Every summer our "Four Masterpieces" will be re-adapted to the screen, especially the latest small drama bone "Dream of the Red Chamber", which introduces Bao Dai's love to countless children, I don't know if there are any children who ask parents, Jia Baoyu and Lin Daiyu's ambiguous cousin relationship, is it very embarrassing? How did the ancient Chinese tradition that cousins could marry, but cousins could not get married?
Where does the tradition of not being married with the same surname come from
We know that China attaches great importance to blood relations, and from the Zhou Dynasty onwards, China relied on this blood bond, whether it was the same surname or a different surname, to achieve political stability in its respective fiefdoms. In the Spring and Autumn Period, the Zhou Dynasty carried out non-blood alliances according to the characteristics of different regions, that is, to achieve the establishment of trust relations between each other through marriage.
You must know that before the Spring and Autumn Period, people believed that non-my races would have different hearts, and it was difficult for non-blood races to establish trust. The marriage of the Zhou Dynasty people, such as between men and women with the same surname Ji, could not intermarry, which is "marriage with the same surname, and their birth is not fertile", that is to say, if the same surname is married, the offspring born cannot flourish. Did the Zhou Dynasty people realize that the marriage of close relatives led to the easy prominence of hidden disease genes? Apparently not, because the Zhou Dynasty advocated intermarriage between cousins.
According to the rules of the Zhou Dynasty, if it is the same surname, five generations apart, it is possible to get married, but in turbulent times, the family tree is often interrupted. If it is a marriage with the same surname, even if it is five generations apart, it will also be looked at differently in the village, even if others cannot check your family's genealogy, the family tree is to burn incense, wash your hands, and have a very solemn set of rituals.
Where does this habit come from? In the Zhou Dynasty, alliances were established mainly through marriage, and if they all married to those with the same surname, how to unite foreign races? Therefore, the Zhou people generally draw foreign races together in the form of marrying daughters.
In order to achieve the unification of the world, the people of the Zhou Dynasty wanted to do it"
One marries nine daughters
That is to say, these nobles of the Zhou Dynasty would not marry the same surname, but would have multiple surnames to enrich the family. And what if the Zhou Dynasty people married their daughters? Average take"
The marriage system
For example, if the King of Zhou marries a daughter, he will let the princess take her sister and her niece as a dowry daughter, adding up to a total of nine girls, which is called "
”。
Such as "Ram Biography. The Nineteenth Year of The Duke of Zhuang records: "Who is Teng? Princes marry one country and two kingdoms go to Tengzhi, and follow their nephews; who are nephews? Brother's son also; who is the son? Brother also. The princes employed nine daughters. "That is to say, through the form of wholesale, the harem of others is occupied." Let the next generation of monarchs most likely be members of the Zhou family, so as to establish a blood relationship with the Zhou royal family. We see in the "Zuo Biography" that the King of Zhou is calling uncles and uncles when he sees princes with the same surname; when he sees princes with different surnames, he will generally be called uncles, uncles, etc. You see that your eyes are full of relatives.
An alliance established through marriage
It was not only the royal family that used in-laws to establish alliances, but also the warrior gatekeepers established alliances through such in-laws. The two most famous gate valves in the Eastern Jin Dynasty, the Wang clan and the Xie clan, the Wang clan was the prime minister of the Eastern Jin Dynasty, Wang Dao, and the Shusheng Wang Xizhi, the most prominent time was known as "the king and the horse share the world", the king is the Wang family, and the horse is the emperor Sima family. But don't think that at that time, every surnamed Wang had such a status, this Wang clan is specifically referred to as the "Langya Wang Clan", you are not only the Wang clan, but also the Langya Wang Clan, only then can you have the status of a rich disciple, in order to be higher than the surname Wang from other places. In the same way, the Xie clan is the "Chen Jun's Xie clan", which is the same reason.
The door valve clan achieved self-shaping and self-elevation, and from the end of the Southern and Northern Dynasties to the early Sui and Tang dynasties, there were some particularly prestigious door valves, so powerful that the emperor had to prevent them from further expanding their influence by restricting them from intermarrying with each other, for example, Tang Gaozong had forbidden the marriage of the seven major families at that time, which were: Zhao County Li Clan, Longxi Li Clan, Taiyuan Wang Clan, Xingyang Zheng Clan, Fanyang Lu Clan, Qinghe Cui Clan, Boling Cui Clan.
In the 19th century, European countries also relied on this marriage relationship to form alliances, such as King George V was the grandson of Queen Victoria, Kaiser Wilhelm II was the grandson of Queen Victoria, they were cousins, the Tsar was the granddaughter of Queen Victoria, and King George and King William were his cousins.
In the early political expansion, it was necessary to rely on blood ties to build trust in each other. But with the increasing number of clan children, this blood relationship is destined to be diluted, so how can this alliance relationship be used in the family?
Future alliances
Let's take Britain and the United States as an example, the Liberal Democracy of Britain, which was brought to the American continent with Columbus and colonizers, and flourished on the American continent. The first thirteen colonists fought with the suzerainty of Britain for freedom at any cost, and the eight-year war was supposed to be a bloody vendetta. But we see that the British and American families are close, and the war has not broken up their kinship.
Those who insisted on the independence of North America from Britain claimed that they were fighting for their rights as British. The relationship between the first 13 settlements in North America and Britain is not the relationship between colonization and colonization as we usually understand it. The founding fathers of the early days of the American Revolution and statehood, many of whom were descendants of the Anglo-Saxons of the British Isles, were, to be precise, a "British overseas Britain," or "part of Britain."
Britain and the United States had forged alliances away from ancient times by blood and in-laws, relying on their religious and cultural identities with each other, to forge political, military, intelligence, economic, and cultural alliances that had been strengthened during the two world wars.
The Zhou Dynasty used marriage to establish political alliances, so it was stipulated that marriages with the same surname could not be married. Our neighbor India likes to marry a daughter very far away, and if the daughter marries very close, she will be discriminated against, just as we were discriminated against when we married with the same surname in ancient times. Why is there such a custom? That's because the ancient Ganges River in India is prone to flooding, resulting in disasters in some areas, if the daughter marries far away, you can effectively avoid this disaster, and the family flees to the daughter's home.
The formation of any kind of system has its own special historical reasons. But from a genetic science perspective, there are great risks associated with marriage between close relatives. The vast majority of human genetic diseases are so-called "recessive inheritance". That is, unless both chromosomes from the parents are disease-causing genes in the same position, a child may not get the disease. If the parents are far apart, the likelihood of such a coincidence is very small. If the parents are close relatives, the likelihood of recessive genetic diseases is greatly increased.
Children born to close relatives have a much higher probability of psychosis and low IQ than ordinary children. There are a large number of close relatives marrying in Arab countries, so the IQ of Arabs is relatively low. Children born when a cousin or cousin marries are on average 3 centimeters shorter than the average child.
When encountering the question of whether similar cousins can intermarry, we can tell the child that this is a product of a special historical period and is not scientific, and we can introduce the correct marriage relationship through genetic science.