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Ming Dynasty (Chinese Studies)

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  1. Introduction
  2.  
  3. Relative to other time periods in Chinese history, modern scholarly research came late to the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), which was often held in ill odor. The charges against the Ming were legion: its rulers were vicious autocrats; it wasted its technological lead over the rest of the globe; it myopically turned inward just when western Europe began its Age of Discovery; the state and a complacent literati elite allowed the “sprouts of capitalism” to wither before they could bloom; and, finally, Ming’s incompetence led to a foreign occupation that lasted into the 20th century. Focusing on the humanist tradition, much post–World War II Western scholarship, in contrast, saw much that merited exploration—the place of the individual in society, the growth of vernacular literature and theater, and fascinating developments in art, thought, and belief. Although Chinese and Japanese scholars shared such interests, they devoted greater attention to socioeconomic developments such as a growing commercial economy, increasingly commoditized economic relations, urbanization, and regional and even national market integration. For those interested in long-term socioeconomic and intellectual trends, whether socioeconomic or intellectual questions, dynastic divisions seemed artificial and superficial. Thus many cast the Ming as one half, often the humbler half, of the Ming-Qing period, stretching from the 14th to 19th centuries. More recently, some scholars have instead argued that the early 12th to early 15th centuries constituted a distinct historical epoch, the “Song-Yuan-Ming transition.” Yet others see the Ming, like Muscovite Rus, the Timurids, and the Ottomans, as one among many successor states to the Mongol Empire, highlighting synchronic ties across Eurasia over diachronic continuity with previous dynasties. Such contending conceptualizations result both from divergent research foci and from the lack of consensus about the wider significance of the Ming period in Chinese and global history.
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  5. Introductory Works
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  7. The best single-volume introduction to the Ming period is Dardess 2012. Slightly more detailed but still engaging are the relevant chapters of Mote 1999. Mote and Twitchett 1988 and Mote and Twitchett 1998 are invaluable points of departure for those who want greater depth; both contain an extensive bibliography of works in Western and East Asian languages that include primary sources and secondary scholarship. In contrast to the preceding works, which feature political narrative, Brook 2010 places greater stress on climate, commerce, and social/cultural history. Goodrich and Fang 1976 provides biographical notes on hundreds of important figures from the Ming period.
  8.  
  9. Brook, Timothy. The Troubled Empire: China in the Yuan and Ming Dynasties. History of Imperial China. Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2010.
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  11. A leading historian of the Ming dynasty, Brook supplements his expertise in commerce, trade, transportation, and administrative structures with attention to climate change and its consequences to illustrate patterns of underlying continuity between the Yuan and Ming periods.
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  13. Dardess, John W. Ming China, 1368–1644: A Concise History of a Resilient Empire. Critical Issues in World and International History. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2012.
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  15. A concise and insightful synthesis of a lifetime of teaching and research by a leading scholar of the Ming period. Intended for undergraduate courses but useful for specialists too.
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  17. Goodrich, Luther Carrington, and Fang Chaoying. Dictionary of Ming Biography, 1368–1644: The Ming Biographical Project of the Association for Asian Studies. 2 vols. New York: Columbia University Press, 1976.
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  19. Written by leading figures in the field, each entry provides essential biographical and bibliographical information on hundreds of key figures from the Ming period.
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  21. Mote, Frederick W. Imperial China, 900–1800. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.
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  23. Another readable and insightful synthesis of a lifetime of teaching and research. Nearly a third of the book is devoted to the Ming. Mote also provides an excellent bibliography of the best secondary scholarship.
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  25. Mote, Frederick W., and Denis Twitchett. The Cambridge History of China. Vol. 7, The Ming Dynasty, 1368–1644, Part 1. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
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  27. A detailed political narrative history divided by the reigns of individual emperors and written by leading specialists.
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  29. Mote, Frederick W., and Denis Twitchett. The Cambridge History of China. Vol. 8, The Ming Dynasty, 1368–1644, Part 2. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
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  31. This volume is organized thematically, including chapters on government, socioeconomic changes, foreign relations, religion, intellectual history, and sources.
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  33. Guide to Sources and Scholarship
  34.  
