Chinese culture Chinese culture () is one of the Cradle of civilization#Ancient China, world's earliest cultures, said to originate five thousand years ago. The culture prevails across a large geographical region in East Asia called the Sinosphere as a whole ...

, an ancestral home is the place of origin of one's extended family. It may or may not be the place where one is born. For instance,

Lien Chan Lien Chan ( zh, t=連戰, w=, p=, poj=; born August 27, 1936) is a Taiwanese political scientist and politician. He was the chairman of the Taiwan Provincial Government from 1990 to 1993, premier of the Republic of China from 1993 to 1997, vice ...

was born in

Xi'an Xi'an is the list of capitals in China, capital of the Chinese province of Shaanxi. A sub-provincial city on the Guanzhong plain, the city is the third-most populous city in Western China after Chongqing and Chengdu, as well as the most populou ...

, but his ancestral home is

Zhangzhou Zhangzhou (, ) is a prefecture-level city in Fujian Province, China. The prefecture around the city proper comprises the southeast corner of the province, facing the Taiwan Strait and (with Quanzhou) surrounding the prefecture of Xiamen. Nam ...

Definition

A subjective concept, a person's ancestral home could be the birthplace of ''any'' of their patriline ancestors.

Su Shi Su Shi ( zh, t=, s=苏轼, p=Sū Shì; 8 January 1037 – 24 August 1101), courtesy name Zizhan (), art name Dongpo (), was a Chinese poet, essayist, calligrapher, painter, scholar-official, literatus, artist, pharmacologist, and gastronome wh ...

limited it to five generations, i.e. it refers to the home of one's great-great-grandfather. Even more broadly, an ancestral home can refer to the first locality where a

surname In many societies, a surname, family name, or last name is the mostly hereditary portion of one's personal name that indicates one's family. It is typically combined with a given name to form the full name of a person, although several give ...

came to be established or prominent. Commonly, a person usually defines their hometown as what their father considers to be his ancestral home. In practice, most people would define their ancestral homes as the birthplace of their patriline ancestors from the early 20th century, around the time when government authorities began to collect such information from individuals. Moreover, a person's ancestral home can be defined in any level of locality, from

province A province is an administrative division within a country or sovereign state, state. The term derives from the ancient Roman , which was the major territorial and administrative unit of the Roman Empire, Roman Empire's territorial possessions ou ...

and

county A county () is a geographic region of a country used for administrative or other purposesL. Brookes (ed.) '' Chambers Dictionary''. Edinburgh: Chambers Harrap Publishers Ltd, 2005. in some nations. The term is derived from the Old French denoti ...

down to town and village, depending on how much an individual knows about their ancestry.

Implications

The Chinese emphasis on a person's ancestral home is a legacy of its history as an

agrarian society An agrarian society, or agricultural society, is any community whose economy is based on producing and maintaining crops and farmland. Another way to define an agrarian society is by seeing how much of a nation's total production is in agricultur ...

, where a family would often be tied to its land for generations. In Chinese culture, the importance of family and regional identity are such that a person's ancestral home or birthplace plays an important social role in personal identity. For instance, at a university, students who hail from the same region will often become members of the regional/ hometown society or club for other people with the same background. Discussion of personal or ancestral origins is typical when two people meet for the first time. In recent years, the root-seeking (尋根 ''xúngēn'') movement has led to greater interest in ancestral hometowns, especially among

overseas Chinese Overseas Chinese people are Chinese people, people of Chinese origin who reside outside Greater China (mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan). As of 2011, there were over 40.3 million overseas Chinese. As of 2023, there were 10.5 milli ...

. Ancestral lineages are an important part of Chinese business culture as it plays a central part of negotiating ''

guanxi ''Guanxi'' () is a term used in Chinese culture to describe an individual's social network of mutually beneficial personal and business relationships. The character ''guan'', 关, means "closed" and "caring" while the character ''xi'' 系 mean ...

''. It can also have implications in other areas like politics. See: Shanghainese people in Hong Kong for an example of how ancestry and lineage systems play a part in business practices. Ancestral home is an item to be filled in many documents in the

People's Republic of China China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. With population of China, a population exceeding 1.4 billion, it is the list of countries by population (United Nations), second-most populous country after ...

Forms that required listing of "ancestral home" () included school handbooks to be signed by the parents of schoolchildren.

Taiwan

National ID cards issued in

Taiwan Taiwan, officially the Republic of China (ROC), is a country in East Asia. The main geography of Taiwan, island of Taiwan, also known as ''Formosa'', lies between the East China Sea, East and South China Seas in the northwestern Pacific Ocea ...

by the

Republic of China Taiwan, officially the Republic of China (ROC), is a country in East Asia. The main geography of Taiwan, island of Taiwan, also known as ''Formosa'', lies between the East China Sea, East and South China Seas in the northwestern Pacific Ocea ...

government formerly carried an entry for "home citizenship" (). Citizens would usually have their ancestral home (defined through the patriline) stated on these documents, despite having never set foot in their ancestral home. This practice was abolished by the government in the mid-1990s amid the Taiwan localization movement.

Singapore

Birth Certificates of Singapore issued by the Immigration and Checkpoints Authority carried the entries for "dialect group" (labeled as in Chinese) for newborn's parents.

Footnotes

External links