Ancestral Leaves: A Family Journey through Chinese History (review)

Ancestral Leaves is both a family history of Esherick’s affines, a descent group of the Anqing Ye lineage of Anhui province, whose recorded history begins in the fourteenth century, and a wide-ranging history of modern China. A number of émigrés have written histories of their families during the modern era. Central to a number of these works is an account of a family’s successful positioning of itself within the elite during the twentieth century and its eventual victimization under the People’s Republic. In contrast, Esherick places the similar experiences of the Ye family in historical context, balancing the personal and particular with a superb understanding of late imperial and modern politics, social history, and cultural change. The life histories of various family members are deeply researched and selections from their genealogical records, diaries, letters, literary works, and interviews show how they saw their world and their choices in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Esherick succeeds in humanizing the history of China’s modern transition without losing a historian’s perspective on the lives of his subjects. It is a wonderfully rewarding book.

Three of the many themes running through Ancestral Leaves deserve mention. First, Esherick describes the broadening horizons of the family. Ye Kunhou, who established his line through his service to the Qing dynasty during the rebellions of the nineteenth century, did not really see beyond the empire. For him, the victories of foreign powers over the Qing were actually the defeat of foreign forces, and the opening of treaty ports was the Qing’s gift to the surrendering powers. His son, Ye Boying, equally successful in his official career, saw no further. In fact, neither of them was interested in anything beyond the interior of northern China and the court in Beijing; they were men of the interior, who took little or no note of the modernizing developments in the coastal cities.

Ye Chongzhi, Boying’s grandson, however, established himself up in the treaty port of Tianjin, turning from pursuing an official career to business, in which his success owed much to the family’s political connections. His many sons (by two concubines) took advantage of new opportunities in business, science, politics (the Communist Party and the liberal Democratic League but not apparently the Guomindang), and even entertainment. By and large, they all aspired to national prominence, but for some of them, this ambition came to include studying abroad in Japan and the United States. The last generation covered in the book saw seven children seek advanced degrees and settle in the United States. Their horizons have gone from a city in Anhui to encompass the globe.

The cultural worlds of Kunhou and Boying were “traditional” in the sense that they acquired such literati cultural skills as poetic composition and art collecting and adopted a very conservative Confucian political view. For them, the rebellions that wracked the nineteenth century were attributable to misconduct by state officials, a belief that required the assumption that the political system was perfect in principle and could orchestrate social harmony were it not flawed in its effectuation. They also held the belief that government should interfere as little as possible in society, which required the further assumption that left to their own devices, the people could take care of themselves and that, by nature, they would act harmoniously. From the fact that events during their lifetimes contradicted both assumptions, they concluded not that they were mistaken about state and society but that those who rebelled had to be suppressed without mercy. Neither of them were true products of the examination system, although their education was grounded in the examination curriculum; their rise was facilitated by the purchase of degrees and offices, meritorious service, and the cultivation of ties with other Anhui natives.

These men were certainly typical of some portion of Qing officialdom, but the book does not tell us anything about what they were not...