Histories of childhood, particularly Asian childhood, are not well served. Since the cultural turn in the humanities and social sciences, which challenged the assumption that biologically determined categories such as birth and puberty are somehow ‘natural’ or universal, we are invited to look at differences between people. What practices or beliefs in Chinese cultures were specifically about ‘girlhood’ for example, or even ‘boyhood’ for that matter. So focussed, the history of childhood and youth ‘is actually [a history of] the ways in which adults tried to shape and characterise the young’ – a history full of cultural symbols of relative age, especially in relation to law, war, education, marriage, reproduction and sexual relationships.