起点
The beginning
Qian Liu (钱镠) was born in 852, into poverty, in 临安 — today's Hangzhou. No title, no land, no name worth passing on. Through courage and discipline in a violent age, he rose to found 吴越国 (907–978). History would remember him as 武肃王 — the Martial and Solemn King.
But he had watched great houses rise on wealth and collapse within a generation, undone by pride and comfort. He understood a hard truth: 成家容易，传家难 — building a house is easy; passing it on is hard. A kingdom could be won in a lifetime. A family worth keeping had to be built to last far longer.
立家训
The decision
So Qian Liu did something rare for a king. Rather than only dividing land and gold, he wrote his descendants a set of teachings — the 《武肃王八训》 (Eight Instructions) and, near his death, his 遗训 (Final Instructions). Over the centuries his descendants copied, expanded, and consolidated these teachings into what is now known as the 《钱氏家训》 — the Qian Family Precepts.
It is not an inventory of what he owned. It is a description of who the family should be — built on the Confucian ideal of 修身、齐家、治国、平天下 (cultivate yourself, order your family, serve your state, bring peace to the world), and divided into four:
个人 · 家庭 · 社会 · 国家
the self · the family · society · the nation
Two generations later, in 978, his grandson 钱俶 faced a choice: fight the rising Song empire and turn Jiangnan into a battlefield, or hand over the kingdom peacefully. He surrendered it — 纳土归宋 — with the treasury intact and not a single city burned. The dynasty ended. The people, and the family, were spared.
The kingdom lasted seventy-one years. What Qian Liu had written down would last far longer.
千年不衰
Why the family did not fade
A thousand years on, the 《钱氏家训》 is still read aloud when the Qian descendants gather. In 2021 it was inscribed on China's national list of intangible cultural heritage — the first family-precept text to enter it.
Historians credit the family's endurance to three braided causes: the precepts (家训) as a stable moral compass across generations; a fierce culture of scholarship (崇文重教) sustained for centuries by clan-funded schools — the 钱氏义庄 — that paid for poor kin's education; and the founding sacrifice of 纳土归宋, which kept the family's standing intact under Song patronage, just as Jiangnan was becoming the wealthiest and most literate region in China. The Qians rode that wave for a thousand years.
From that current came scholars in nearly every dynasty: 钱惟演 (Song statesman and poet), 钱谦益 (late-Ming literary giant), 钱大昕 (Qing evidential-scholarship master), and in the 20th century the historian 钱穆, whose 《国史大纲》 shaped how generations of Chinese would read their own past.
In modern times the family has produced more than a hundred academicians across some fifty countries. Chinese science remembers 三钱 — the Three Qians: 钱学森, father of China's missile and space programme; 钱三强, a founding figure of China's nuclear programme (两弹一星); and 钱伟长, a pioneer of applied mechanics. Alongside them: 钱钟书, author of 《围城》 and 《管锥编》; 钱其琛, Vice Premier and foreign minister; 钱煦, bioengineer and recipient of the US National Medal of Science; and 钱永健 (Roger Tsien), 2008 Nobel laureate in Chemistry. From the single county of Wuxi, one branch alone produced ten academicians.
The kingdom lasted decades. The family has lasted more than thirty generations. The difference was a few hundred characters, written down — and a culture built around living up to them.
From the 《钱氏家训》 — in their own words
家训四则
What they passed on
个人 · On the self
心术不可得罪于天地，言行皆当无愧于圣贤。
Let your conscience never wrong heaven and earth; let your words and deeds never shame the wise.
家庭 · On the family
子孙虽愚，诗书须读；忠厚传家，乃能长久。
However humble your children, they must be taught; a family that passes down honesty and depth is the one that lasts.
社会 · On society
救灾周急，排难解纷；私见尽要铲除，公益概行提倡。
Relieve the suffering, settle the quarrels of others; put away private bias, and hold up the common good.
国家 · On the nation
利在一身勿谋也，利在天下者必谋之；利在一时固谋也，利在万世者更谋之。
Do not scheme for what benefits only yourself; strive for what benefits all. What serves one moment is worth pursuing; what serves ten thousand generations, far more so.
Premier 温家宝 (Wen Jiabao) quoted this line publicly in 2006, and again at Cambridge in 2009.
这些不是关于钱财的规矩。
These were never rules about money. They were a statement of what the family stood for — values each generation chose to uphold.
这，就是家风。
This is 家风: the values and character a family carries forward.
从你开始 · The lesson for your family
钱镠起于寒微，凭的只是一个决定。
Qian Liu began with nothing but a decision.
He wasn't a king when it mattered most. He was a poor man who decided, early, what his family would stand for — and wrote it down before he had anything else to give. 富不过三代, the saying goes — wealth rarely lasts three generations. His family answered it, not with more wealth, but with 家风.
You are closer to that beginning than to any dynasty. You have a family you love, something you've built or are building, and the same choice he faced: 你要留给后人的，除了财富，还有什么？ Beyond what you own — what will you pass on?
Every hundred-year family began with one person who decided what mattered. Yours can begin with you.
Writing your family's values down — 立下你自己的家训 — and building the plan to carry them, is the work we do. It begins with a single guide, or a single conversation.