05/07/23 - Concubines: The Key to Dynastic China's Success

I admit, I’ve been a little clickbait-y with the title. I admit, I was trying to bait people in with something that sounded sexy and scandalous. What I really want to talk about is something that’s been confusing me forever about Europe. Now, I know nothing about European history except in the broadest strokes, but from what I understand of it, it seems like it was based on a system where, for the average peasant, the greatest authority figure was your particular Duke. He had the power to collect taxes, raise armies, pass laws, enforce sentences, draft people, and spend tax dollars on infrastructure. So long as he paid his year dues to the King, the King didn’t bother him. And aside from outright failed usurpation, there wasn’t any way for a King to fire a Duke. And the Duke’s first-born son got to be the next Duke, and sometimes there were Duchesses too, but either way, there is no possible way for a peasant to ever become Duke.

As someone taught on Chinese history, this whole system is utterly confusing to me. Every since the Warring States Period, there have been an understanding in China that it is absolutely necessary to provide peasants with a hope of advancement. It doesn’t matter how slim the hope is, at least every generation, you’ve got to be able to point to one or two examples of people who started from the bottom, pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, and now they’re living the Ancient Chinese Dream. If people don’t see any way out whatsoever from an eternity of backbreaking farm labour to support the livestyles of their noble overlords, then they’re going to make their own way—and it’s going to involve eating the rich.

At the very beginning, since it was, you know, the Warring States period, obviously, the way up was with military honours. Peasants without a penny to their name can join the military, and if he’s able to bring back a head of a single armoured military soldier, he got the rank of Gongshi. That got him one hectare of land, one house, and one servant, and 50 stones a year in grain for pay. The more heads he brought back, the higher his rank, with twenty ranks each with associated awards and privileges and increased pay. Not only was this system great at getting everyone in the nation of Qin to be super motivated for every war and fight harder than their enemies, but it was meritocracy—those who were the best at fighting or effectively leading their comrades to consistent victories got ahead. At the very top of the ladder, you would be equivalent to the Chancellor of the nation, with your own lands you could collect rent from.

But that didn’t meant you could sit pretty. Your military honours weren’t your children’s military honours. If they didn’t earn their own honours, they don’t get to inherit any of those lands, houses, servants, pay, or title. I’ve always taken that as granted of, “Well, obviously, that’s the only way to run a society.” If you allow power and wealth to be so easily inherited, then those at the top will accumulate more and more power and wealth through the generations, locking them into a monopoly and putting an end to social mobility. No amount of selection will help peasants succeed when nobles have 100 times the sources to throw at training their children to the test, whatever test you choose. And once your nobles get that power, how are you still even Emperor, rather than just a figurehead? How do you get any policies passed?

And when nobles are that wealthy and powerful and independent from the Emperor….why not just kill him and become Emperor yourself? How was that not constantly a thing in Europe? Why did European Dukes keep Kings around, when the King depended on them for both funds and soldiers?

In the Han Dynasty, with wars at an end for the most part, China switched to a recommendation-based system. The lowest rank of local magistrates had the responsibility of searching for particularly talented people under their governance and recommending it up the chain. Those people would be hired for internships until they’ve proven they know what they’re doing, and then they would be hired. If they’re absolute fucktards who made a mess of everything wherever they went, both they and the person who recommended them would get in trouble. If they were amazing at their job, both they and the person who recommended them would get bonuses. Later, by the Sui Dynasty, this was changed into national exams which were held once every 3 years, to find the best scholars to put into internships and so on and so forth.

Either way, if you were a noble in China, the top 1% of society, the situation to you is quite clear. Whatever privileges you’re bringing to your family is going to vanish like smoke as soon as you die. But at least for now, you have connections and you have money and you have some leeway with the authorities of your position. “That’s okay,” you think, “I’ve just gotta make sure my son is competent enough that he can earn enough honours in the military to live comfortably for the rest of his life. Or he’s capable enough that I can recommend him for a basic job and he won’t fuck it all up. Or he’s smart enough that he can get a 3.5 GPA. How hard can that be, right?”

You go to your wife and you say, “Hey, let’s make a baby together.” And she enthusiastically agrees.

She gives birth, and it’s a girl.

”Fuck!” You swear, “It’s okay. It’s okay. We’ll just try again. I mean, what are the chances?”

She gives birth, and it’s a girl.

