an open letter to its employees around the world.

Samsung’s way was this: three months after Lee Byung-chul’s death, the engineering sample of Samsung’s first four-megabit memory chip came off the line, and the executives carried it to the cemetery in Gyeonggi Province and laid it before his grave.

Fifth, record in full; do not delete the unflattering facts.

The Ford great-grandson wrote his Princeton thesis re-examining his great-grandfather’s labor policies, and the family did not stand in his way.

The Song dynasty had its own case of deletion. When Ouyang Xiu wrote the spirit-way stele for Fan Zhongyan and came to the late reconciliation between the Fan and Lü families, the Lüs being the house of Fan’s old rival at court, Fan Zhongyan’s son Fan Chunren would not accept it, and when the stone was cut he simply had the passage cut away. Ouyang Xiu was furious, and the two families nearly broke off relations.

Samsung’s family history was written by Lee Byung-chul himself. His Hoam Autobiography (Hoam jajeon, Hoam being his pen name), written late in life, gives his eldest son Lee Maeng-hee a single sentence: “I once handed a part of the group to my eldest son Maeng-hee to run; in less than six months the enterprises entrusted to him, and indeed the whole group, fell into confusion, and he himself asked to withdraw.” Seven years later Lee Maeng-hee published a memoir, Buried Stories, and rebutted it word for word: not six months, seven years.

A closing thought

Fan Yanqiao was a twenty-eighth-generation descendant of Fan Zhongyan and the last steward of the Fan Charitable Estate. The day after Suzhou was liberated he reported to the military control commission and handed in all the estate’s account books, its land registers and the rubbings of the stone on which the Rules of the Charitable Estate were carved. He did it calmly, handing over the ledgers one by one, signing and putting his mark. He lived on in Suzhou many years after. The year his daughter married, he wrote in a letter, calling his ancestor by his posthumous title, Duke Wenzheng: “The story of the Suzhou Fans is about to end with me. But the spirit Duke Wenzheng left behind will not end.” In his private notes there is another passage: “The estate’s fields are gone; the spirit of our forefather is not. His shrine on Tianping Mountain still stands. His descendants, of every branch, are all still here. That is what it means for nine hundred years not to have been lived in vain.”

That scroll of the Eulogy of Boyi was lost in the Jingkang upheaval, when the Northern Song capital fell, and after the fall of the Song it drifted north. In the Yuan an official was posted to govern Suzhou, and the first thing he did on arrival, the prefecture’s business waiting behind, was to pay his respects at the shrine of Duke Wenzheng. There he learned that a scroll which had passed through many hands into his own was this one; he sought out the Fan descendants and returned it to its owners. Five hundred years later the estate caught fire and the handwritten relics of the ancestors burned to nothing; this scroll was scorched, and survived. On Tianping Mountain the Fan shrine and the tomb of Duke Wenzheng both still stand. Every year on Fan Zhongyan’s birthday, Fan descendants from China and overseas gather at Tianping Mountain for a public memorial. In the early 1990s no more than a few dozen came. By the 2010s, more than a thousand came each year.

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Case sources: The Nine-Hundred-Year Trust: Fan Zhongyan and the Fan Charitable Estate; From the Lion Grove to the Louvre: Six Hundred Years of the House of Pei; The Watch Still Runs: Five Generations of Fords and the Art of Repair; Red Lanterns, Empty Courtyards: The Rise and Ruin of the Qiao Banking Dynasty; The Bow That Ended a Dynasty: Three Generations of Samsung; A Seed and a Century, Part I: From a Chaoshan Seed Stall to Asia’s Agribusiness Empire

Academic references

• Marshall P. Duke, Amber Lazarus & Robyn Fivush (2008) Knowledge of Family History as a Clinically Useful Index of Psychological Well-Being and Prognosis: A Brief Report, Psychotherapy: Theory, Research, Practice, Training 45(2), 268-272
• Bruce Feiler (2013) The Stories That Bind Us, The New York Times, March 15, 2013
• Dennis T. Jaffe (2020) Borrowed from Your Grandchildren: The Evolution of 100-Year Family Enterprises, Wiley