The Cambridge History of China. Vol. 06. Alien Regimes and Border States, 907-1368
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ETHNIC GROUPS 281
Intermarriage with Chinese and others was made legal as late as 1191,
although it must have occurred quite frequently earlier. The official national-
ity policy of
the
Chin state, however, changed considerably over the years. In
the early period of conquest, the Jurchens tried to impose their clothing and
hairstyle on the Chinese. Like the Manchus in the seventeenth century who
ordered the Chinese to adopt the queue as their hairstyle, their forefathers in
1126 also ordered the Chinese to change their clothing and hairstyle, an
ordinance that was reinforced in 1129. But it does not seem that this rule was
strictly observed, and under the pro-Chinese emperor Hai-ling wang the
Chinese in Honan were allowed to wear their own costume.
Emperor Shih-tsung reversed this policy, not in an attempt to convert the
Chinese into Jurchens, but in order to preserve the Jurchens' national iden-
tity. Contrary to earlier state policy, many Jurchens in his time (1161—89)
seem to have adopted Chinese ways of behavior and to have forgotten their
national traditions, including their own language. Therefore the emperor
prohibited the Jurchens from dressing in the Chinese way or from adopting
Chinese family and personal names. The imperial princes who had been given
Chinese names had to resume their Jurchen childhood names. Only the
Jurchen language was to be spoken in the palace, and members of the
imperial bodyguard who had forgotten Jurchen had to relearn it. Jurchen
bards were ordered to perform before the emperor to keep alive the old
traditions. National pride was the reason for another ordinance under Chang-
tsung: In 1191 the Chinese were forbidden to refer to Jurchens as "barbari-
ans"
(fan). But in spite of all these well-meaning attempts to segregate the
Jurchens and preserve their identity, more and more of them merged with the
Chinese majority of their state. Only in the backwoods of Manchuria where a
compact Jurchen population lived, did their language and customs remain
alive. The national crisis and the repeated disasters after 1200 led to their
further assimilation. Equal treatment of meritorious Khitan soldiers was
prescribed in 1201, and differential treatment of non-Jurchen military colo-
nists was abolished in 1215. One reason for this gradual disappearance of the
Jurchen people's national characteristics was that the garrisons in which they
lived were dispersed over the whole state. The fact that even under the Chin
the Khitan people remained much more of a close ethnic entity can be
attributed to the remote and marginal areas in which they lived, where they
could maintain their traditional tribal ways of life.
To the Jurchen minority not all Chinese seemed alike. They made a clear
distinction between the "northerners," that is, the Chinese who had been
former subjects of
Liao,
and the "southerners," the former Sung subjects in
Honan and Shantung. This is evident from some of the addresses given by
Shih-tsung, who was a shrewd observer. For him, the northerners were
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282 THE CHIN DYNASTY
unreliable and cunning and always adapting themselves to circumstances,
whereas he regarded the southerners as straightforward and honest. "Among
the people in the south there are many who are unyielding, dare to speak up
and offer honest criticism."34 This is a striking difference from the usual
cliche regarding regional characteristics. In our century the northern Chinese
were commonly credited with the characteristics attributed in the twelfth
century to their Honan ancestors, and the "real" southerners, particularly in
Canton, with those of the twelfth-century Pekinese.
Despite the rapid sinicization of the Jurchens, there must have been a
major language problem in the administration of the empire. Chinese peti-
tions had to be translated into Jurchen during the court proceedings, which
caused delay and not-infrequent misunderstandings, particularly during the
earlier reigns when the knowledge of Chinese was still rare even among the
educated
Jurchens.
A further complication was the script. A special script for
the Jurchens was created in 1119, the so-called large script, which was
apparently based on the Khitan large script. Another script was invented in
1138,
the "small script," which has survived on a few stone inscriptions and
continued to be used in Manchuria into the sixteenth century. Together with
the Khitan script and Chinese there thus existed three completely different
writing systems, so that there was a script barrier
as
well as a simple language
barrier between the ethnic groups and within the bureaucracy.
