Guan Li and Ji Li (Capping and Hairpin Ceremonies)

The classical Guan Li, described in the Yili and elaborated in later ritual manuals, is built around three successive cappings of the young man's head, each with a different hat, moving from a plain cloth cap through a leather cap associated with military service to a ceremonial cap of formal court dress. Each capping is performed by an invited elder of standing rather than by the boy's own father, and after the third the presiding elder confers a courtesy name, the zi, by which the young man will afterward be addressed by his peers rather than by the personal name given at birth. The ceremony took place in the ancestral hall, before the family's own ancestors, which tied the young man's new adult standing to his lineage rather than only to his own person.

Ji Li, the hairpin ceremony for a young woman, follows a simpler form appropriate to its more private setting: a mother or a senior woman of standing dresses the girl's hair and fixes it with a pin, marking that she has reached marriageable age and adult female status within the household. Where Guan Li publicly inducted a young man into the ceremonial and civic life of the lineage and, in principle, the state, Ji Li marked a woman's adult standing chiefly within the household and the marriage market, a difference in scale that mirrors the wider asymmetry of roles the classical texts assign to men and women.

What is known of Guan Li and Ji Li in practice, rather than in the bare prescriptions of the Yili, comes largely through the Song dynasty scholar Zhu Xi, whose family ritual manual set out a simplified, practicable version of the classical rites for ordinary literati households and became the standard reference for domestic ritual across later imperial China and, through Confucian influence, in Korea and Vietnam as well. Patricia Buckley Ebrey's history of Chinese family ritual writing traces how successive editors and commentators adapted Zhu Xi's text to their own periods, which is itself evidence that the ceremonies were living practice rather than dead letter for much of imperial history.

The rites declined sharply with the fall of the imperial examination and lineage order in the twentieth century, and for most of the century were neither performed nor widely known outside specialist scholarship. Since roughly the early 2000s, cultural and Confucian revival movements in mainland China and Taiwan, often associated with the wider Hanfu traditional-dress movement, have staged reconstructed cappings and hairpin ceremonies at schools, temples and public celebrations of traditional culture. These modern performances draw on the classical texts and on Zhu Xi's manual but are frankly reconstructions rather than an unbroken lineage of practice, and the atlas describes them as such.