“Goddammit! Third time’s the charm.”

She gives birth, and it’s a boy. You’re overjoyed! You raise that little baby, teach him his first words, watch him take his first steps, you’ve already hired the best tutors you can afford for him, you’ve bought all the school supplies he’ll need until he’s twenty years of age…and then he gets pneumonia and dies at two years old.

“What the fuck.” You say, “I mean, do we try again?”

“Dude,” your wife says, “I’m not young anymore. Do you know how dangerous it is to have babies? I’ve already put my life on the line three times for you. And it’s not as though I’ve got shittons of free time. What, you think the measly yearly pay you bring in is enough to run this household? If we just got by with the same fixed salary that all your colleagues are making, how are we ever going to get ahead? How are our children ever supposed to compete against theirs? I’ve got tons of investments in businesses that I need to follow up with, I’ve got lawsuits in the works, I’ve got disputes between peasants in the lands that we’re renting out that need to be resolved, I’ve got connections to help maintain for you with your bosses and your subordinates. I’m very, very busy, okay?”

“Yeah, you’re right,” you admit, “I mean, that’s why I married you to begin with. Girls with a noble education really are different. You’re such a lifesaver.”

She rolls her eyes, “Duh. I haven’t been learning how to organise excel sheets and run budgets and make returns on investments since I was seven years old for nothing. And don’t forget, if I keel over having a baby for you, that’s three years of mourning in which you can’t get a second wife. What’s your investments gonna look like after nobody’s been paying attention to them for three goddamn years.”

“Dude, don’t even joke about that. I’d never be able to find someone as good as you again.”

“Yeah, because you’ll be a widower. No talented noble girl is going to marry a widower.”

“…Did you really have to be so harsh? I was trying to be romantic. But seriously though. What’s the solution here? I mean, we gotta have a son.”

She looks you up and down with a trace of contempt, “If I were you, I’d have at least fifteen sons. Way more of a chance that at least one of them won’t turn out to be utterly useless.”

And that’s what concubines are—they’re basically Ancient Chinese surrogates. They’re basically not much more than a household servant whose duty is to be pregnant on your wife’s behalf, instead of scrub dishes or trim gardens or whatever. That’s what differentiates a concubine system from merely polygamous societies. From the beginning, there is only one husband and one wife. The wife is the only person whose legal rights are guaranteed by the law.

There are rules to when you can and cannot divorce your wife. You can sell concubines or gift them away whenever you want. The wife has a dowry her family prepared that is solely her property, that you cannot touch. Concubines don’t need or necessarily have dowries. The wife has a right to oversee the education of all the children in the household. Nobody would let uneducated concubines raise their kids. Your wife is entitled to the filial piety of your children.

And in order to get a concubine to begin with, both the husband and the wife has to agree to it. Though given the sky-high maternal mortality rates, infant mortality rates, the amount of work that the wife of a noble family has to do, and the fact that she’s just as invested as you in a capable heir who can continue the family fortune and keep her comfortable in old age, plus general social assumptions that a good wife is one who is generous with the concubines, means that wives almost never refused.

But so far, all I’ve described is how concubines are a….sort of loophole that allows nobility to grasp onto their power and prestige for a couple more generations. It lets you take a look at a stock of at least two dozen children, to sit back and see which ones were male, which ones survived early childhood, which one showed the most potential. And to take that one, and adopt it under their wife’s name, making it the heir to your fortune. And meanwhile, so long as your other children are registered under concubines and haven’t been adopted to your wife, they’re from the side branch (shuchu 庶出), not the main branch (dichu 嫡出). They have no right to inherit, and you don’t have to worry about the dilution of your fortune by having to split it between three sons all from your wife.

That sounds entirely counter-productive to my idea of keeping nobles from monopolising success, right? How do concubines constitute the key to China’s success at all?

For that, we have to take a look at the only position in China which is, in fact, strictly hereditary—Emperor.

When I was a little kid, I have vague memories of owning a book all about the mad and inbred Kings of Europe. And it utterly amazed me how there were literally dozens of examples, where you know for a fact your primogenitor is utterly cuckoo for cocoa puffs, and you’d just….die? Pass the throne along to him anyways? Just, do nothing about it? Guess how many mad or retarded Emperors there were of China.

One.

