Tongyangxi
Tongyangxi (traditional Chinese: 童養媳; simplified Chinese: 童养媳; pinyin: tóngyǎngxí), also known as Shim-pua marriage in Hokkien (Chinese: 媳婦仔; Pe̍h-ōe-jī: sin-pū-á or sim-pū-á; and in phonetic Hokkien transcription using Chinese characters: 新婦仔), was a tradition of arranged marriage dating back to pre-modern China, in which a family would adopt a pre-adolescent daughter as a future bride for one of their pre-adolescent (usually infant) sons, and the children would be raised together. A direct translation of the Hokkien word "sim-pu-a" is "little daughter-in-law", in which the characters "sim-pu" (traditional Chinese: 媳婦; simplified Chinese: 媳妇; pinyin: xífù) mean daughter-in-law and the particle character "a" (Chinese: 阿; pinyin: ā or Chinese: 仔; pinyin: zǐ; Pe̍h-ōe-jī: á) indicates a diminutive.