In The Board of Rites and the Making of Qing China Macabe Keliher posits that “different early modern states faced common political problems” of transforming power into legitimate authority and that such fundamentally political issues “lay at the heart of state-making efforts in the early modern world” (202–203). In this respect, the historical dynamics of early Qing state-formation may be construed as part of a broader historical “convergence” wherein early modern state-makers and empire-builders across Eurasia “developed new disciplinary techniques to invest political actors with a sense of common purpose to conquer and rule” (202), albeit always within their own historically contingent and culturally specific circumstances.

It is within this comparative framework that Keliher presents the first Qing emperor Hong Taiji's 1631 establishment of the Six Boards, including the Board of Rites, not as evidence of “sinicization,” but rather as an instance of appropriation, “informed by Ming precedent, yet reconstituted for the Qing context” (119). By “the Qing context” he means the 1630s and early 1640s, when the most pressing political problem for Hong Taiji was how to both master and mitigate the centrifugal dynamics of princely rivalry. In order to harness the energies and ambitions of his three designated co-rulers, who were autonomous banner lords in their own right, Hong Taiji and his adherents, including Chinese advisors in the newly established Board of Rites, turned their attention to matters of li. As a general concept, li was understood as “a system of political organization based on a rigid hierarchy, manifest in ritual and ceremony, and mediated through sumptuary and behavioral practices” (43). And Keliher's argument that “the specific practices of li must be separated analytically from the general concept” (14) undergirds a broader point: although a hoary yet abstract notion of li may have been “carried over from antiquity,” it did not so much determine as “inspire” the institutional arrangements and symbolic practices that gave form and substance to the nascent Qing political order (43). As both a general concept and a set of particular “rituals, ceremonies, and rites, as well as behavioral practices, administrative norms, and sumptuary” (9), li “became increasingly important in shaping the outcome of political struggles and guiding the actions and choices of political actors” (xiii) from the 1630s through the 1650s. It is this story of how “seemingly straightforward symbolic acts … worked to both shape political order and inform the choices of organizational actors in the making of Qing China” (9) that Keliher seeks to elucidate in this engaging and intellectually expansive study of institutional history and political culture.

Chapter 1 introduces the book's main themes and methodological premises. Chapter 2 surveys early Jurchen socio-political organization and then succinctly delineates the lines of tension that emerged among Hong Taiji and his paternal kinsmen following Nurhaci's death in 1626. This overview provides a necessary frame of reference for Part Two (Chapters 3–5), which delves into the symbolic and ritual “formation” of the Qing political order during the 1630s and 1640s. This process of “formation,” as detailed in Chapter 3, “began with the 1632 New Year's Day ceremony, which arranged the ascendancy of Hong Taiji” over his two older brothers and a cousin (44). By orchestrating this ritual observance, officials from the Board of Rites, which had been established only five months earlier, sought to place these powerful imperial relatives and other political actors in ceremonially subordinate positions according to imperial definitions of merit, instead of already operative standards of wealth or seniority (50). Keliher characterizes this rite as an effort to publicly humiliate powerful personages at court (51), thus underscoring the “symbolic violence” inherent in the process of early Qing state-formation.

Chapter 4 examines how officials at the Board of Rites continued to subvert conceptions of joint rule bequeathed by Nurhaci by ritually (re)constituting authority in “emperorship” which was increasingly “performed through li” (66). This entailed the formalization of protocols for annual “Grand Ceremonies” and thrice-monthly “court ceremonies” as well as for sacrificial activities at imperial tombs, ancestral temples, and suburban altars of state. Not coincidentally, officials at the Board of Rites devised rules and regulations for many of these ritual practices in conjunction with Hong Taiji's official proclamation of the Manchu polity and of Qing rule in late 1636.

Keliher moves from imperial ceremonies to more quotidian forms of ritual regulation in Chapter 5, arguing that although Hong Taiji's initial call to regulate clothing, interpersonal greetings, personal entourages, and ceremonial positioning was primarily intended to control his imperial relatives, it also allowed officials at the Board of Rites to articulate a more comprehensive and unified vision of administrative and political order, “where relatives and nonrelatives served the state side-by-side as part of the same political system, subject to the same regulations, and punished by the same laws” (107).

Throughout Part Two, Keliher marshals an impressive array of evidence meticulously gleaned from Chinese and Manchu archival and manuscript sources and offers precious glimpses of active deliberation and debate among early Qing state-builders as well as of moments when things did not go exactly to plan. Such unvarnished details provide a welcome complement to more anodyne accounts of ritual practice found in normative sources (i.e., official histories and collected statutes) and are central to the author's arguments regarding the “internalization” and enforcement of ritual protocols by political actors themselves.

