To win the approval of China's native elites, Qing China's new Manchu leaders developed an ambitious plan to return Confucianism to civil society by observing laborious and time-consuming mourning rituals, the touchstones of a well-ordered Confucian society. The first to do so in any language, Norman Kutcher's study of mourning looks beneath the rhetoric to demonstrate how the state—unwilling to make the sacrifices that a genuine commitment to proper mourning demanded—quietly but forcefully undermined, not reinvigorated, the Confucian mourning system.