True to Her Word: The Faithful Maiden Cult in Late Imperial China by Weijing Lu (review)

In the Ming to Qing dynasties, faithful maidens (zhennü貞女), most in their teens to thirties, committed suicide or carried out other acts of fidelity to honor their deceased fiancés. About five thousand of them earned a place in a subgroup among exemplary/martyred women (lienü 烈女) and chaste widows (jiefu 節婦) in their communities as well as in the local and general histories of late imperial China. Perusing dynastic and reign records, gazetteers, biographies, Confucian literati discourse, and the few writings by women, Lu’s study of the cult or social phenomenon of faithful maidens is a substantive contribution to the disciplines of women’s/ gender studies and Chinese social history. Seven provocatively titled chapters grouped into three parts (history, choices, and ideology) engage the reader in an edifying exercise to contextualize the faithful maidens and their exercise of agency in the backdrop of the sociopolitical environment and within a Confucian discourse. Throughout the study, Lu reiterates her primary arguments: faithful maidens willingly played an active role in self-defining the conduct of honor and duty; the social environment, political crises, and government mechanism of honor caused a social practice to proliferate into a cult in the Qing; and through this cult, these young women had an impact in shaping history and culture across communities in premodern China.

True to the author’s respect for the individuals under discussion, Lu refers to them by name whenever possible, beginning with the Shijing 詩經 reference to Lady Weixuan 衛宣夫人 and the Cypress Boat 柏舟 vow in the Spring and Autumn Period (771–476 b.c.e.), from which the cult of faithful maidens originated. The daughter of the duke of Qi, Weixuan mourned the death of her fiancé and refused to marry his brother. Such acts of fidelity were given a moralistic interpretation in the late eighth century, linking ritual to female virtue. In the thirteenth century, the faithful maidens were placed above virtuous women and commemorated in collective biographies. Here we read about faithful maidens disfiguring or killing themselves to reject another betrothal, or following their fiancés to death, or living the rest of their lives as virgin widows.

The cult of faithful maidens developed in the fourteenth century and generated a spurt of growth as it crossed paths with the political crises of the seventeenth century (dynastic change and Ming resistance). However, it was between 1644 and 1850 that the cult proliferated as the state became more intrusive in social conduct and granted exemption of corvée taxes to families of faithful maidens, in addition to expanding the mechanism of honoring testimonials (jingbiao 旌表) and granting of commemorative arches and shrines. Visitors to some of the shrines claimed to have experienced spiritual rejuvenation and efficacious incidents that derived from the moral strength of the women honored by these shrines. Compared to 156 faithful maidens honored in the Ming, 4,394 faithful maidens received honoring testimonials between 1644 and 1850. By the mid-nineteenth century, with a population in China of 400 million, many more faithful maidens must have practiced acts of fidelity than the average of 21.8 individuals honored per year. Indeed, the cult was widespread in the empire and especially concentrated in the lower Yangzi, the economic powerhouse of the empire.

The cult had originated in literate, elite families, but as it cut across class and education lines, there was ample representation from the top political and intellectual circles as well as from illiterate peasant families. Confucian literati, who recorded these biographies and then circulated them from localities to the central government, played a pivotal role in popularizing the acts of fidelity. Faithful maidens became public and personal icons of morality, which Confucian scholars felt a social and personal responsibility to document. The moral icon moved thinkers such as Liu Zongzhou (1578-1645), who killed himself out of loyalty to the Ming upon completion of the...