It is interesting that the creation of a national Jurchen script system did
not mean the abolition of
the
other two scripts. This is easy to understand in
the case of Chinese, which was, after all, the language of the large majority of
the population and of their cultural elite. The diplomatic correspondence of
the Chin state with Kory6, Hsi Hsia, and Sung seems to have been con-
ducted entirely in Chinese. But within the Chin bureaucracy, the Khitan
script also continued to be widely used, if not the large Khitan script, which
is unusually complicated, then at least the smaller Khitan script, which was
semialphabetical. It was ruled in 1138 that diplomas of appointment for
Chinese and Po-hai were to be written in Chinese, for Jurchens in the smaller
Jurchen script, and for Khitans in Khitan. Throughout the following decades
the Khitan script continued to be used, even in such sensitive offices as the
Bureau of National Historiography. And the greatest nationalist of all Chin
emperors, Shih-tsung
himself,
praised the Khitan script for being able to
express profound and subtle poetry much better than the Jurchen script
could. This reflects the alphabetic and phonetic character of the smaller
Khitan characters, which could easily render the sounds of Jurchen. Even
more important is the fact that the Khitan script remained for a long time
34 CS, 8, p. 184.
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ETHNIC GROUPS 283
the medium through which Chinese literature was propagated to the
Jurchen. Chinese works were translated (or transcribed?) into Khitan and
then from Khitan into Jurchen. It was only under Shih-tsung's successor that
the use of Khitan was discontinued. In 1191-2 the use of Khitan script was
proscribed, and those officials in the Bureau of National Historiography who
knew only Khitan were dismissed.
It seems strange that in Sung China no efforts were made to become ac-
quainted with the script of their Jurchen adversaries. When documents or
other materials in Jurchen script were captured, no-one could read them. Later
Chinese dynasties, especially the Ming and Ch'ing, developed an intricate
system of translators' offices and interpreters' schools. But the Sung, perhaps
out of national pride, never attempted to do
this.
In Korea, on the other hand,
things were very different, and the Jurchen language continued to be taught
and learned for centuries, long after the Chin state had disappeared.
35
Social
classes
Turning from the ethnic problems of the multinational Chin state to its class
structure, we are faced with a certain difficulty. Like all other dynastic
histories, our main source, the
Chin
shih,
records persons, events, and struc-
tures from the metropolitan and bureaucratic point of view. We do not know
very much about the social conditions and changes among the Chinese popu-
lation under the Chin. But perhaps we can assume that the reason for the
relative silence of our sources is that no noticeable changes occurred in
comparison with conditions under the Northern Sung. Life in the Chinese
countryside must have been much the same as it was under the Sung, and it is
easy to imagine that city life, too, in a place like K'ai-feng after the violent
events of the actual conquest, was very much what it had been before, the
only difference being the absence of the Sung court and its dignitaries. It
cannot be said that the Jurchen conquest of northern China led to a total
social upheaval. Many Chinese, particularly among the upper class, suffered
personally from the invaders, but the class structure of the Chinese popula-
tion was not radically altered. Rich, educated, and influential Chinese contin-
ued to live alongside the exploited masses of
laborers,
small tenant-farmers,
and poor landowners. Nor can it be proved that exploitation of
the
peasantry
was any greater under the Chin than under the Liao or Sung. Only in one
35 The complicated situation with regard to the three different scripts used for the Chin written language
is summarized by Karl A. Wittfogel and Feng Chia-sheng, History of
Chinese
society,
Liao (907-j 125),
Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, n.s., vol. 36 (1949), p. 253. For studies of the
Jurchen language in Korea, see Hiu Lie, Die
Mandscha-Spracbkunde
in Korea, Indiana University
Publications, Uralic and Altaic series, vol. 114 (Bloomington, 1972), pp. 7-10, 15-19.
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284 THE CHIN DYNASTY
respect was a new factor introduced by the Jurchen conquest, namely, the
appearance of widespread slavery.
As to the upper end of the social ladder
we
have much information about the
changes within the Jurchen population and its stratification. The highest
social class in the Chin state was, without doubt, the imperial Wan-yen clan.
There were also other Wan-yens, the descendants of nonnoble families of that
tribe,
but the family of the chieftains that later became the ruling house of
Chin enjoyed immensely greater prestige and power than did the other Wan-
yens.
They were a small elite minority within the national minority of the
Jurchens, but as shown in the preceding chapter, they held many of the
highest offices and, during the early years of the dynasty, practically con-
ducted both military and political affairs. The
figures
of the 1183 census show
that there were 170 households containing 982 clan members. To these must
be
added 27,808 slaves, or over 163
slaves
per imperial clan household. As the
possession of slaves was an important social and economic factor that also
influenced the property tax assessment, the wealth of
these
households can be
gauged when compared with the average of two slaves per normal
meng-an
mou-k'o
household. The same disparity is revealed when comparing the land-
holding of the rank-and-file military colonists. The imperial clan household
had, on average, 2,166
mou
of
land;
the rank-and-file household had only 274
mou.
