The lineage hall is where Confucian ritual becomes governance, and the phenomenon is strongest in late imperial south China — Guangdong, Fujian, Jiangxi — where single-surname villages with substantial corporate estates were the norm. Seasonal offerings to the founding ancestor and to branch ancestors were the occasion; around them clustered the reading of lineage rules, the arbitration of disputes between members, the punishment of offenders by the elders, the distribution of estate income, and decisions about the school and the graves. The imperial state, which stationed one magistrate over a county of hundreds of thousands, was entirely content with this: a lineage that policed itself reduced the caseload and the tax-collection problem simultaneously. The consequence was that the practical experience of authority for most people was kinship-based and ritual in form rather than bureaucratic. Land reform in the 1950s dissolved the estates in mainland China; the halls survive as heritage sites and, in Hong Kong, Taiwan and the diaspora, in some cases as functioning institutions.