Tongyangxi

Tongyangxi (traditional Chinese: 童養媳; simplified Chinese: 童养媳; pinyin: tóngyǎngxí), also known as Shim-pua marriage in Hokkien (Chinese: 媳婦仔; Pe̍h-ōe-jī: sin-pū-á or sim-pū-á; and also written as 新婦仔), was a tradition of arranged marriage dating back to pre-modern China, in which a family would adopt a pre-adolescent daughter as a future bride for one of their pre-adolescent (usually infant) sons, and the children would be raised together. A direct translation of the Hokkien word "sim-pu-a" is "little daughter-in-law", in which the characters "sim-pu" (traditional Chinese: 媳婦; simplified Chinese: 媳妇; pinyin: xífù) mean daughter-in-law and the particle character "a" (阿; ā or 仔; zǐ; á) indicates a diminutive. The similarly used Mandarin Chinese term "tongyangxi" (童養媳; 童养媳) means literally "child (童) raised (養) daughter-in-law (媳)" and is the term typically used as translation for the English term "child bride". These child marriages, which guaranteed a wife for a poor son, were more prevalent among the impoverished. So long as they were spared from having to support a daughter who would eventually marry and leave the family, the families who gave up their daughters also gained from this. Since these unions were rarely successful, China outlawed them in 1949. Compulsory education in Taiwan allowed these girls to leave their homes and gain exposure to the outside world, which frequently resulted in their adoption from their adoptive families. The practice ended there by the 1970s.