A Seven-Metre Family Line in Yitong

A published account of Yitong Manchu Museum describes objects gathered from local households, including a lineage cord and a large family genealogy. The two records preserve family history in different forms: the cord is attributed to a Na-surname household, while the 1895 genealogy is a separate family record. The cord’s attached pieces make descent tangible; the genealogy lays generations on a sheet written in Manchu and Chinese. Each brings a distinct family record into the museum through materials that could be handled, kept and passed on.

A 2022 interview with family-history scholar He Xiaofang explains that Manchu genealogy could take a physical form called a “suosuo” or “children’s cord,” alongside later written family lists and books. That wider context helps situate the Yitong objects without making one family’s practices stand for every household. The museum account identifies the cord with a Na-surname family and the genealogy as a separate family record.

The Yitong museum description calls the Na family’s object a seven-metre “children’s cord.” Its main line was twisted from threads of five colours. More than seventy coloured cloth strips and pig and sheep knucklebones were attached along its length; the account says the strips represented girls and the knucklebones boys. The family described the cord as carrying an eighteen-generation line.

The cord turns kinship into a material sequence. Each attached piece changes the line, making the record visible through its length, texture and weight. He Xiaofang’s account of Manchu genealogy describes cords as an older physical form of family record, with knucklebones placed between generations and later written genealogies developing alongside them. The Yitong cord therefore belongs both to one family’s history and to a broader practice in which thread and attached objects could preserve descent.

The same Yitong museum account describes a separate 1895 genealogy, a distinct family record. Dated 1895, it measures 164 by 108 centimetres and is written in Manchu and Chinese. It was mounted from three layers of paper and records nine generations. Its scale makes it a substantial family document, while its bilingual writing joins two scripts on one surface. The account links the genealogy to a different lineage, not to the Na-surname household associated with the cord.

Set beside the seven-metre cord, the sheet offers another way to make descent visible. The cord gathers family markers along a woven line; the genealogy places names and generations in writing. He Xiaofang’s account describes the development of written lists and family books alongside cord records. The two Yitong objects let readers see this change in form without imagining that the older material practice simply disappeared: thread and paper could carry related kinds of family memory.

A published account of Yitong’s cultural history traces the museum’s collection work to an office established in 1986 to gather and organize Manchu cultural objects. In 1987, a touring exhibition of 1,800 objects went to Beijing; the Yitong Manchu folk museum was established that June. The same account describes the Na-family cord and the separate 1895 genealogy among objects collected and preserved by the museum.

That chronology gives the records a public setting without turning them into a general checklist of Manchu life. The cord was a household object that marked descent through attached pieces; the genealogy was a family record set down in two scripts. A 2022 interview with genealogy scholar He Xiaofang describes physical cords and written lists or books as related forms that could coexist. In Yitong, the county collection preserved examples of both, each with its own material scale and family setting.