For a demographer the basic features of marriage are essentially the same in every non-polygamous society. A man and a woman form a new union in which the man has exclusive sexual rights to the woman, and, thus, are allowed to have offspring. Most authors focus on these characteristics. From this starting point they deal with variables like age at marriage, proportion married according to sex, and number of children born to the couple. This way of handling nuptiality offers the opportunity to compare marriage cross-culturally and over time. Nonetheless we have to be aware of the simplification of reality that is part of this approach. When a Nijmegen couple married at age 29 for the groom and 25 for the bride, and a couple in Lugang married respectively at ages 20 and 17, there is more to be said about the differences between the two marriages than the simple subtraction of the ages. At the demographical surface the marriages appear to be comparable events but they may well hide substantially different realities. Therefore, before applying the standard demographic measures to the populations of Lugang and Nijmegen, we will briefly look at the cultural, economic, social, and emotional meaning of marriage in both cities. This is not just an anthropological sidestep for the sake of adding folklorist color. Rather, it will prove to be essential to understand the findings in the demographic sections of this and the following chapters.

Let us consider first what marriage implied for Taiwanese couples and their families. Towards the end of the 19th century the Canadian missionary G.L. MacKay already noticed that “marriage is arranged by the parents of the contracting partners, without regard to the feelings and preferences of the parties themselves.” The rationale behind this was that marriage had nothing to do with affections but was directed only at obtaining “male posterity, who shall guard the graves of the dead and minister to the needs of the departed spirits of their ancestors. We have reasons to doubt the objectivity of the observations by a Presbyterian missionary more than a century ago. His description, however, comes very close to what 20th century social scientists have found.