The zongzu is the corporate patrilineal descent group and it is the unit through which most people historically experienced Confucianism. It comprises all male descendants of an apical ancestor, together with their wives, and it typically holds an ancestral hall containing the tablets, a printed genealogy, and corporate land whose income funds its activities. Its powers were substantial: it maintained a school, arbitrated disputes among members, punished offenders under its own written rules — including expulsion, which was socially catastrophic — arranged relief for poor members, and negotiated with the state on the group's behalf. Membership is by birth in the male line; a woman transferred at marriage from her natal lineage's ancestors to her husband's, which is the structural fact underlying much else about her position. Lineage organisation was strongest in south China and in Korea and persisted latest there; land reform in the People's Republic in the 1950s removed the economic base, and the halls that survive on the mainland are mostly heritage buildings, though functioning lineages remain in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Fujian and the diaspora.