The yizhuang, charitable estate, is the financial mechanism that made Confucian lineages durable, and Fan Zhongyan's foundation of 1050 in Suzhou is the model case: he bought roughly a thousand mu of land, gave it to his lineage in perpetuity, and specified that the rents fund grain allowances, clothing, marriage and funeral expenses for members, and support for boys studying for the examinations. The Fan estate operated, with interruptions and reconstitutions, for some eight hundred years. The pattern spread widely in the Song and after: a member who succeeded in the examinations and accumulated official wealth converted it into inalienable corporate land, which then produced the conditions for the next generation to succeed. This is the concrete answer to how an in-principle open meritocracy produced such persistent family advantage — the examination was open, the fifteen years of tutoring required to pass it were not, and lineages built institutions specifically to fund them. It is also a genuine welfare mechanism that kept poor relatives fed, and both descriptions are true simultaneously.