“This thoughtful book is rich in detail (some fascinating, such as how a god became an ancestor), draws on secondary studies in English, Chinese, and Japanese, and is written in impeccable English.”Conrad Schirokauer, Columbia University, Choice March 2014 Vol. 51 No. 07"Yonghua Liu 劉永華 of Xiamen University 厦門大學 has produced an outstanding study of Confucian ritual practices and socio-cultural change in rural Fujian 福建 province. Written with the objectivity of a historian and the sensitivity of an ethnographer, Liu builds on the existing scholarship on socio-religious space[...]to reveal an accommodating relationship between state and religion in late imperial China. [...] Liu should be congratulated for publishing this excellent analysis of popular religious practices in Southeast China. The rich ethnographical data and the conceptual insights should appeal to religious specialists, historians, and anthropologists of China."Joseph Tse-Hei Lee (李榭熙), Pace University, Chinet.cz April 2014“…the book can boast such merits as clarity, painstaking elaboration of details, use of new materials and up-to-date secondary research produced by Western, Chinese and Japanese scholars to support all the arguments.” Ekaterina Zawidovskaya, Monumenta Serica 62 (2014)"Based on his careful reading of around 30 genealogies held either in the ancestral halls or private hands of Sibao residents, and ritual texts compiled by Confucian ritual specialists (lisheng), as well as account books, family division contracts and local archival materials, Yonghua Liu has successfully produced an outstanding study of cultural mediation and the mediators. […] it is an important addition to the rich literature of the Huanan school because of the author’s acuteness as a historian and his mastery of the details. […] the book contributes greatly to our understanding of how the cultural and social fabrics were woven and were constantly changing in a rural setting in late imperial China."Koh Khee Heong, National University of Singapore, Asian Studies Review, 2015, Vol. 39, No. 3, 521–540"Using a rich array of local archival materials, oral histories and participant observation, Yonghua Liu carefully analyses the historical impact and significance of a topdown movement to incorporate rituals into the daily lives of villagers that began in the late fourteenth century. [...] Yonghua Liu has given historians a fascinating glimpse of the interplay of the social, economic and cultural forces that supported the ritualization of Chinese illage life in southeast China."Evelyn S. Rawski, University of Pittsburgh, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 2014, Vol. 77, No. 2, 420-422