The wealth and arrogance of imperial clan members, who were mostly
absentee landowners and lived in the capital, and their idleness and extrava-
gance caused resentment, not only among the population at large, but also to
a
stern ruler like Shih-tsung. One of the recurring reproaches was that these
imperial relatives were town dwellers, imitated the Chinese way of life, and
had lost their ethnic identity and forgotten their former military values.
The influence of Chinese civilization on the emperors and the imperial clan
must have begun very early. Nothing would be more wrong than to assume
that A-ku-ta and his entourage were just savages. One important indicator of
the degree of sinicization under the Chin and other dynasties of conquest is
the system of personal names. In all Jurchen families a child was given a
Jurchen personal name at birth, at least as long as the language and the
cultural elements of their past were still alive. Chinese names, however,
appear quite early. Chinese names were also given in addition to Jurchen
names, even in A-ku-ta's own generation. And what is more, these names
conform to the system called
p'ai-hang
in Chinese, which assigns to all male
members of the same generation certain Chinese characters or character com-
binations according to a predetermined sequence (sometimes taken from a
specially composed poem). For example, the generation following A-ku-ta
usually had Chinese names whose first character is
tsung
(ancestor). This was
certainly a conscious imitation of Sung usage, which had, too, a strict
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ETHNIC GROUPS 285
onomastic system based on the p'ai-hang principle in use among the imperial
Chao clan.'
6
The age-old Chinese custom of conferring the imperial clan
name on meritorious outsiders, particularly non-Chinese allied chieftains,
also occurs under the Chin, who granted this inexpensive distinction in thirty
cases.
But other Jurchen clan names were also sometimes given with imperial
approval to non-Jurchen officials. Chinese personal names are, in any case,
evidence of the degree of Chinese influence within a Jurchen clan.
The number of Jurchen clans
{hsing)
is given differently in the sources. For
the predynastic period, Chinese sources speak of the "thirty clans"; another
figure given is seventy-two (this is certainly a round number, seventy-two
being a cosmologically relevant number and therefore sometimes meaning
only several dozen). A long list of the Jurchen clans, ninety-nine in all,
appears in the Chin shib. Counting the imperial Wan-yen family, who are
listed separately, the total would be one hundred. This, too, looks like
systematizing numerology, and even more clan names appear in the body of
the history. A curious distinction is made in the clan list. Eighty-three clans
are given white titles (pai-hao) and sixteen, black titles
{hei-hao).*
1
It is not
clear to what this distinction between black and white refers. It is possible
that the white clans were regarded as more ancient or superior, because
among the Jurchens, as with the Mongols, white was an auspicious color.
38
Of the eighty-three white clans, twenty-seven, including the Wan-yen clan,
had received fiefs in the Jurchen homelands near the Gold River in Man-
churia; thirty in Hopei; and twenty-six in Kansu. The sixteen black clans
were enfoeffed in Honan and northern Kiangsu, that is, in the southernmost
part of the state. Although no explanation is given in the Chin shih passage,
this differentiation must in some way be connected with the transfer of the
original meng-an mou-k'o organization to the conquered territories. It is not
clear whether these fiefs were only titular ranks or whether they implied
territorial jurisdiction or actual landholding.
36 For genealogies of the Jurchen clans and a list of the various Chinese orthographies of personal and clan
names, see Ch'en Shu, Chin shih
shih
pu i wu
chung
(Peking, i960). On the Chinese p'ai-hang system of
personal names, see Wolfgang Bauer, Der
chinesische
Personenname:
die
Bildungsgestze
un
hauplsachlichsten
Btdcutungsinhalte port Ming, Tzu und Hsiao-ming, Asiatische Forschungen, Monographienreihe zur
Geschichte, Kultur und Sprache der Volker Ost-und Zentralasiens, vol. 4 (Wiesbaden, 1939), pp.
200—10. No systematic study of Jurchen personal names has yet been made, or, for that matter, of
Manchu names that could help explain Jurchen names.
37 The list of ninety-nine clan names appears in CS, 55, pp. 1229—30. A Yuan author, Yao Sui (1239-
1314),
gives a different figure; see his Mu an chi (SPTK ed.) 17, p. 21b. He says that there were 68
"white" and 44 "black" clans, a total of 112. Instead of the term "title" (bao), he uses the term white or
black "writing" (shu). The exact meaning of writing in this context is as enigmatic as is the term
"title" (or "number") used in the Chin shih.
