The Statute Regarding the Remarriage of Women in The Qin Bamboo Slips in the Collection of Yuelu Academy (Vol. 5) and the Scandal of Lao’ai

Abstract

Slips 001-008 in The Qin Bamboo Slips in the Collection of Yuelu Academy (Vol. 5) contain a legal statute issued on the wuyin day of the twelfth month of the twenty-sixth year of the First Emperor of Qin. It is related to re-establishing a family by means of a woman’s remarriage. The content includes the following: it was forbidden to call the husband in a remarriage as jiafu “substitute father.” It was forbidden for children to call each other as brothers and sisters if they were not fathered by the same man. A widow with children was not allowed to transfer the property of her deceased husband to her maternal family or to the family she remarried into. It was forbidden to force a widow to remarry. The issuance of the wuyin statute was directly associated with the scandal of Lao’ai 嫪毐. Lao’ai had had an affair with the mother of the First Emperor of Qin, fathering two sons with her, and claiming himself as the substitute father of the First Emperor. The Stele of Mount Tai and the Stele of Mount Kuaiji praised the First Emperor for “defending and demarcating the boundary of the inner and the outer, forbidding licentious behavior, so that both men and women are pure and honest” 防隔内外，禁止淫泆，男女絜誠. The First Emperor also named the widow Qing 清 of the Ba 巴 region as a chaste woman and built the Terrace of the Woman Huai Qing 女懷清臺. Those events serve to confirm the relevance between the wuyin statute and the scandal of Lao’ai. Because the term “substitute father” had a notorious reputation, the Han people replaced it with “stepfather” (jifu 繼父) when calling the husband of a remarried mother.