As a rule we find in Weihaiwei either that each village is exclusively inhabited by the people of one name, who are all inter-related and address each other as brothers and uncles and nephews, or that one "surname" is in numbers, wealth and social influence greatly predominant over the others. Title-deeds and tombstones testify to the antiquity of many of the existing Weihaiwei families; many of the peasant-proprietors who share the land among them to-day are the direct or collateral descendants of the people who tilled the same fields in the days of the Sung, Yüan and Ming dynasties. There are considerable numbers, however, whose ancestors were immigrants from other parts of China; some of these were military colonists, some were transferred by Government from other provinces as a result of political or social troubles connected with rebellions or famines. There are many well-known residents who themselves have never travelled beyond the boundaries of the Wên-têng and Jung-ch'êng districts, but who are well aware, from their carefully-preserved pedigree-scrolls, that their ancestors were brought hither by Government hundreds of years ago from provinces as far distant as Yünnan. The Roman Emperors, we know, frequently adopted a similar method of dealing with certain political exigencies, for they transferred whole bodies of people from one province of the Empire to another; but the fate of the transferred Chinese was better than that of many of the Roman provincials, for they retained their independence and did not become the serfs of overlords. A typical village of Weihaiwei may be defined as consisting of a group of families all bearing the same surname and all tracing their descent from a single ancestor or a single ancestral stock, each family in the group constituting a semi-independent unit, owning its own lands, possessing certain rights over a common tract of pasture-land and sharing in the rights and responsibilities connected with the upkeep of the Ancestral Temple[75] and its tablets,[76] the family burial-ground,[77] and any land or property that may have been specially set apart to provide for the expenses of religious ceremonies and sacrifices.[78] The more mixed a village becomes, that is, the greater the number of "surnames" that it contains, the more widely does it depart from the uniformity implied by this description. There may, for example, be several ancestral temples, several burial-grounds, many different patches of sacrificial land; though if the immigrants came from a village in the vicinity, and have left there the main body of their clan, it sometimes happens that they will still associate themselves with the parent-village rather than with that in which they live, and will therefore refrain from establishing new centres of ancestral worship.