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.