of immorality, emphasizing his cleanliness, and his friends asserted his integrity.

31. Liu Kwang-Ching (Orthodoxy in Late Imperial China, 2–3) argues that “it is clear that by late imperial times, a situation of religious pluralism prevailed in China. Buddhism, Taoism, and other popular religion had long flourished peaceably alongside Confucianism. But it seems that this religious diversity coexisted with a moral orthodoxy—moral because its precepts were primarily socioethical, and orthodox because such precepts were themselves linked to religious and cosmological notions.”

32. This basic assumption is particularly acknowledged by Liu Kwang-Ching (Orthodoxy in Late Imperial China, 13–15), who notes that “the socioethical realm in its moral orthodoxy transcended differences in belief, narrowly defined. […] Through the working of imperial bureaucracy and kinship organizations, the socioethical doctrine became widely accepted, making the institutional analysis of culture at least as important as class analysis.” This makes it clear that “what the Ch’ing rulers wanted to assure was subject-monarch loyalty based on filial piety” (16).

33. See Rowe’s reappraisal of the role of Geng-Mei lineage feuding in a more complex social reality (Rowe, Crimson Rain, 103–105).

34. De Bary, “Individualism and Humanitarianism in Late Ming Thought,” 222.