Death Rituals and Politics in Northern Song China Available to Purchase

Mihwa Choi's Death Rituals and Politics in Northern Song China addresses a lacuna in the field. While historians have long acknowledged the central importance of the rituals of mourning and burial in Chinese political culture and elite identity, the subject has not received its share of attention. Recent years have seen the publication of works that have examined the classical rites of mourning in different periods of premodern Chinese history. Norman Kutcher published Mourning in Late Imperial China in 1999, a work that covered the Qing dynasty (1644–1911).¹ The author of this review published The Politics of Mourning in Early China in 2007, which explored mourning and commemorative practice in the Han dynasty (206 bce–220 ce).² Choi, in contrast, investigates the connections between state ideology and classical rites of mourning and burial during the long medieval period. She focuses on the Northern Song dynasty (960–1127) and,...