18세기 중엽~20세기 초 중국의 “官修家譜” ― 中國第一歷史檔案館에 소장된 『淸代譜牒檔案』을 중심으로

Abstract

In early Chinese history, the genealogies were compiled by the state, in order to help in the selection of officials and in determining inheritance rights. From the Song Dynasty on, went from being public documents to being private ones. With the state no longer getting involved, genealogies lost their usefulness in the selection of officials and came to be used principally for offering respect to ancestors and recording the members of a lineage. Beginning in the Qing Dynasty, the state resumed the large-scale supervision of information about family members in its compilation of all sorts of census registers and archival records related to bannermen. These sorts of records are known to scholars as "Household Registers" (戶口冊), and their purpose was to select officials and determine inheritance rights, thus giving them many similarities to the official genealogies compiled in the pre-Song era. This article calls these documents Qing Dynasty "Officially Compiled Genealogies" (官修家譜). At present, although scholars have engaged in a great deal of productive discussion about household registers from both historical and demographic perspectives, they still have not fully incorporated household registers into the literature on genealogies, nor have they explored them from the perspective of ordinary genealogical studies. This situation is not merely a shortcoming in the independent study of Eight Banner household registers, but a deficiency in the entire study of Qing period genealogies, and even in the study of Chinese genealogies as a whole. This article will take this gap as its starting point for engaging in an exploration of Qing household registers.