Providing the best surviving evidence of the everyday thinking of the Sung upper class, Yuan Ts'ai's twelfth-century manual is the advice of a typical educated man on the concerns of managing a family, from rearing children and arranging their marriages, to avoiding social conflict, training servants, and managing property and preserving it for the next generation.

Originally published in 1984.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton...

To explore the historical connections between Confucianism and Chinese society, this book examines the social and cultural processes through which Confucian texts on family rituals were written, circulated, interpreted, and used as guides to action. Weddings, funerals, and ancestral rites were central features of Chinese culture; they gave drama to transitions in people's lives and conveyed conceptions of the hierarchy of society and the interdependency of the living and the dead. Patricia Ebrey's social history of Confucian texts shows much about how Chinese culture was created in a...

Compiled by the great Neo-Confucian philosopher Chu Hsi (1130-1200), the Family Rituals is a manual for the private performance of the standard Chinese family rituals: initiations, weddings, funerals, and sacrifices to ancestral spirits. This translation makes the work, which is the most important text of its kind in the last thousand years of Chinese history, fully accessible to scholars and students in a wide range of fields. The militantly Confucian Family Rituals was designed to combat the practices of Buddhist and other non-Confucian rites, and it was quickly recognized...