Mourning in Late Imperial China

Download or read book Mourning in Late Imperial China written by Norman Kutcher and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2006-11-02 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.