From Zhu Xi's Family Rituals to a Modern Revival

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.