Part Three (Chapters 6–8) bring us into the Shunzhi period when the “institutionalization of Qing state-making” commenced. Chapter 6 is in many respects the book's greatest contribution. Here the author highlights a qualitative difference between the succession crises precipitated by the deaths of Nurhaci and Hong Taiji in 1626 and 1643 respectively. As he notes, “the contest of succession” in 1643 “was not over the structural arrangements of power” (130), nor “over charismatic access to political resources” (132) as it had been in 1626. Instead the primary contenders in 1643 “jockey[ed] for position and interests within the emergent framework” of dynastic rule (130) by advancing “arguments for succession” that “employed terms … of discourse established by Hong Taiji surrounding the imperial family and its positions” (134). Building upon recent Chinese and Japanese scholarship, Keliher deftly outlines the complicated factional alignments and intricate negotiations that allowed for the succession of Hong Taiji's ninth son as the Shunzhi emperor in 1644. Although this political settlement reflected a general “adherence to the organizational form of the imperial family laid down by Hong Taiji” (133) and allowed the Qing conquest to proceed apace, banner factionalism intensified during the Shunzhi emperor's minority and only abated following the co-regent Dorgon's death in 1650. The consequent coalescence of an imperial faction around the young Shunzhi emperor set the stage for a coterie of officials from the Plain Blue Banner, who also held positions in the Board of Rites, to place the imperial relatives under the authority of an independent bureau known as the Imperial Clan Court which was established in 1652. This transformation of the imperial relatives—from an independent group of potential challengers to imperial authority during the preconquest period, into a still exalted but subordinated service nobility in the 1650s—was a distinctive yet historically contingent aspect of early Qing state-formation that had long-lasting consequences down to the nineteenth century (144 and 199–200).

Chapter 7 explores attempts to reform court attire which began in the early 1650s and were directly related to the ongoing advance of Qing forces southward. Here officials at the Board of Rites sought to formalize an appropriate style of imperial dress that might “signify the authority of the Manchu ruler to both the Manchu military and Chinese literati” (161). In the end, this was a long and drawn-out process that was only fully realized much later, when more positive and comprehensive regulations on court costumes were issued first in 1687 and then in 1759.

Chapter 8 focuses on a parallel process of increasingly comprehensive codification that the author dubs “the rearticulation of li into law” (171) as exemplified by the compilation of the Qing dynasty's first administrative code. For Keliher, the appearance of the Da Qing huidian (a.k.a. the Kangxi huidian) in 1690 represents “the culmination of early Qing state-making” (198). This overarching structure of closed emplotment seems to both rest upon and necessitate a “formalist” or “internal” reading in which Keliher argues that the “layers of structure and content” found in the Kangxi huidian “reflected the relation between the concept of li, handed down from antiquity, and the articulated practices of li, as expressed in the various regulations” and thereby “expressed the political realities of the seventeenth-century Manchu state” (192). While this analysis offers an intriguing framework for linking concept and practice, it may remain more schematic than fully historicized without more detailed grounding in the specific circumstances of the 1680s.

This issue of historical contextualization may also suggest some potential avenues for future research. For example, what role, if any, did officials at the Board of Rites play in the Kangxi emperor's succession, minority, and gradual assumption of personal power? How, if at all, did the establishment of certain inner court institutions (such as the Imperial Household Department, the Office of the Imperial Diarists, and the Household of the Heir Apparent) reinforce or alter the importance of the Board of Rites as a site of political contestation and negotiation? Could the Kangxi emperor's order to start compiling the first edition of the Da Qing huidian in 1684 have been informed by a desire to codify institutional arrangements that had been negotiated not only during the 1640s and 1650s, as the author emphasizes, but also during the 1660s and 1670s as well?

While reading about the complicated and contentious relations between the first Qing khans/emperors and their closest relatives, I also could not help but wonder about the place and role afforded to imperial women such as Bembutai (1613–1688)—a Korcin Mongol princess of the Borjigit clan, posthumously known as Empress Xiaozhuang Wen, who was purportedly one of Hong Taiji's favored consorts (133) and the respective mother and grandmother of the Shunzhi and Kangxi emperors. How might the position and influence of such women have affected or been affected by the ritualization of court politics detailed in this study? And what might the presence or absence of such female figures in the historical record reveal not only about the sources themselves, but also about the gendered dimensions of early Qing political culture and state-formation? Although these various lines of inquiry may lie outside of Keliher's immediate concerns and the scope of his evidentiary base, they also point to the fruitfulness of engaging with this study's many points of empirical detail and interpretive nuance.

By taking seriously his protagonists’ preoccupation with li/doro/ritual as recorded in the historical sources, Macabe Keliher has produced an enriching and important work of scholarship that may be appreciated on a number of levels. First, The Board of Rites and the Making of Qing China helps to fill a lacuna in our account of the evolving structures of the early Qing state. Second, it offers a fresh perspective by bringing the methods of ritual studies and cultural analysis to bear upon our scholarly understandings of state-formation. And third, by highlighting the ritual and symbolic dimensions of state-building during the early Qing, Keliher suggests an alternative basis for comparison with a wide range of early modern states. Specialists in Qing and Chinese history as well as those interested in ritual and the comparative history of dynastic states and imperial formations should find it especially appealing and worthy of a place on their reading lists and bookshelves.