Death Ritual in Late Imperial and Modern China

James L. Watson and Evelyn S. Rawski edited this University of California Press volume, an academic collection examining Chinese funerary ritual from the late imperial period into the modern era, with contributors addressing both the underlying structural unity of Chinese death ritual and its considerable regional and historical variation. Its strength is the specific argument the volume as a whole develops, that Chinese funerary ritual maintained a recognizable orthopraxy, a shared structure of correct ritual performance, even amid real regional and dynastic variation in belief, a genuinely influential thesis in Chinese religious studies. Its limit, as with any edited collection, is that individual chapters vary in period and regional focus, so a claim about one specific region's or era's funerary practice is best checked against the specific chapter addressing it.