China’s deprecating nobility spent down substance instead of accumulating it

Evidence

This anomaly, which can only occur in a bureaucratic or paper-work nobility, denotes normal development with a minus sign, so to speak. For the sense of that normal development is the gradual accumulation of transmitted values, although this may begin with an original conferral; in China, however, that substance is given all at once, as it were, and then it is gradually used up. — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 518

Categorization

• QUESTION: Simmel reports princely Chinese nobility conferring every twenty-six generations with a hedge ‘if I am rightly informed’ — worth verifying this claim’s source.