38 On the significance of black and white, see Ch'en Shu, "Ho-la Ch'i-tan shuo chien lun T'o-pa kai
hsing ho Yuan tai Ch'tng tai te kuohao," Li shih
yen
chiu,
2 (1956), pp. 67—77. On p. 71 he says that
black sometimes signifies inner, paternal clans and white outer clans linked by marriage. It appears to
be the reverse here.
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286 THE CHIN DYNASTY
One more observation can be made. Not all of the one hundred clans were
in fact Jurchens. Among the white clans there are listed some non-Jurchen
clans or tribes, for example, the Khitan Yeh-lii, the Turkic Onggiid, and the
Mongolian Onggirad. In addition to the social stratification within the
Jurchen ruling minority, we therefore have also ethnic differences, although
the inclusion of non-Jurchen clans in the list certainly means that they had
been to some extent politically assimilated and integrated in spite of their
previously different ethnic background. All this shows the rather fluid char-
acter of the aggregation of tribes that was to become the Jurchen nation.
Another social differentiation within the Jurchen nation was the fact that
as a rule, the imperial Wan-yen clan intermarried with only eight clans, all of
indubitable Jurchen origin.
39
These eight clans enjoyed considerable social
prestige, and we find many of their members in the highest offices. The
marriage customs of the Chin ruling house therefore fall in between the
Chinese usage, in which in principle there was no limitation on the families
from whom consorts might be taken, and that of the Liao rulers, who chose
their empresses from only one family, as did the Mongolian Yuan emperors.
We earlier mentioned slavery as a characteristic of Chin social structure.
They were the lowest stratum in Chin society. But within the
misera
contribuens plebs
there again existed a distinct stratification from a
fiscal
point
of
view.
The families in the state, apart from the privileged Jurchen nobility
and the tax-exempt Chinese bureaucrats, were classified as follows: taxpaying
families, non-taxpaying families, basic families and miscellaneous families,
regular families and controlled families, government families, slave families,
and families paying double land tax.
40
This enumeration is rather unsystem-
atic because it mixes fiscal, ethnic, and socioeconomic categories, but it gives
a good overall view of the gradations within the masses of the population.
Taxpaying and corvee-liable families were those who owned land. Non-
taxpaying families were those who were too old, too young, or invalid. Basic
families
(pen-hu)
refer to the Jurchens, and miscellaneous
(tsa-bu)
to Khitan,
Chinese, Po-hai, or other ethnic groups, a distinction introduced in 1195,
perhaps in order to avoid the having to pin down the nationality of individu-
als.
Regular families
(cheng-hu)
is a term designating families who had been
slaves ofameng-an
mou-k'o
and had subsequently been freed but still remained
under the administration of their respective unit commanders.
The
meng-an mou-k'o
population as registered in the census of 1183 there-
39 These eight clans, according to CS, 64, p. 1528, were the T'u-tan, T'ang-kuo, P'u-ch'a, Na-Ian, P'u-
san,
Ho-shih-lieh, Wu-lin-ta, and Wu-ku-lun. Of these, the T'ang-kuo and P'u-ch'a were "black,"
and the rest were "white." This list is, however, incomplete because in addition to these eight clans,
the P'ei-man clan also had supplied empresses for T'ai-tsu and Hsi-tsung (CS, 63, pp. 1502—3).
40 This enumeration is given in CS, 46, p. 1028. The distinction between the Jurchen and other ethnic
groups (basic and miscellaneous families) is mentioned in CS, 46, p. 1036.
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ETHNIC GROUPS 287
fore included all those formerly enslaved persons who were presumably Chi-
nese.
The term
cheng-hu
could therefore also be rendered as regular families.
Controlled families
(chien-hu)
were those who were controlled by the Board of
Palace Registers; they were government bondsmen who had been conscripted
from the free population to serve in government agencies, mainly the palace
administration. Government families (kuan-hu) were persons who had already
been slaves and had then been forced to work in imperial workshops. They
were distinguished from "normal" slave families owned by private individu-
als.
The double taxpayers (erh-shui-hu) finally were perhaps more a kind of
slaves than simply a group of persons who were taxed doubly. This group
consisted of families who had been given to Buddhist monasteries by the
emperors of the Liao dynasty. They had to pay both rent to the monastery and
land tax to the government. For all practical purposes they were slaves of the
monasteries. Their numbers must have been considerable, because even at the
end of the twelfth century, temple slavery was denounced, and a decree was
issued that permitted them to be set free.
