With the rapid development of society, people's travel is becoming more and more convenient. No matter where you want to go, there will be airplanes, high-speed rail, trains, cars and other means of transportation to choose from.
As more and more people walked out of their homes, went further away, and saw different folk customs, the doubts in their hearts followed. This includes the differences between the south and the north, in clan ancestral halls.
In the south, there are almost no villages without ancestral halls, while in the north, such dense ancestral halls are rarely seen.
So, why is this? Is it because northerners have no clan tradition? is not.
About the Ancestral Hall
As early as the feudal period of ancient my country, the Ancestral Hall had appeared. It can be said that the patriarchal family system is the basis for the development of ancient my country's society.
In ancient times, whether it was a small family or a country centered on the emperor, it was essentially inseparable from the support of the patriarchal family system.
At that time, almost everyone in society had a deep clan concept. In order to visualize it, there were many subsequent sacrificial activities.
Initially, The common people have no right to build a ancestral temple. If you want to worship your ancestors, you can only choose to worship . At that time, there were only three types of ancestral temples: the Taimiao of the emperor's family, the ancestral temple of the kings, princes, generals and ministers' families, and the last one was the ancestral temple of the scholars and officials.
direct to to Ming Dynasty During the Jiajing period, ordinary people had the legal qualification to establish ancestral halls. And even so, not everyone has an ancestral hall.
You should know that no matter when, social status and economic conditions will greatly affect people's behavior and choices. Therefore, poor families are powerless when it comes to the issue of ancestral halls.
With the end of feudal society and the founding of New China, there was a time when the ancestral hall was no longer used for sacrificial purposes, but was instead converted into purposes such as schools and factories.
That is, during that period, some ancestral halls suffered a devastating blow and disappeared from the land of China, and the construction of ancestral halls also entered a period of stagnation.
Then, with the gradual recovery of social atmosphere, people's living standards are increasing day by day, and restoring and building ancestral halls are once again put on the agenda.
However, is not obvious in northern my country. On the contrary, in southern my country, it can almost be called "ancestral hall fever" . More and more southerners are restoring and building their own ancestral halls, and investing a lot of manpower and money in this regard.
And to a certain extent, this also reflects the differences in economic development of north and south . After all, it is obviously difficult to invest a lot of money to build a ancestral temple in the face of financial constraints.
Perhaps, this is one of the reasons for the young ancestral temple in the north. After all, objectively speaking, since reform and opening up , the economy in northern my country has lagged relatively behind the South.
Historical Questions
If you have an ancestral temple built at home, or if you have a little knowledge of the ancestral temple, you should know that and the ancestral temple often have a genealogy.
As long as you are a person who is on the genealogy, no matter where you go, you can find the "root" through the genealogy. It seems lightweight to have a family tree, but it is actually not easy.
is different from the current social situation. In ancient times, my north was actually a more developed compared to the south. At the root of this, it is not unrelated to the more convenient transportation in the north.
However, in addition to bringing economic development, convenient transportation is also more susceptible to invasion by foreign enemies.In addition, due to geographical reasons, some people in have become refugees .
In this way, there are big problems in clan inheritance. During the late Qing Dynasty and the Republic of China, Another large-scale population migration occurred in northern my country - to the Guandong .
Some people successfully "break through" over, while others died on the road. These directly lead to the difference in ancestral home and living place. And in the years of hard survival, it is even more difficult to build a ancestral hall.
However, although southern my country has suffered heavy damage in the war years and special periods, it still has the power to protect its own ancestral halls, which has allowed many ancestral halls to be passed down.
Plus, whether you are doing business at home or going out for business, most of them are with your family. makes their family cohesion go to a higher level.
When successful people appear in the family, everyone will focus on this person and discuss the construction of the ancestral temple together. This is extremely difficult for the north, which has experienced a large population migration. These historical problems such as
are also one of the reasons for the young ancestral temples in the north.
clan concept
First of all, one concept we need to clarify is that clan concept does not equal family concept . In fact, the concept of clan is a family-based group that transcends the family.
The word "Zong" in the clan represents "Clan" , which is a relative recognized by the patriarchal side.
In layman's terms, to a certain extent, the clan is a group that brings together relatives recognized by the paternal line. When it comes to "ethnic groups", there are quite complex social relations and rules mixed in it.
The most intuitive benefit brought by the clan is that everyone can "hang together to keep warm".
No matter how different the blood ties are, as long as people with a surname are gathered together under the influence of clan concepts. In this way, it forms a group of difficult to break to resist attacks from other people or groups.
Based on this point, many clan groups with extremely large power have been formed in northern my country. However, as the saying goes, tree attracts wind, and is too huge, and is bound to attract fear.
plus the relatively tough folk customs in the north, The too large group force will lead to an imbalance in power.
So, various targeted actions appeared to launch a strong blow to the clans that formed the climate. After a while, the large clan groups in the north were scattered and it was difficult to become a climate again.
On the other hand, the southern clans have embarked on the road of doing business. Hui merchants, Zhejiang merchants, Guangzhou merchants, Guangzhou merchants, , etc., under the mutual influence of the tribe, gradually accumulated huge wealth, , and wealth to a certain extent can indeed be called a "protective umbrella" .
Therefore, the northern clans gradually declined, while the southern clans grew stronger. This also led to a huge difference in the number of ancestral temples in the north and south.
Conclusion
In addition to some of the above objective reasons, we cannot deny that the establishment of many ancestral temples in the south today is actually due to a mentality of "following the trend" and "comparing". seems that if you make certain achievements but don’t build a ancestral temple, you will be inferior.
Therefore, ancestral hall cannot be a measure of whether people in a region have clan concepts. After all, each person’s situation will be different, and the final result will also be different.
Therefore, is important to not forget the original intention , but the original intention is not only expressed in external forms, isn’t it?
