Mourning in Late Imperial China: Filial Piety and the State
Mourning in Late Imperial China: Filial Piety and the State By Norman Kutcher
1999 | 226 Pages | ISBN: 0521624398 | PDF | 7 MB
1999 | 226 Pages | ISBN: 0521624398 | PDF | 7 MB
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.