The pious donation of people to monasteries was a relatively humane
procedure if compared with the wholesale enslavement that occurred during
the military campaigns of the Chin state. It can be assumed that most of
these slaves were people who had been taken captive. Another reason for
slavery common in all periods of Chinese history was self-sale in periods of
famine and distress, or the sale of children at such times. All these reasons for
enslavement as a private slave (as contrasted with a conscripted government
slave) are well attested during the Chin dynasty. The biggest slave owners
were, of course, the members of the imperial clan. When still a prince, Shih-
tsung owned over ten thousand slaves. Slave status was hereditary, so that the
unhappy victims of military enslavement not only had to suffer personally
but their descendants also remained slaves. Marriage between a free woman
and a slave resulted in slave status for the woman; she could, however, sue for
divorce if she had been unaware of her husband's slave status. If sons or
daughters of freed slaves who had been born while the parents still were
slaves married a free person, they were regarded as free and could even take
the examinations.•»'
Slavery did not mean in every case absolute poverty at the barest subsistence
level. Sometimes a slave could, perhaps as a majordomo, achieve some influ-
ence and status. For example, a decree issued in 1190 forbade slaves of the
imperial clan to encroach on merchants or to extort debts under false pretenses.
The redemption of slaves, which was in theory always possible, was han-
dled differently under different reigns. In the early period, return to a free
41 A detailed description of marriage rules for slaves is given in CS, 45, p. 1021.
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288 THE CHIN DYNASTY
status was more or less left to the individual largesse of the owner. In 1116 it
was ruled that a slave could be freed by compensation in kind: One person
could be freed if redeemed with two persons. Later, in 1141, a decree ordered
that the government could free slaves if three bolts of textiles were paid for
one adult male, and two for a woman or child. At a still later date, perhaps
around 1200, payment for redemption could be made in money: The ransom
rate,
if the slave had been paid for in money, was fifteen
kuan
(strings of cash)
for an adult male, and half this sum for a woman or adolescent.
43
It seems,
however, that the redemption of slaves by payment was limited to cases in
which slavery had been due to self-sale and similar reasons, not to military
enslavement. In any case, the widespread practice of slavery under the Chin
continued under the Mongols and remained a characteristic of thirteenth-
and fourteenth-century social structure. It goes without saying that the
overwhelming majority of the slave population was of Chinese origin, al-
though there must have also been Jurchens and other tribal slaves as well.
It should now be clear that the basic unit of Chinese society under the Chin,
as in other periods, was the family. The family system of Chin, at least among
the Chinese population, was certainly not different from that of contemporary
Sung China. Chin legislation concerning marriages and family status is fre-
quently referred to in our
sources.
It is not, however, always clear whether the
decrees and ordinances concern the Jurchen population or Chin subjects in
general. Most of the rather detailed rulings seem to point to a conflict between
original Jurchen or other non-Chinese
custom,
and Chinese tradition. Among
the Jurchens as well as the Po-hai people, marriage by elopement was quite
common, a custom that was forbidden in Shih-tsung's reign. Another custom
conflicting with Chinese usage was levirate and sororate. It had been custom-
ary among the Jurchens for sons to marry the deceased father's concubines;
nephews, those of uncles; and brothers, the other brothers'
widows.
Both these
ancient traditions were abolished or modified under Shih-tsung: Elopement
was forbidden, whereas sororate and levirate were allowed only for Jurchens
but prohibited for Po-hai and Chinese.
43
Another concession to Chinese mores was the introduction of exogamy.
Originally every Jurchen could marry within his own clan, but already under
A-ku-ta, nonexogamous marriages were frowned on and could be ended by
divorce. Under his successor even the sons or daughters of stepfathers or
stepmothers, who were not at all consanguineous, were forbidden to marry.
Concubinage was legal, but in 1151 it was decreed that officials could have
only two concubines. It must remain an open question whether this limita-
42 On the practice of redemption by supplying substitutes, see CS, 2, p. 29; by paying money, 58, p.
'353-
43 CS, 6, p. 144.
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ETHNIC GROUPS 289
tion ever became effective. An indication that adultery - in other words,
sexual freedom for women
—
was tolerated among the Chin elite is a decree of
1170,
which ruled that officials' wives who had committed adultery should
not enjoy their husbands' rank. Those women, however, who had obtained
their rank because of their sons' positions were not affected by this rule. It is
easy to imagine that staunch Confucianists would have denounced such
behavior.