A deeply kind and gentle sweetheart with Down’s Syndrome during the Wei-Jin period who was intended to hold the throne for just long enough for the Crown Grandson to come of age and take over. You know what happened? Every single one of his brothers and uncles pulled a coup and the nation instantly fell into civil war. And his dad was made fun of for the next 1800 years of Chinese history to the modern day, for being enough of an idiot to expect a mentally handicapped man to shoulder the responsibilities of ruling.

And really, he should have known better. While primogenitor inherited more often than not in China, it’s simply because he’s considered the default heir if all else is equal. But ever since mythological times, far before the Shang Dynasty (2000 BC), China has had buckets of morality tales of how it is the responsibility of the Emperor to pass his throne to the most competent of his heirs. That if he has no competent heirs, it is morally wrong to think that bloodline supersedes competence when it comes to selecting an heir to adopt. And as the Emperor, your most important job is…well, it’s running China. But your second most important job is producing as many sons as possible, so that you can choose for the best among 40. Not simply the best among 2.

There are otherwise fairly great Emperors who faced criticism their entire life and for thousands of years after their death, because he only had children with his Queen. And although she did in fact do great and gave him seven children (four boys, three girls), nonetheless, everyone never stopped pointing out how irresponsible he was being, trusting the future of all of China to merely four rolls of the dice.

Concubines also completely solves the inbreeding problem. Although noble families had some amount of staying power in China, and they tended only to marry each other, there was absolutely no requirements or expectations whatsoever about the status or background of your concubine. You would be the butt of jokes for the next two millennia to come if, say, as the Crown Prince, you married a merchant’s daughter as your proper Wife. But if you take a street sweeper as a concubine, no one would bat an eye.

I think most polygamous societies came about because of the practical issues I’ve talked about before—the need for surviving, reasonably competent heirs combined with high mortality rates. But concubines are much more stable for society, because they also solve the inevitable instability that polygamy inevitably results in. When some men have multiple wives, some other men, by necessity, would end up with no wives. And single young men with nothing to lose and an understanding that there’s no hope for their future compose the most unstable elements of society. However, concubines lighten the problem significantly, because concubines are not exclusive.

If you visit a coworker’s house and happen to see his wife, and comment, “Wow, what a beauty. Perhaps you should divorce her so I can marry her.” You might get beaten to death, and everyone would generally agree that you kind of deserved it. But concubines were regularly something that subordinates would gift to their bosses as a bribe, or bosses would gift to their subordinates as a reward. It’s not uncommon for friends to gift each other concubines when their bro is looking particularly down. If three noblemen tell you that they’ve had five, eleven, and nine concubines each respectively, that doesn’t mean there were actually 25 unique women involved.

This system is great for every single person involved, except perhaps the concubines themselves. I suppose, at the end, this might circle back to my previous essay about feminism in modern China. Perhaps China has been a society that has been propelling itself forward on the sacrifice of women for thousands of years. Perhaps at this point, it’s simply the default state that everyone assumes. If someone has to get the short end of the stick, well, why not poor women? Poor women have been getting the short end of the stick for thousands of years, and everything worked out pretty well, didn’t it?

Appendices:

A couple of thoughts about concubines that I couldn’t find a place to fit in the essay itself, so I’ll quickly cover them here in no particular order.

Where do concubines come from?

If offered the right price, very poor, desperate families will sell their daughters off to be concubines. Not just so they can feed themselves, but because they genuinely convince themselves that it’s a better future for their daughter. What is her life otherwise going to be? She’s going to spend her whole life on an acre of fields, working from daybreak to dusk in backbreaking pre-industrial farm labour, marrying a farmer who’s just as dirt poor as she is to raise a bunch of children who will be just as poor as she is, and die without ever having tasted a solid bite of bread.

Or you let the local landlord take her as a concubine, where she doesn’t have to do any work (except sleep with him), get to lounge around all day waited on by other servants, and, if she’s lucky, someone with her bloodline is going to end up inheriting all of the landlord’s estate. Doesn’t that sound better? You know, assuming that she doesn’t get gifted or sold on, or beaten to death for fun.

Or you could purchase women from the local brothel, if you don’t mind the significantly increased risks that you might get syphilis and die.

But chances are, as a nobleman, you don’t have to. Because when you married your wife, she would have brought an entire entourage of maids to serve her needs in your household. And probably among those maids is exactly someone she prepared for those occasions when you like to get down to some business, but she’s on her period. That’s probably the top candidate for where concubines come from if you’re an honest man who truly loves his wife.

