This is a work of mature reflection and substantial scholarship, a significant contribution not simply to the study of an aspect of contemporary Chinese funerary practice but also – as the title indicates – to the understanding of some less easily graspable aspects of what it might mean to be Chinese. Some data from speakers of Vietnamese are also incorporated here, but the burning of money is by and large something that many Chinese do, while other contiguous cultures with similar concerns about the unseen world, such as Mongols or Japanese, do not. Those interested in a simple introduction to the burning of paper money might perhaps be advised to go initially to a work such as Roderick Cave's Chinese Paper Offerings (Oxford University Press, 1998), since although the reader of the work under review may tap into a very rich seam of ethnographic observation, this is frequently embedded in an equally rich discourse that moves well beyond a description of immediate phenomena to discuss much broader issues.

Even so, all students of contemporary Chinese life would do well to read this whole book carefully and critically, rather than pillage it for its up-to-the minute observations about what paper goods are burned and how. The Introduction (pp. 1–8) announces the author's theoretical perspectives, glossing in particular the prominent word “material” from the subtitle, and then the first chapter, “Chiasm” (pp. 9–24) introduces earlier studies while also glossing the further term “lifeworld,” using one initial example. Next come chapters on the range of paper offerings, and on what may be known from surviving sources concerning their origin. Three core chapters on “Liturgy,” “Ideology” and “Sacrifice” lie at the heart of the book (pp. 76–141), and articulate the author's considered conclusions as to “what is going on” in this not unimportant area of the Chinese cultural tradition, before chapters on “Ghost Bills” and on “Burlesque” (pp. 142–69) confront us with contemporary paper-burning practice and its apparent excesses, the topic of much contemporary online discussion in China. Finally a chapter of fourteen pages on “Value” brings together some of the themes adumbrated earlier, though these pages are then followed by two more, “A postscript on the Grain of Sand,” in which the author evocatively confronts Chinese ways with a Western perspective by alluding to an earlier namesake – though one does not see Arthur Waley's “Blake the Taoist” (in The Secret History of the Mongols and Other Pieces, George Allen and Unwin, 1964, pp. 169–75) in the bibliography, and wonders what comments that piece would have been elicited, had the author seen it.

Different readers will of course bring different experiences to reading and to re-reading this book. But it is possible that this coda, and an awareness of Waley's remarks, may call to mind the verdict on the unseen world reported by Zhuangzi after his discussions with a skull, and thus prompt a little reflection at least on some of the most novel data included in the chapter on “Burlesque.” Zhuangzi pities the abandoned skull, discovered by the roadside, and takes it home to use as a pillow. The skull appears in a dream – a classic communication from the beyond, of a type that occurs at the very start of the book under review – and politely challenges his charitable sentiments, claiming in effect that there is a lot to be said for being dead. Why? “The dead have no ruler.” Until reading Fred Blake's study, Zhuangzi always seemed to me more than a little quixotic here. We know that even before his time the unseen world was hierarchical, at least as understood by some, and his efforts to claim this contested space for anarchy appear to have been completely overwhelmed by its evolution into the grim judicial bureaucracy recently described by Paul Katz, and still graphically depicted by a number of Chinese religious groups. Or has even this unpleasant form of law and order broken down completely now, leaving a wild dystopia in which simulacra of guns are sent to the other world to protect the mahjong winnings of the deceased? Yet worse, there are even allegedly examples of supposed thermonuclear weapons having been dispatched to the dead (pp. 186–88).

But maybe this is precisely Zhuangzi's point, and an entirely materialistic one, at that: neither the state, nor its weak surrogates amongst China's permitted institutional religions, can do anything to curb the construction of new and completely unregulated conceptions of the world of the dead. This is governed by no authority, save the autocephalous instincts of those who can afford to burn paper – that is, just about everyone. The burlesque exuberance of some recent activity may be dismissed as the froth on top of a wave of extraordinarily rapid economic growth, but a glance not too far backward suggests that the supposedly staid tradition of Chinese ritual observance has for some time now possessed a capacity for unhesitating innovation. On p. 145 we learn that the oldest “ghost bill” in existence dates to May 1923. Yet contemporary writing on China's currency, for example by E. Kann, suggests that at this point banknotes played a significant part in this-worldly affairs only in certain areas of China, and in Kann's words metallic currencies were still “the backbone of the system” even some years later. The bias in Western writing on Chinese ritual practice has been to see it as if not superstition then at least as “surviving.” Perhaps it was, and is, capable of doing better than that. At any rate the lifeworld described by C. Fred Blake is one that needs to be taken seriously as part of the larger world of today, not as a nostalgic hangover from a more stable and now regretted past. I hope this book finds many readers, whether their interests lie in the burning of money or not.