"Once placed side by side and installed in their bedroom (their private quarters), the couple form a unit endowed with its own economic personality and a promise of greater independence to come. It is one of the striking features of Chinese family organization that while a man has little in the way of individual property rights until he eventually takes out his share of the family property on division, when he marries he becomes part of a conjugal property-owning unit endowed with furnishings of the bedroom brought by the bride and paid for to a large extent out of the money earlier passed from the groom's family to the girl's. Within the conjugal unit the bride herself holds as her own property such personal wealth (jewelry and cash, but even sometimes right to income from land) as she has acquired on her own as a maiden or been presented with by her family and friends."

Freedman 1970, 182

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