The result of three workshops, this informative volume concerns one of the most neglected classics, the Rituals of Zhou (Zhouli). Although not as prominent as other classics, it was a favorite among reformers because it sets out in minute detail an idealized government. This volume aims to underscore the political impact the Zhouli had on East Asia for more than 2,000 years, and to demonstrate that the classics played the same legitimating role in East Asian politics that charters and constitutions did in Western cultures.

The book's thirteen essays are divided among four parts on early China, medieval China, early modern East Asia, and modern China. The longest is the first section, which, oddly enough, is also the weakest. The volume's most provocative article, by David Schaberg, confirms Jin Chunfeng's findings that the Zhouli is a Qin dynasty text. The “Zhou” of its title does not refer to the Duke of Zhou, but instead means “comprehensive.” The text betrays the Qin impulse to establish a centralized government that oversees both information and commercial exchange systems. Indeed, Zheng Xuan (127–200) was the first to associate the text with the Duke of Zhou. Still, one might ask why Wang Mang (r. 9–23), who compared himself to the Duke of Zhou, championed this text to legitimate his Confucian-style government.

In his offering, Martin Kern explores the nature of the Zhouli text. He notes that, even though it is replete with late Warring States and Early Han ideas, it conveys much accurate information about Western Zhou scribes. This article includes a wealth of information on scribes and levels of literacy. Michael Nylan demonstrates that a number of Warring States texts portray the Duke of Zhou not as a Confucian hero, but either as a scheming usurper or as a Legalistic official. Though intriguing, the essay sheds no light on the Zhouli, so one wonders why it was included. One could level a similar criticism at Andrew H. Plaks's contribution on Zheng Xuan's Zhouli commentary. In his essay, Michael Puett argues that Wang Mang championed the obscure Rituals of Zhou because it sanctioned the need for a strong ruler who presided over a centralized government. One wishes that Puett had also discussed how the text influenced Wang's reforms.

Part II unfolds with three essays dedicated to Tang-Song China. David McMullen meticulously delineates the Zhouli's influence in the Tang dynasty. Throughout the dynasty, the classic was esteemed, but it was less important than the text derived from it, the Compendium of the Sixfold Administration of the Great Tang. One area in which the Zhouli did have a huge impact was state ritual. Underscoring the text's import to reformers, Peter K. Bol notes that Wang Anshi himself wrote a commentary on it. For Wang, the Zhouli captured government at its best: only by understanding its ideas could one reproduce its perfect order in the present. Jaeyoon Song's offering examines Southern Song commentators' Neo-Confucian reassessments of the Rituals of Zhou. In contrast to Wang, they interpreted the text as favoring autonomous regional governments, a small staff of bureaucrats who fulfilled multiple functions through temporary assignments, and a governmental emphasis on moral edification (jiaohua).

Parts III and IV are the most impressive because they document that, even in more contemporary times and in places outside of China's borders, the Zhouli still commanded great influence. Kate Wildman Nakai documents how in Tokugawa Japan Mito School thinkers favored the text because they viewed it as championing a decentralized polity and samurai-like officials who had both civil and military functions. JaHyun Kim Haboush aptly delineates the way a seventeenth-century scholar named Yun Hyu employed the Zhouli to suggest that all political authority should be concentrated in the prime minister's hands, so that the state could be strengthened enough to attack the Qing. Benjamin A. Elman notes that the first Ming emperor extensively used the classic to configure both the shape of his government and its rural control systems. By late Ming and early Qing times, even though it had lost its political import, intellectuals regarded the Kaogong ji (Artificer's Record) chapter of the Zhouli as an objective account of early Chinese technology.

In the last chapter and the conclusion, Rudolf Wagner makes the case that nineteenth-century reformers found the Zhouli compelling because it provided them with access to an idyllic Chinese past that was untainted by the imperial regimes. Given its distance from the present, the reformers could also compare and adapt the classic's ideals to modern Western formulations of government.

Although the quality of all the essays is quite good, those that focus on the late imperial period and beyond China are particularly effective in emphasizing the Zhouli's importance to Chinese notions of statecraft.