Mourning in Late Imperial China: Filial Piety and the State

by Norman Kutcher

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521624398
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	08/13/1999
Series:	Cambridge Studies in Chinese History, Literature and Institutions
Pages:	226
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.87(d)

Table of Contents

List of illustrations; Acknowledgements; A note on conventions; Reigns of Ming and Qing emperors; Introduction; 1. Death and the state in imperial China: continuities; 2. The reorientation of Ming attitudes toward mourning; 3. The early Qing transformation of mourning practice; 4. The bureaucratization of the Confucian li; 5. The death of Xiaoxian and the crisis of Qianlong rule; 6. Death and Chinese society; Select bibliography; Index.

Editorial Reviews

"Noman Kutcher has written an engaging and provocative book about personal and political aspects of mouring in seventeenth and eighteenth- century China...This book should be read by all who are interestes in late imperial culture and politics." Amer His Rev

From the Publisher