Wufu Mourning Grades

The wufu is a scale, and what it measures is closeness of kin. Five grades of mourning dress, running from the coarsest cloth to the finest and from the longest term to the shortest, were assigned to every relationship a person could stand in to a dead relative. A son mourning a father wore zhancui, sackcloth so plainly made that its edges were left untrimmed, and kept the mourning for what was called three years. A man mourning a distant cousin wore sima, fine hemp, for three months. In between came three intermediate grades, each with its own cloth, its own term and its own list of relatives.

The system is not a description of feeling. It is a prescription, and the tradition was explicit that the outward form was there to give grief a shape it could be carried in and then set down. Wearing the cloth carried obligations with it: withdrawal from office, abstention from meat and wine, from music and from marriage, and in the heaviest grade a simple hut and a plain diet.

The grades also worked outward from the dead person in both directions, so that the chart was symmetrical and complete. Everyone in a Chinese descent group could find their own square on it. That is what made the wufu useful for purposes far from the funeral itself: it was the one place where the boundary of a family was written down in a way that admitted no argument, and both the state and the lineage used it as such.

The three year mourning for a parent was contested from the beginning, and the tradition preserved the objection rather than burying it. In the Analects a disciple, Zai Wo, puts it to Confucius that a year would be long enough, since in a year the crops turn and the seasons come round. Confucius asks him whether he could eat fine rice and wear brocade within the year and feel at ease. The disciple says he could. Confucius tells him to do as he pleases, and after he has gone remarks that a child does not leave its parents' arms until it is three years old, and that the three years are a return of that. The argument in the passage is not that the rule is ancient. It is that the rule is an answer to something the objector has not felt.

The practice outlasted the argument. Under the imperial bureaucracy an official whose parent died was required to resign his post and return home for the mourning period, a rule known as dingyou, and the exceptions granted to indispensable officials were controversial precisely because everyone understood what was being waived.

Two things reduced the scheme to something a household could actually do. The classical ritual compendia set out the grades in detail but assumed a world of aristocratic households. Zhu Xi's Family Rituals, compiled in the twelfth century, cut the ceremonies down to a scale a modest family could manage and became the standard manual across China, Korea and Vietnam, carrying the mourning grades with it into ordinary practice for the next seven hundred years.