The Board of Rites and the Making of Qing China Hardcover - 2019

From the rear cover

"This is an inspired work of institutional history that is likely to alter how Chinese and foreign scholars have understood late imperial China. By way of close readings of archival Manchu sources, Keliher has produced an astonishingly well-documented study that demonstrates the distinctive administrative inventions of the Qing and elevates the Manchu legacy to its proper place as the maker of modern China as we know it."--Lionel M. Jensen, Faculty Fellow at the Liu Institute for Asia and Asian Studies, University of Notre Dame

"Keliher's remarkable monograph has much to offer early modernists working on state/empire formation, institution-building, and ceremonial and ritual. While paying full attention to the specificities and intricacies of Qing rituals, Keliher convincingly invites us to rethink the ways in which political and social power was constructed and deployed in early modern Eurasia."--Kaya Sahin, Associate Professor of History, Indiana University

"By analyzing the creation of the Qing Board of Rites during the seventeenth-century Manchu conquest, Keliher persuasively argues for the importance of ritual symbolism in the legitimation of China's last dynasty and enriches our understanding of this facet of Qing state formation."--Evelyn S. Rawski, Distinguished University Professor Emerita of History, University of Pittsburgh