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. | Mourning In Late Imperial China by Norman Kutcher, Hardcover | Indigo Chapters