Some of the most significant recent scholarship on the Qing state has turned the field's attention to Qing law and legal practice, showing local administrators in the role of judges. In this important and engaging new book, Jeffrey Snyder-Reinke presents Qing officials in another role, as rainmaking ritualists, and in doing so, he highlights the theatricality of local administration.

After an introductory chapter, Snyder-Reinke describes in chapter 2 the cultural elements that Qing officials drew on in their rainmaking practices. The author identifies three “modes” of rainmaking—the rainmaker as mourner, drawn from a poem in the Shijing, purportedly a lament of the Zhou King Xuan during a prolonged drought; the rainmaker as martyr, based on an account of the Shang dynasty founder King Tang's offering himself in sacrifice during a drought; and the rainmaker as magician, referring to the Han-era Confucian Dong Zhongshu's influential rainmaking techniques. Qing officials drew on various combinations of these three aspects of the classical rainmaking tradition. This is followed by a discussion, in chapter 3, of rainmaking at the imperial level during the Qing. Snyder-Reinke argues that even the imperial household was ecumenical in its rainmaking rituals, rather than rigidly “orthodox” Confucian. Chapter 4 shifts focus to the real concern of this study, rainmaking practices at lower levels of the Qing bureaucracy, where state and society met. Here, the author shows, officials pursued an even wider range of practices, including worship of deities outside the official pantheon and occult practices that historians usually contrast with officialdom and state Confucianism. Chapter 5 introduces the rainmaking method of a late eighteenth-century scholar that circulated among officials in at least nine printed editions during the second half of the nineteenth century.

In his last substantive chapter, Snyder-Reinke shows that rainmaking was “a thoroughly political activity” involving local officials, Buddhist and Daoist clerics recruited to conduct rainmaking ceremonies, local elites, and the wider populace that observed what the author convincingly shows were public practices. At the local level, officials' rainmaking efforts were in some sense negotiated, as officials often initiated rainmaking in response to farmers' demands during a drought, appealed to deities seen by the local populace as particularly efficacious, enhanced or adjusted their techniques in response to pressure from local elites, and risked losing their prestige and authority in the face of rising public scorn when initial efforts failed to bring rain. At every step, the official as rainmaker was expected to demonstrate his sincerity as ritual performer, and his success or failure was linked to the authority that he would be able to maintain over the locality in which he served. Thus, Snyder-Reinke asserts that “rainmaking was not only about rain,” but “was also about being an official” (p. 48), as important a task as those more familiar in the historical literature—tax collection, adjudication, and the maintenance of public order.

Many of the vivid accounts of rainmaking in this book, including three fascinating descriptions that open the volume, are drawn from newspapers (Shenbao, Xinbao, North China Herald) and pictorials (Dianshizhai Pictorial). These sources, new in the second half of the nineteenth century, allow the author to observe late imperial practices that often either do not appear or, if mentioned, are frowned upon in such sources as administrative handbooks. Of course, all sources should be interrogated. For those who might suspect that reports in newspapers and pictorials are sensationalist, the author also presents very similar accounts of official rainmaking in such sources as folktales (p. 99), the Qingbai leichao (p. 100), one official's diary entry (p. 133), and another official's account of his bureaucratic service (pp. 164–66).

Snyder-Reinke frames much of his argument within debates about the nature of Chinese religion, the relationship between the “Confucian” state and popular religious practice, and particularly the extent to which state and popular religions constituted orthodoxy or “orthopraxy.” The author uses the depictions of ecumenical and apparently unorthodox official rainmaking at the local level to argue against a rigid analytical divide between Confucian ritual practice and popular religious practice, and against the view of “Chinese officials as orthodox Confucians faithfully defending the state's ritual regulations and vigilantly rectifying popular religious practices” (p. 182). One of many contributions of this compelling book is to remind us that the “Qing state” and “Chinese officials” are categories that include a very large number of people with often widely divergent views about state and society. At different times in the history of late imperial China, some officials, typically those who associated themselves with the Learning of the Way movement, did use their position within the state apparatus to push a particular agenda, to create and enforce their orthodox vision for society. In making descriptive generalizations about the state and officialdom as “Confucian” and “orthodox,” we are perhaps unwittingly furthering their prescriptive agenda.