A Temple with Two Gods

Abstract

This chapter shows how military households strategized within the Ming state's registration system and how their assignment to the region generated new kinds of social relations. It explains how Ming military institutions have shaped local social life over the centuries and how their legacies shape social relations even up to the present day. The chapter also discusses the variety of approaches and methods members of military households used to integrate into the existing communities around them, sometimes infiltrating and taking over existing community organizations such as temples and thereby developing and maintaining a separate communal identity within the larger society, sometimes integrating as individuals and families with that society and blending into it. It explores the families' process in moving between different regulatory systems and tried to even take over existing social organizations. A small temple in the village of Hutou provides an illustration of how these new social relations could endure.