Women's Roles in China: Changes Over Time 

Yin Yu Tang is a late Qing dynasty home that was relocated from China to the Peabody Essex Museum (Salem, Massachusetts) in 2003.

Suggested for grades 5 to 12

1.  How did women live in and use the rooms of the Yin Yu Tang house?

2.  Based on your research of the Yin Yu Tang house and its occupants, what do you think was expected of women during 19th century China?

3.  What evidence exists to tell us about the role 19th century Chinese women played in the public sphere? What do you know about Chinese society at this time that might account for this?

Try using this activity when teaching about...

• family values
• public and private lives of women
• the connection between geography and culture
• rural and urban China
• housing and architecture
• traditional gender roles

In the late Qing dynasty, around the year 1800, a Chinese merchant surnamed Huang built a house for his family in a small, remote village in the southeastern corner of China's Anhui province. He named the house "Yin Yu Tang." The three characters can be translated simply as Shade/Shelter, Abundance, and Hall, but the name also implies that the builder wanted to shelter his descendants for many generations. Eight generations of the Huang family lived in the house, until the mid-1990s, when the house was abandoned. The remaining members of the family sold the house to the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, and it was dismantled, shipped and rebuilt to become a permanent exhibit at the museum in 2003. 

The house follows traditional modes of Chinese architecture. It features mortise-and-tenon construction (where posts and beams are connected without nails or screws), with regional characteristics such as the stepped, exterior "horse head" walls, a "sky well" interior courtyard, and a carved brick front entrance. It also follows the principles of fengshui, which aligns structures in harmony with the environment. According to fengshui principles, a house should face south to take advantage of the sun’s warmth. However, the Yin Yu Tang house faces north because the hills and flowing water in the village blocked southern exposure. The members of the family designed and lived in the house as if it faced the auspicious south.

The Peabody Essex Museum website takes you on a virtual tour of the house with print and audio narratives, pictures, videos, and copies of correspondence sent between family members. 

Materials

• Blank sketching paper
• Colored pencils (two different colors for each student)

Procedure
1.  Ask every student to sketch the first floor plan of his/her house or apartment. The teacher may want to draw a model on the board to get students started.

2.  With one colored pencil, circle the entrance most often used by the student to enter and exit the home. With the different color pencil, circle the entrance most often used by guests to enter and exit the dwelling.  Note:  These entrances may be the same.

3.  Ask students to sketch plans for additional floors in the home, if applicable.

4.  With the same color pencil used to circle the guests' entrance, have students lightly shade the rooms most often used by guests. For example, a living room, dining room, or great room. 

5.  With the same color pencil used to circle the student's entrance, have the student lightly shade the rooms he/she considers to be private and usually not seen by guests.  For example, bedrooms.

6.  Have students put a star in the room that gets used the most.

7.  Have students share their sketches in small groups of 2-3 students. Can they identify similarities in how the students use the rooms in their homes? Are there any significant differences?

8.  Conduct a whole class discussion on how we use rooms in our homes for both private and public purposes. What rooms are most often used for guests? What rooms are most often used just for family members or for individual members of a family? Are there rooms only used by certain members of the family, and if so, which ones? What does this tell us about what we expect from each member of the family?

Note to Teacher: From this discussion, students will probably conclude that American homes do have public and private spaces. Also, rooms will usually be used by different age groups (i.e. nurseries, play rooms, master bedrooms, home offices) and maybe by different genders (i.e. kitchens and workshops). They may conclude that in American culture we may expect children to play, adults to work, women to prepare meals, and men to use tools in building and fixing objects around the house. However, these roles are not rigid as many children have chores to complete around the house and all members of the family may contribute to making meals.

9.  Inform the class that they are going to take a virtual field trip to an old Chinese house. The people who lived in this house also had public and private rooms and some rooms that were mostly used by the women in the family.

Materials

• Internet access for all students
• Yin Yu Tang scavenger hunt handout
• Blank sketching paper
• Colored pencils (two different colors for each student)

Procedure
Note to Teacher:  The best way to experience the Yin Yu Tang house is to visit it at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts. If this is not possible, the Yin Yu Tang website is easily accessible, but you will need QuickTime installed and the volume on to take advantage of some features (download QuickTime here). It is highly recommended that teachers visit the website first and become familiar with its navigation. Once at the website, go to Orientation – Room Allocation – Scene 4 and listen to the audio about how the house was constructed and the importance of its orientation, halls, and bays. This will allow the teacher to share some pertinent background information with the students about how traditional Chinese houses were built according to cultural principles. You may also want to divide the virtual exploration (see below) of the house into parts, assigning small groups of students to work on each part, then reporting back to the whole class.

1.  The teacher may want to introduce the following terms which describe women's lives in traditional China (before the fall of the Qing dynasty):  arranged marriages, bound feet, virtuous widow, Confucian relationship of husband and wife. 

2.  Have students access the Yin Yu Tang website and complete the scavenger hunt using the handout.

3.  Allow students to meet in small groups to review their findings. 

4.  Direct each group to sketch the first floor plan of the Yin Yu Tang house and use colored pencils to shade private and public rooms, circle the entrance used by family members and by guests, and star the room that was used the most.

5.  Conduct a whole class discussion on how the family used the rooms in the Yin Yu Tang house for both private and public purposes. Use the following questions as guides for discussion:
     a.  What rooms were most often used for guests? 
     b.  What rooms were most often used just for family members or for individual members of a family? 
     c.  Who lived in the house full-time? 
     d.  Where were the other members of the family? 
     e.  What does this tell us about what was expected from the men and women in the family? 
     f.   Were there rooms only used by certain members of the family, and if so, which ones? 
     g.  What does this tell us about what was expected from men and women in the family? 
     h.  Were there objects in the Yin Yu Tang house that were only used by women? 
     i.   What does this tell us about what was expected of the women who lived there?

6.  Have students create an advertisement for a room to rent in the Yin Yu Tang house. It should list which room is available and what the expectations are for the men and/or women who plan to rent the room. For example, "Room for rent on second floor of five-bay house, southern exposure. Occupants will have access to forecourt and courtyard for entertaining guests, bedroom for family only, kitchen for women only. Rent negotiable and payable upon husband's return from work in the city."

7.  Have students write a paragraph in which they address these two questions: 
     a.  How do the lives of the family members who lived in the Yin Yu Tang house confirm the elements of traditional culture?
     b.  What do students think was considered the best compliment someone could say about a woman living in traditional China?

Cara Abraham teaches world history, Asian Studies, and American government at Brookfield High School (CT). Her trip to China in 2001 with Yale University's PIER Outreach was the first of four. She has worked in collaboration with Primary Source since 2003 and has been a resource teacher on a China study tour, three summer institutes and several seminar series. With her husband, Michael, she has authored four chapters in The Enduring Legacy of Ancient China (2006) and China in the World (2009), sourcebooks published by Cheng and Tsui in collaboration with Primary Source.