If your wife’s maids don’t work out for you, then chances are, she has sisters or cousins who are born from concubines themselves who aren’t in line for any kind of inheritance, who’s being kept around exactly as concubine fodder. To ensure that no matter who your heir is, their mothers came from the same line.

‘Course, you can’t just randomly sell or beat these. Concubines that came from proper families and brought a proper dowry to your house are Noble Concubines, instead of Lowly Concubines. They’ve got the same human rights as the rest of China’s citizens. They weren’t sold into slavery by their family.

But you’ve got to be upper-middle class in order to afford a concubine to begin with. The only people who can afford a Noble Concubines is going to be the equivalent of senators and cabinet members and the President himself. You’re looking at high-ranking officials in the capital, or imperial family members.

How much are concubines anyhow?

Much like asking, “How much are cars?” It really depends on the brand and the model and the condition of the car. And somewhat similar to cars, brand new concubines average around 50K modern equivalent RMB in silver (going up to hundreds of thousands or even millions when you’re talking about truly rare beauties, much like limited edition fancy luxury sports cars). But you can buy half-way decent preowned models for just a couple grand if you look. You just gotta watch out for reliability problems. The cheapest sale and purchase of a concubine I could find on record was a 51-year-old woman who went for 750 RMB, otherwise known as a peasant’s average yearly income.

Has the reverse ever happened? You know, like male concubines for female tycoons?

Yes! It has! Though, if you’re merely a stupendously wealthy tycoon as a woman, you’re not going to have the right to keep multiple male consorts around for your amusement. Pretty much only Princesses get that privilege. There is the famous Princess Shanyin of the Liu Song Kingdom, who complained to her brother, the Emperor, that it didn’t seem like fair that only he got to have a harem and she didn’t, when they’ve got the same dad. So the Emperor granted her a harem of thirty hot dudes. Still not satisfied, she then repeatedly tried to sleep with the Minister of Personnel (basically Head of HR for all of China), even going so far as to attempt to rape him. But he resisted too hard, so she sent him away.

Also, this Minister of Personnel was also the son of a four-star general.

Also, this Minister of Personnel was literally her uncle on her mother’s side.

And all of this, while she was married and had a proper husband and everything!

Unfortunately, while she’s certainly not the only Princess to keep a harem of her own, this is far from common place. For the most part, concubines are something that only men got to enjoy.

Just how many concubines did the Emperor have?

I’ve seen a lot of relatively laughable exaggerations on Wikipedia of Chinese Emperors and their harem. I think I need to clarify that whether it’s the Emperor or his Princes or Lords and Nobles, there is a set number of concubines that one is allowed to have. The Emperor has the greatest number. He gets one Empress, three fei (妃), 9 pin (嫔), 27 shifu (世妇, these are then divided into three tiers of nine), and 81 yuqi (御妻, divided into three tiers of 27 each). For a total of 121 women.

There are certain unique benefits to being in the Emperor’s harem, as opposed to a normal nobleman’s though. And I mean, beyond just the chance that your child might end up being the most powerful man on earth. First, once you’re the Emperor’s woman, you’re not going to be anybody else’s woman. There is zero chance that you’ll be sold on. Secondly, you actually get a wage! Yup, an Emperor’s harem holds official rank in the Imperial Bureaucracy, just like all those tax men and judges and generals outside, and gets paid the same money. They’re doing just as important a job, after all!

Now, the theoretical upper limit to an Emperor’s harem is 121 women. That doesn’t mean that’s how many they actually, practically had. I’d estimate, on average, Emperors probably had anywhere from two to three dozen women in their harem.

Wikipedia often throws around numbers like Tang Emperor Li Longji has over forty thousand women in his harem. I mean, okay, sure, Wikipedia. That is technically true. That is counting every single lifeform which owns a vagina inside the walls of the forbidden palace. That includes every women who was keeping the floors clean, the roses trimmed, the chamberpots scrubbed, the stoves hot, the Imperial pets fed, etc, etc, etc. I feel like, if you’re going to count how many women the Emperor has by the amount of women he has theoretical access to if he really, really wanted to, you could’ve just went ahead and said that Li Longji had over 45 million women available to him.