Abstract:  As a term for charity famine relief   “yizhen”was coined by the sixteenth century at the latest.Hundreds of years later ，both the dissemination of the term and the practices related to it changed dramatically.  Originally，“yizhen”was regarded as a respectable name for the act of donating to relief.  Until the first half of nineteenth century，the term indicated a kind of famine relief by local civil society ,and its reputation spread widely.  From the end of the 1870’s, “yizhen”became the proper name for a new kind of civil relief that was renown throughout China.  These developments reflected both inheritance and transcendence of the term and the practice in a “metabolic”process.  Fully exploring this process in combination with the perspectives of social history and cultural history , the author argues , will help us to find another thread in the changing course of civil relief in modern China.