The philosopher Cheng Yi helped promote a “cult” centered on these people by writing that, in the face of poverty, “to starve to death is a very small matter.” For 10 points each:
[10h] Name these people who could live in communal “homes” in 18th-century Jiangnan. After their deaths, these people were honored with “memorial arches.”
ANSWER: chaste widows [or guǎfù; accept cult of widow chastity or zhēnjié; accept descriptions of widows who did not remarry after the death of their husbands; accept jiéfù; prompt on women, wives, or synonyms; prompt on chaste or virtuous people; reject “faithful maidens”]
[10e] Chaste widows were often symbolically given these objects. Mark C. Elliott’s books document how the widow cult spread to women in the eight groupings of Manchu households named for these objects.
ANSWER: banners [or flags; or qí; or jīngbiǎo; accept Eight Banners]
[10m] Stories of widows from the Local History of Tancheng are a source of this author’s microhistory The Death of Woman Wang. This historian wrote The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci and The Search for Modern China.
ANSWER: Jonathan D. Spence [or Jonathan Dermot Spence]
<JB, World History>