原文：
A third kind of expert brought in at north China funerals in addition to the diviners and geomancers, the monks and priests, was of a rather different type: invited, not hired, this man's expertise was his classical education. Funeral rituals were, after all, about the living as well as the dead. Funerals were intended to give formal expression not only to the feelings of grief and loss that a death generated but also to the ensuing rearrangement of rela-tionships. We can see these concerns reflected in many strands of the rites: the ritualized wailing and stylized behavior expected of mourners; the elaborate system of mourning clothing that paralleled degrees of kinship; the fixed methods for notifying the community of the death; the rituals for presenting and receiving condolences; the offerings to the deceased; and the procedure for creating an ancestral tablet. Each had its fixed form and prescribed actions but was not within the purview of the professionals so far discussed.
It is with these aspects of the funeral that classical Confucianism had, in fact, long been explicitly concerned. Funerals were the quintessential expressions of hsiao, ''filial piety," "reverence toward parents," a value that by late imperial times was imbedded at the core of the orthodoxy accepted by most Chinese. Many of these rituals had names of considerable longevity, were based on ancient precedents quite complicated in their most sophisticated forms, and had been perpetuated by the classically educated elite for many centuries. These rites reflected a deep concern with the proper handling of familial and social relations, and with establishing and maintaining unbroken but hierarchical connections among generations. living and dead in the patriline. Because many strands of the funeral rituals drew on this classical Confucian orthodoxy, it is not surprising that people turned to the texts and experts of this tradition for correct explication and procedure.
The ultimate authority for funeral rituals was the Confucian Classics. Confucius himself had established the importance of ritual in general and funerals in particular. The Li chi (Treatises on ceremonial usages), I li (Rites and ceremonial usages), and Hsiao ching (Classic of filial piety) were somewhat later works that had become repositories of model ritual procedures. For centuries, scholars had studied these texts in order to understand and emulate these classical models. Fine editions of these works were available to the elite in Ch'ing times (and more widely in the twentieth century), but their difficulty as texts restricted their readership to the philologically trained. Ritual compendia were also officially printed by the Ch'ing court as guides to imperial ritual, and as Evelyn Rawski shows in chapter 10, at imperial funerals the president of the Board of Rites served as master of ceremonies, and Hanlin scholars, as consultants. Thus scholar-officials, with their access to the classical past, performed the most authentic and elaborate of these rites.
For the person of more ordinary education there was, fortunately, a more accessible reference work, the Chia li (Rituals for family life) attributed to the great Sung philosopher Chu Hsi. Although surviving editions of this work seem rather scholarly, the book appears to have circulated fairly widely. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century local histories refer frequently to it, noting the reliance placed on it by educated people.
A great many other ritual manuals, many of them illustrated, borrowed the prestige of Chu Hsi's name and the "Rituals for Family Life" title. This more popular Chia li genre included simple drawings of mourning clothing and ritual paraphernalia, diagrams of positions and movements, and the texts of many of the written forms necessary for high-status funerals (testimonial banners, announcements, invocations, epitaphs, etc.).45 Ch'ing literati made concerted efforts to disseminate these works in order to check "Buddhist" influence and rectify what they perceived as vulgar popular customs. The shorter Classic of Filial Piety was sometimes distributed at funerals,46 and it may have been even more widely available. It provided formulaic descriptions of the "filial son lost in grief,'' which may have inspired behavior (and were sometimes substituted for observation in gazetteer accounts). Although a detailed study of the texts and illustrations of these ritual books is clearly necessary before we can ascertain how much consistency there was between editions for different kinds of reading audiences, it seems fairly clear that books of this sort were basic reference manuals for the elite and were promoted as such.
Equally significant, it was not just the most highly educated who were called upon to dictate portions of the funeral ritual. It appears to have been widely accepted that for matters relating to these aspects of ritual, even a smattering of a classical education produced a specialist. Justus Doolittle (drawing on experiences in Foochow) said of the educated men who made money serving as "professors of ceremony" for the "common people" during funerals: "They . . . are necessarily literary men, of respectable connections, of polite demeanor, able to assume, when occasion demands, a grave and dignified appearance; self-possessed and authoritative, else they could not discharge to the satisfaction of their patrons the function of their calling."47 During the Ch'ing, the academy and examination system drew in the wealthy from all over the empire and trained them in a classical education and a refined style of behavior. Though many of these men never had careers beyond their native place, they still felt a part of this national elite. Procedures laid out in texts such as the "Rituals for Family Life" provided these men with a source of consistency and continuity. Reliance on this kind of text assured the elite a near monopoly on what, by their own definition (and apparently shared widely by others) was the most high-status, refined, and elegant funeral. These experts disdained other ritual specialists, prided themselves on their amateur status, and were never hired for money.
The prestige of these "Confucian" aspects of funeral ritual made them attractive even to the uneducated. Ordinary people could, of course, simply rely on the orally transmitted expertise of members of the family and community, for in their simplest form the rituals mentioned here (the kowtow, procedures for making offerings, receiving guests, etc.) were commonly used in daily life, and basic "Confucian" ideas about family and hierarchy had long since become part of popular culture. The partially literate could turn also to the sections on funeral rituals contained in popular almanacs, books that often defined the grades of mourning, described mourning attire and the ritual itself, and provided simple texts for the written parts of the ceremony. Such almanacs were said to be widely available in the twentieth century and may have been so earlier.
Nevertheless, the high status associated with elaborate rites and their written components enhanced the desirability of guidance from a member of the elite. To obtain these services, people were encouraged to establish patronage relations with prominent individuals in their communities. Respected and experienced friends of the family were asked to serve as masters of ceremony during the funeral. Someone else was invited to the ceremony of making offerings to the spirit of the soil at graveside and thanked later with a feast. The prestigious ritual of filling in the ancestral tablet called for, ideally, the brief participation of someone of the scholar class. Conveyed to the funeral in a hired sedan chair and welcomed with obsequious fanfare by the host family, this "inscriber of the tablet" thus established his superior position and enhanced the prestige of the rites.
The imperial educational system had provided a nationwide network of "masters of ceremonies" with ritual experience and expertise and access to classical texts, to maintain consistency. Men trained in the classical style of behavior represented the forces of uniformity for this part of the ritual. Among the elite, the formalities orchestrating social and familial relations at
funerals were thus relatively standardized nationwide during the imperial period, but became progressively variant as one moved down the social scale.
