Between Home And Country:Village Rites And Village Governance In The Middle Ming Dynasty

Taiquan Village Rites(??????)was written in the tenth year of Jiajing(1531)by Huang Zuo,a scholar-official of Guangdong in the Ming dynasty.Most of the contents of this book are not original by Huang Zuo,but is a fusion of predecessors' etiquette,township convention regulations,official announcements,national laws,which is quite practical.Taiquan Village Rites has been published and practiced several times,but unfortunately it failed to produce the desired effect.Although Taiquan Village Rites takes the name of rites,it essentially focuses on the rural governance.In his book,Huang Zuo constructs a comprehensive rural governance system with etiquette as the program and governance as the main body.The system has two characteristics: the first is that there are four etiquettes and five organizations in the system,and the etiquette and the organization are interlinked to complement each other.The second is to use the "teacher" as an intermediary to balance the power between the country and the township organizations.The formation of Taiquan Village Rites is related to the development of rural etiquette and governance during the Ming Dynasty.After the Tang and Song Dynasties,the process of etiquette going to the countryside gradually began,and etiquette became a new tool for educating and governing the rural people.In the Ming dynasty,the government inherited this tradition,and formulated the etiquette for the common people and promulgate to the whole country,which further extended the etiquette to the countryside.