This essay explores the ritual dimension of the formation of Confucian orthodoxy in China from around the fifteenth to the early seventeenth centuries. Recent scholarship on orthodoxy has shown how the civil service examination system bound together hundreds of thousands of educated men with the court in pedagogical practices that effectively regulated what constituted acceptable knowledge of the classics used to legitimate the imperial regime and its policies. Without questioning the central importance of the examinations in the propagation of orthodoxy, in this essay I expand the scope of this problem to consider the role of ritual in reproducing orthodoxy by focusing on the uneasy convergence of the state cult of Kongzi—known in the West as Confucius—with the family cult of his flesh-and-blood descendants.

My tale is an eloquent one, with heroes and villains, crises and angst, passion and fury. What it lacks in resolution it more than makes up for in dramatic tension. It is a story set in Britain and India in the 1890s, a time of intense polarities. This was the decade in which Oscar Wilde, Britain's most lionized playwright, was imprisoned for homosexuality; in which the spark of “new unionism” flared and then fizzled; in which Britain competed in the “scramble for Africa,” adding new colonial possessions to its already ample stockpile. It was the decade of imperial budgets, of mounting tension in South Africa, of the call for tariff reform, of the “new Woman,” and of that curious political hybrid, Liberal-Unionism.

In December 1995, the Association of Indonesian Muslim Intellectuals, ICMI (Ikatan Cendekiawan Muslim se-Indonesia), held its second national congress in Jakarta (Kompas, December 4–10, 1995; Republika, December 4–10, 1995; Gatra, December 9 and 16, 1995; Forum Keadilan, January 1, 1996; Ummat, December 11, 1995). Twelve hundred delegates, representing 42,000 members from all Indonesian provinces and from many Indonesian Islamic communities abroad, participated. Minister of Research and Technology B. J. Habibie, generally considered President Suharto's favorite cabinet member, was chosen for a second five-year term as national chair. Sixteen ministers, nearly half the cabinet, were elected to leadership positions, and the president himself was designated ICMI's “Protector” (Pelindung).

Literary biography is a difficult art to practice when the subject is a premodern Muslim poet. Even in the work of such explicitly autobiographical western writers as the twentieth-century Russian poet Anna Akhmatova the relationship between art and life can be tantalizingly ambiguous. In the case of most well-known classical Muslim poets, though, the connection between life and literature is usually indeterminable. To personalize the lyrics of the great fourteenth-century Persian poet Hafiz is as problematic as trying to glean autobiographical details from Shakespeare's sonnets. The reasons are essentially the same. Little is known of these poets' lives, and their poems exemplify lyric and panegyric genres that were not intended to be autobiographical or idiosyncratic. Neither Hafiz nor Shakespeare were Romantics, and they did not write introspective or self-revealing poems.

Ethnic mongol herders in north china have traditionally enjoyed a distinctive cultural landscape. In contrast to the way dense population and intensive agriculture strictly regimented land-use practices among Han Chinese, dispersed settlement and mobile stock-herding permitted Mongol society to operate and evolve under much different spatial and ecological horizons. Such deep-rooted orientations still resist facile alignment with alien standards now imposed by Beijing, disguised as they are in the language of economic development.