Chinese mourning customs in the nineteenth century: A glimpse into Foreign Office, Consulate and Legation Files, China: 1830-1939

The FO 228 file series from The National Archives in London, whose content from 1830 to 1895 features in the first section of AM’s Foreign Office, Consulate and Legation Files, China, is a remarkable repository of information on myriad aspects of Chinese life in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. 

These files consist of correspondence between the various British diplomatic outposts in China and the Foreign Office in London, and are organised largely by the sender or recipient rather than by subject. They therefore flit between a kaleidoscope of subjects – as befits material which covers a period of war, rebellion, revolutions in international trade, technological upheaval and social change – and provide fascinating glimpses into the world in which the writers lived and worked.  

One such file is 1853’s innocuously titled To Foreign Office (Sir S. G. Bonham). Among handwritten letters interspersed with printed shipping returns, and after a list of the stationery required by the consulate in Amoy (modern Xiamen) for the following year, we find a newly published article written by a diplomat for the Royal Asiatic Society, a body founded in London in 1823 to further the study in Britain of topics related to Asia. This piece discusses Chinese kinship norms and the ways in which the concept of kin in Chinese culture differed from that prevalent in the West. It is accompanied by six printed tables-cum-maps illustrating the varying degrees of ritual mourning then customarily observed in China, which were dependent both on one’s relationship to the deceased and on sex and marital status. 

For example, for his father or mother a man would wear mourning dress of the first degree for three years, but for his grandparents, great-grandparents and so on only of the second degree. The time mourning dress was worn also decreased the further back the generation. A man’s mourning for his sister would be less in degree if she was married than if not; for his brother, there was no such distinction, and male blood relations’ wives were mourned in the same fashion as the relation himself. The relative social positions of the sexes are also illustrated by the fact that the table laying out how a married woman should mourn her husband’s kinfolk is much more extensive than the table for her own. 

The article explains that the basis of these differences is that a married woman becomes, on marriage, more a part of her husband’s family than of her own blood family, the observance of mourning for whom is thereby lessened. The tone of the piece is briskly inquisitive, but not orientalising. Since this concept was by no means unknown in the Western world of the time – for example, in Britain until 1870 the legal personhood of a married woman was subsumed into that of her husband – the writer could explore the differing details of these arrangements in Chinese culture, but the fact of them would be unremarkable to, and, one hazards, not necessarily disapproved of by, his (male) assumed readership.

For more information about Foreign Office, Consulate and Legation Files, China: 1830-1939 section I, Wars and Treaties, 1830-1895, including free trial access and price enquiries, please email us at info@amdigital.co.uk.

The document discussed in the article is FO 228/151, To Foreign Office (Sir S. G. Bonham), 1853 (Folder 2), which is available open-access for 30 days.