A similar conflict between tribal customs and Chinese traditions occurred
in law. The old law of the Jurchens was, to a great part, based on the ius
talionis (eye for an eye) and on the principle of indemnity
(Wergeld
in Ger-
manic law). Lighter crimes were punished by flogging. Murderers were
executed, and 40 percent of their personal property went to the state (ruler or
chieftain), 60 percent to the victim's family, and the murderer's family
members were enslaved. But redemption was possible by giving horses,
oxen, or other property to the victim's family. In this case, the only punish-
ment inflicted on the culprit was to cut off
his
ears or nose in order to identify
him as a criminal.
In the transition from tribal to Chinese codified law, several phases can be
distinguished. Under T'ai-tsu the old customs remained largely unchanged,
and also under his successor T'ai-tsung, Jurchen legal customs were applied
along with some laws of the Liao and Sung. The laws were extremely harsh,
and capital punishment for theft of goods exceeding a certain value was
common. The second phase is characterized by attempts to codify the exist-
ing statutes and the compilation of an eclectic mixture of Sui, T'ang, Sung,
and Liao legal precedents (1145). This compilation was, however, not a
comprehensive code like the
T'ang
lit shu i (T'ang code with commentary) or
the Sung hsing t'ung (Encyclopedia of Sung penal law). These laws were
regarded as excessively harsh and cruel.
The third phase in the transitional period was the reign of Emperor Shih-
tsung. He took a great interest in legal matters and ordered the compilation
of
a
comprehensive collection of
laws
and statutes. The result was a handbook
of 1,190 articles in twelve chiian; the emperor, however, was dissatisfied
because the text was not always clear and some legal terms had become
obsolete. A thorough revision was therefore ordered. The final stage in the
sinicization of Chin law took place under Emperor Ch'ang-tsung. After some
preliminary codifications the T'ai ho code (T'ai ho lit) was proclaimed and
became effective in the fifth month of 1202.
The T'ai ho code as such has not survived, but the Chin shih gives a
detailed description of its contents.*« The code had 563 articles (the T'ang
44 SeeCS, 45.
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290 THE CHIN DYNASTY
code had 502) and was accompanied by a collection of
713
ordinances and a
handbook containing imperial edicts and regulations for the six ministries.
This massive codification of Chinese law under Ch'ang-tsung shows the
energy with which the legal scholars (all of them Chinese) had been at work.
It must be regretted that the T'ai ho code is lost as a whole. But, out of the
563 articles of the code, the legal content of 130 is known through citations
in later juridical works, above all, in the Yuan juridical handbook Yuan
tien
chang,
so that for roughly one-quarter of the T'ai ho code a comparison with
T'ang and Sung laws is possible.
Some of the differences between codified T'ang law and Chin law can be
explained by economic developments. In the T'ang code the value of illicit
goods or gains was assessed in silk, whereas under the Chin the value was
measured in cash, which shows that monetary economy had become univer-
sal.
From other differences it can be deduced that the Chin code tried to
strengthen the authority of both the state and the family elders. For example,
the punishment for an official who did not carry out his duties within the
prescribed time was more severe under the Chin code. We also find rules in
Chin law that are more severe with regard to offenses threatening the author-
ity of the head of the family and the husband. Such an offense was not
punishable if
a
husband "according to reason" had beaten his wife if
she
had
committed a crime and the result had been fatal. The power of
a
slave owner
over his slaves was enhanced by the Chin code. If
a
slave cursed his master,
the T'ang code prescribed exile, but in Chin law it was a capital offense.
Also,
some types of sexual crimes were more severely punished than under
T'ang and Sung law.
Of particular interest are those provisions of Chin law that reflect the
multinational character of the state. The ethnicity principle was expressly
given priority. Offenses committed against each other by persons of the same
nationality (t'ung-hi) were to be tried according to the respective customs of
that nationality. Some of the peculiar Jurchen marriage customs also were
permitted by Chin law. Inheritance law differed among the nationalities. The
separation of households during the lifetime of
parents
or paternal grandpar-
ents was punishable under T'ang law. But among
the
Jurchens,
sons could set
up their own households as soon as they were able to support themselves, a
custom also to be found among the Mongols. The Chin code expressly
permitted Jurchen sons or grandsons to live separately in their own house-
holds while their fathers or grandfathers were still alive. The premature
division of family property inherent in this custom may have contributed to
the impoverishment of
the
Jurchen military colonists, a fact already noted by
a
Jurchen minister in the Ta-ting period (1161-89).
When the Chin state was absorbed into the Mongolian empire, the T'ai ho
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