Translated by Patricia Buckley Ebrey

• FrontMatter,
• CONTENTS,
• PREFACE,
• ABBREVIATIONS,
• PART ONE. Class, Culture, Family, and Property,
• PART TWO. Precepts for Social Life,
• APPENDIX A. Editions of the Precepts for Social Life and Their Transmission,
• APPENDIX ¿. Discrepancies Between the 1179 and 1190 Editions,
• GLOSSARY,
• SOURCES CITED,
• INDEX,

Providing the best surviving evidence of the everyday thinking of the Sung upper class, Yuan Ts'ai's twelfth-century manual is the advice of a typical educated man on the concerns of managing a family, from rearing children and arranging their marriages, to avoiding social conflict, training servants, and managing property and preserving it for the next generation.
Originally published in 1984.
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