The ancestral hall took its lasting form from a Neo-Confucian argument about who was entitled to venerate their ancestors formally at all. The philosopher Zhu Xi, writing in the twelfth century, set out family ritual guidelines that assumed a household could maintain a shrine to recent forebears, but for a long period afterward, larger, multi generation halls collecting an entire lineage's tablets under one roof remained a privilege effectively restricted to noble and official families. That restriction loosened significantly during the Ming and Qing dynasties, when a wider range of commoner lineages gained the practical and, eventually, legal standing to build halls of their own, and the citang spread rapidly across the lineage dense regions of southern China, particularly Fujian and Guangdong, where a single hall could represent a descent group thousands of members strong.
The hall became far more than a place to keep spirit tablets in this period: lineages used citang income, generated from land held collectively as ancestral trust property, to fund the hall's upkeep, support poorer members, and pay for the education of promising sons, so that a building built to honour the dead also functioned as the lineage's bank, school fund and local government all at once.