A summary of Jin Wenxue 金文学, "A sad memorial to a fanatically virtuous woman" (悲しき烈女碑) in Kōshoku to Chūgoku bunka: Chūgoku no rekishi wa yoru ni tsukurareta 好色と中国文化：中国の歴史は夜に作られた  [Kawaguchi-shi, Japan: Nihon kyōhōsha, 2004], pp. 50-55.)

When Jin was a boy (ca. 1960s-70s), there was a woman who died in his village at the age of 90. She became a widow at age 20, and for the next 70 years lived a life of lofty chastity. Jin’s grandmother was married at 16, widowed at 36, and spent the rest of her 80+ year life maintaining chastity. In short, “Among the traditional virtues that women must uphold, it was chastity that Confucianism held up as the loftiest item.”

The roots of this concern with chastity are deep in Chinese history. The first emperor of the Qin dynasty is famous for roaming around the empire and carving inscriptions in boulders and other such places. Some of these inscriptions addressed the matter of female chastity. During the Song dynasty, this obsession with chastity began to spread from the elite classes to ordinary people.

The Ming-era text Yuyuan zaji 寓園雑記 ("garden miscellany"), for example, contains the tale of a man named Wang in whose house resided 6 chaste women, all of whom became widows around age 20 and who maintained chastity thereafter. They never talked with or otherwise interacted with any unrelated man and never went out of the house. Also, there was the Ming-era exam-passer Zhang who died at an old age, leaving behind two young concubines. They did not remarry and shut themselves up in a room in the house. They never left the room, which had a hole in one wall just large enough to pass food through. Even today in the Chinese countryside one can see monuments to chaste widows.

Here we have situation of apparent opposites being two side of the same coin. On the one hand, Chinese culture has long upheld and celebrated chastity, even to bizarre extremes. On the other hand, we must not forget that this outward form of chastity was a veil masking remarriage and illicit affairs. In Chinese culture, both the high moral ideals and the very real possibility of its transgression were ever present. In the Qing era, Qian Yonghui 錢泳會 pointed out that before the Song dynasty it was perfectly normal and obvious for women to remarry, but after the Song dynasty it was considered shameful. The conclusion of the majority of scholars working in this area is that prior to the Song dynasty it was common for women to remarry after the death of a husband. Divorce and remarriage was also a common topic of discussion. The practice was even common among elites, including emperors and palace ladies in Han and Tang times. Hypocritically, many of the wives and relatives of prominent Song-dynasty cultural figures remarried. So while these same kinds of people were telling everyone else not to remarry, these elites did not always live up to their own ideals.

The Qing dynasty was the peak of severe chastity, with chaste widow memorials spreading all over the country. But even then, among the common people, many continued to choose practicality over ideals when push came to shove. A similar situation prevailed in Yi-dynasty Korea [1392-1910], and Korea still has monuments to chaste women.

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