The debate on whether Confucianism is a religion or not has been raging among Chinese intellectuals ever since the western concept of religion has been introduced in China around the turn of the twentieth century. As a consequence, several varying normative redefinitions of “Confucianism” have been proposed. While several historians have analyzed the history of this debate and redefinitions, the present article starts from the religious practices as a lived part of late imperial Confucianism, and examines what trajectories these practices follow when they are included, excluded, or reinvented in the framework of the new definitions of “Confucianism.” While some of these Confucian practices seem to disappear or become marginal, most are actually transmitted in new contexts. As a result, it is not so much the Confucian religious practices that change (even though they do change) as the intellectual and institutional context in which such practices are or are not labeled “Confucian.”