| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.4 | The History Cooperative

Limin Bai. Shaping the Ideal Child: Children and Their Primers in Late Imperial China. Hong Kong: Chinese University Press. 2005. Pp. xxiv, 311. $42.00.
Limin Bai's portrait of late imperial childhood, children, and their primers joins a growing English-language literature, including recent books by Ping-chen Hsiung (A Tender Voyage: Children and Childhood in Late Imperial China [2005]) and Anne Behnke Kinney (Representations of Childhood and Youth in Early China [2004]) on the history of Chinese childhood. Bai substantially adds to this literature with a perceptive analysis of elite efforts to cultivate the ideal child through literacy and moral instruction.	1
Since the publication of Philippe Ariès's landmark study, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life (1965), historians have been careful to distinguish between the construction of childhood by adult belief and proclamation and the lived worlds of children. While focusing on the former, that is what Neo-Confucian educators believed they were doing in their textbooks for "adults in training," this book provides tantalizing clues to the physical surroundings, embodied rituals, and adult-child interactions that children experienced while learning to read, count, and come to understand their social roles in the Ming and Qing dynasties.	. . .

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