Polyandry and Wife-Selling in Qing Dynasty China: Survival Strategies and Judicial Interventions by Matthew H. Sommer (review)

In Polyandry and Wife-Selling in Qing Dynasty China, Matthew Sommer presents, with clarity and precision, a fascinating argument about a neglected but important subject in Qing history. His study, which uses large samples of court records, provides impressive insights into the full reach of the Qing state.

Sommer’s arguments rest on his examination of more than 1,200 legal cases involving wife-selling as well as various forms of what he calls polyandry, polyamory, and marital prostitution. His sample includes 400 local cases from Ba and Nanbu Counties (巴縣, 南部縣) in Sichuan, as well as smaller samples from Baodi County 寶坻縣 (Zhili) and Xinzhu County 新竹縣 (northern Taiwan). Most of his 800 central cases involve homicide and were reported to the imperial center for review. In addition to his reliance on these sources, Sommer includes discussions of 107 wife-sale contracts (culled from his court samples) and two local surveys of customs compiled during the early twentieth century. Finally, in chapter 10, published casebooks from Qing and Republican gazetteers are used to explore judicial reasoning.

Sommer’s local cases date mostly from the years between 1800 and 1899, whereas the vast majority of his central cases cover the period 1736–1820 and represent all provinces, although those from “the traditional core provinces” predominate. Three-quarters of Sommer’s local cases are from Ba County, which includes the city of Chongqing; the vast majority of these concern wife sales. Based on extensive documentation, Sommer maintains that wife-selling and other transactions involving married women were by no means rare. Court records of “illegal marriage practices,” he argues, “reveal only the tip of the iceberg” (p. 11).

During the Qing dynasty, Sommer reminds his readers, there was a hardening of gender hierarchies, expanding commercialization, increasing poverty, and sex ratio imbalances. Adding concubinage to this mix meant that many poor men found it difficult, if not impossible, to marry. Expanding studies of Qing law “to include … illicit custom and community regulation” (p. 2), Sommer writes, not only allows for a fuller understanding of how communities dealt with prohibited (and stigmatized) practices like wife-selling, but also offers important insights into the power of state laws and regulations to govern people’s lives. Sommer’s study provides us with a nuanced assessment of the ways in which local officials enforced (or failed to enforce) state mandates. Finally, although Sommer does not make this claim, Polyandry and Wife-Selling significantly contributes to what we know and how we as scholars think about Qing China’s vast system of “transactions in people.”

Sommer’s arguments are forceful and bold, and it is with some trepidation that I summarize his 383 pages of text. The author argues that in what he (and others) call “brideprice-heavy” marriages, husbands could and did buy and sell wives. Among the poor, Sommer writes, “no clear distinction can be drawn between marriage and the traffic in women in Qing dynasty China” (p. 2). Women, Sommer points out, were victimized in these transactions, but they also had and displayed agency; that is, a wife’s acquiescence, and sometimes active cooperation, made these practices possible. For many desperately poor Chinese, wife-selling was a family (or, for some husbands, an individual) survival strategy. Sommer opposes definitions of Chinese marriage that privilege elite constructions and customs. Implied in his argument is a challenge to understand Qing marriage as a continuum: it is “impossible to sustain,” he writes in his introduction, “the clear-cut binary distinction between marriage and sex work that was basic to Qing law and elite ideology” (p. 2). Finally, Sommer considers how magistrates decided routine wife-selling cases. His research leads him to cast doubt “on the ability of the imperial center to impose its will [its mores] on society through the local courts” (p. 371). In fact, Sommer shows that many local judgments regarding wife...