The custom of men to women's homes has been around for a long time. The old society called it "entering the excess", commonly known as "entering the excess", which was a special form of marriage in the old society.
The traditional thinking of the old society was that "no filial piety has three, and no posterity is greater." Therefore, it is emphasized that there must be male dings to pass on the lineage and inherit the clan branch. If a family only gives birth to a girl and no male heir, there is no one to succeed. In order to pass on the lineage, he was introduced by relatives and friends or introduced by a matchmaker, and a man with his surname in a foreign village was recruited to marry his daughter, and the man entered the woman's family and became the son of the woman's family instead of the son-in-law. This form of marriage is called "entering the excess", which is commonly known as "entering the excess". As for the original girl in the woman's family, she was both a daughter and a daughter-in-law.
From then on, men who entered the women's family had to live in the woman's home forever, and they had to give up their original surnames and use the women's family names, which were written into the "Family Tree".
In the old days, such men who entered the homes of women were often looked down upon and ridiculed as "selling headlights". Because the original family had important festivals, each family's headlights should write their own surname and county or hall number, such as the Surname of Hong, the big book "Hong" on one side of the headlamp, and the word "Dunhuang" on the other side. Whenever a festival is held, the headlamp cannot write the original surname and county of the woman, but the surname and county of the woman's family, so the secular people ridicule the person who enters the house as "selling the headlamp".
Marriage ceremonies are usually relatively simple and not extravagant. But there are also overseas Chinese or rich families, who first let the men who have entered the house to live at home, and let the daughter live in the grandmother's house, and when it comes to the auspicious period of marriage, there are still flower palanquins to the grandmother's house to greet relatives, still bear the dowry and drum music accompaniment, the family still arranges the queue of the new couple, greets the bride with a warm cannon sound, kicks the car door, invites the car, leads the new person to the hall to pay a prayer, the same drum music is noisy, the relatives, friends and guests are feasted, and the form of the entry is covered up with a lively scene, so that the man can marry in a dignified manner. The daughter still sits in a flower palanquin to "marry" as a bride.
Men who are in the thick of money are often personally selected by their daughters, and from this point of view, they are better than the marriages arranged by girls who are kept in the dark and arranged by "the order of their parents" and "the words of the matchmaker".
Another case of excess is the "roof house"
Just like between the brothers of the Zong ping generation, there is a room without male or female children, and there is no heir, in order to pass on the inheritance, they adopt a girl. After the girl grows up to become a girl to be married, she chooses a man with more brothers from the brothers of the same generation to marry the girl.
As for whether the wedding is solemn or not, it is decided by the economic situation of both parties, especially the woman's family, but no matter how complicated or simple the wedding, it is always necessary to perform this procedure and hold this ceremony.
The Taiwanese writer Lü Heruo (1914-1951) published a folklore field report "The Position of daughter-in-law" in Folklore Taiwan, and his novel "Pomegranate" deals with the following plots of inviting marriage customs:
1. The reasons for entering and recruiting. From the man's point of view, as in the novel, Jin Sheng "lives in such poverty, if he does not enter his family, he cannot marry a wife" and "cannot marry his wife independently, he must enter the family"; as far as the woman is concerned, Jin Sheng's wife's family "'s motivation for recruiting a husband for his sister is to hope to have a labor helper". Of course, the motivation for recruiting extra money in another woman's family is mainly that there are boys born in wedlock from their mother's surname to solve the problem of "continuation" of the woman's family.
2. The cohabitation method of recruiting extramarital marriages can be permanently entered into the wife's residence and phased in the period of entering and marrying out of the husband's residence (that is, after the marriage, the contract expires regularly, and the husband returns to his home or finds another place to live with his wife and children). Jin Sheng's agreement with his wife's family belongs to the latter: "The conditions for entering the family are only said to be 8 years, after which he will unconditionally be independent."
3. Male children born in wedlock shall be subordinate to their mother's surname and from their father's surname. Male children born in marriage can be partly from the mother's surname and partly from the father's surname according to the agreement (the most important agreement is often the firstborn male child from the mother's surname). In "Pomegranate", Jinsheng's wife and family have brothers and sisters-in-law and their two children, and there is no problem of "continuation", so "it is not said that the children born belong to their families". From the mother's surname, commonly known as the "sucking pig mother tax". The Marriage and Funeral Customs of Nantou County (Taiwan) (1972) records: "At least 1 of his sons, that is, the eldest son, is still surnamed wife, and the rest of the children are surnamed Son-in-law." The wives who are recruited do not need to change their surnames, and at least their eldest sons must have the same surname as their wives, and the remaining children must have their own surnames. Such children born to excesses are commonly known as the sow tax for those with the same surname as their wives. According to Yun, the origin of the sow tax is because in ancient times, someone sent their own little sow to others for free, or borrowed a large sow to raise others, until the sow produced a piglet, he could ask the borrower who had originally stated the number of piglet heads, and withdraw the piglet as the price of the sow given to or borrowed." The claim of a sow tax is an insult to women.
4. The offering of ancestral tablets (commonly known as the mother-in-law). Professor Li Yiyuan, the most representative anthropologist in Taiwan, once introduced the arrangement rules of "foreign-surnamed mothers" that occurred due to extramarital marriage: "For example, the former daughter Chen was a husband, and gave birth to two sons, one surnamed Zeng and one surnamed Chen. Before the separation of the family, the ancestral tablets of the Zeng and Chen families are enshrined in the hall at the same time, and the Zeng tablets are on the right, indicating that they are the main ancestors, and the Chen tablets are on the left, indicating that they are foreign ancestors. But when the parents passed away, the two brothers separated, they immediately filled out a copy of the ancestral tablets and moved them out, each offering it to their own hall, the difference is only in the Zeng family tablets arranged such as the original hall position, Chen surname brothers' tablets, the position is reversed, the Chen tablet is placed on the right side of the main place, and the Zeng tablet is placed on the left side." In Pomegranate, Jin Sheng "puts his ancestral tablets into a hanging cage" and hangs them on the beam of the "room where the rice is shelled." This may be related to the fact that Jin Sheng is the eldest son or the type of marriage that he has recruited to marry out.
The plot of the above-mentioned extra marriage can also be seen in southern Fujian and other regions. Nowadays, no matter whether the society is rich, semi-rich, or married, Ajie believes that as long as they can love each other and be filial to their parents on both sides, in fact, these titles are not very important, no matter whether they follow the father's surname or the mother's surname, the bloodline still exists!