  35. Franke 1968 and Franke and Liew-Herres 2011 provide a detailed introduction to several hundred important primary sources for the Ming. Li and Li 1988 and Nan 2001 are handy reference works covering both a selection of primary sources and secondary Chinese scholarship. Yamane 1983 and Kishimoto 2006 review important primary sources and secondary Japanese scholarship. Guide to Ming Studies, compiled by Leo K. Shin, is an excellent online resource for many primary and secondary sources in English, Chinese, and Japanese.
  36.  
  37. Franke, Wolfgang. An Introduction to the Sources of Ming History. Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and Singapore: University of Malaya Press, 1968.
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  39. An invaluable introduction to a wide variety of primary sources from the Ming period. The introduction organizes sources by genre and provides a brief description of individual titles, including authors, editions, and relevant secondary scholarship. Its convenient index of authors and titles makes locating sources simple.
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  41. Franke, Wolfgang, and Foon Ming Liew-Herres. Annotated Sources of Ming History, Including Southern Ming and Works on Neighbouring Lands, 1368–1661. Rev. ed. Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia: University of Malaya Press, 2011.
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  43. This updated and much-expanded edition of Franke’s classic is essential for Ming specialists. Liew-Herres not only has expanded the chronological coverage to include the Southern Ming and added many more Ming sources, she has also provided extensive references to relevant indexes, compilations, reviews, and individual studies. Liew-Herres’s “Introduction” is perhaps the most up-to-date and wide-ranging review of Ming studies available today.
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  45. Kishimoto Mio 岸本美緒. “Mindai” (明代). In Chūgoku rekishi kenkyū nyūmon (中国歴史研究入門). Edited by Tonami Mamoru 礪波護, Kishimoto Mio 岸本美緒, and Sugiyama Masaaki 杉山正明, 190–213. Nagoya, Japan: Nagoya daigaku shuppankai, 2006.
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  47. This extremely useful historiographical review includes citations to relevant indexes, bibliographies, debates, and primary sources (complete with recommendations for best editions). It is the handiest point of departure for anyone interested in Japanese scholarship since the early 1990s on the Ming.
  48. Find this resource:
  49. Li Xiaolin 李小林 and Li Shengwen 李晟文, eds. Mingshi yanjiu beilan (明史研究備覽). Xueshu yanjiu zhinan congshu. Tianjin, China: Tianjin jiaoyu chubanshe, 1988.
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  51. Although slightly dated, this handy volume provides brief overviews of major debates in Ming history, notes on primary sources, an extensive annotated bibliography of important Chinese- and Japanese-language monographs, and biographical notes on key scholars in the Ming field.
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  53. Nan Bingwen 南炳文. Huihuang, quzhe, yu qishi: 20 shiji Zhongguo Mingshi yanjiu huigu (輝煌，曲折與啟示: 20世紀中國明史研究回顧). Tianjin, China: Tianjin renmin chubanshe, 2001.
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  55. A detailed bibliographic essay that groups research on Ming history in China into three periods: the first half of the 20th century, 1949 to 1976, and the post-Mao period. Nan organizes the scholarship of each period into such categories as political, institutional, economic, social, ethnic, foreign relations, and intellectual; he also introduces edited volumes, synthetic treatments, and collections of primary sources published in each period.
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  57. Shin, Leo K. Guide to Ming Studies.
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  59. Leo Shin is a professor of Chinese history at the University of British Columbia. His guide includes extensive bibliographic references for indexes, journals, dictionaries, source collections, literature reviews, and more related to the Ming period.
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  61. Yamane Yukio 山根幸夫. “Mindai” (明代). In Chūgokushi kenkyū nyūmon (中国史研究入門). Vol. 2. By Yamane Yukio, 1–90. Tokyo: Yamagawa shuppankai, 1983.
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  63. Although slightly dated, this introduction to the basic primary sources and historiographical debates is still useful, particularly its coverage of Japanese scholarship through the 1970s.
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  65. Annotated and Translated Primary Sources
  66.  
  67. Numerous vernacular novels, short stories, poetry, and plays from the Ming period are available in English, but the selection here focuses on law, historical works, and thought. Jiang 2005 and Southeast Asia in the Ming Shi-lu are translations of key imperially commissioned works on law and Southeast Asia, respectively. The Ming founder compiled detailed guidelines for his officials, his subjects, and his descendants; Farmer 1995 is the most convenient source.
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  69. Farmer, Edward L. Zhu Yuanzhang and Early Ming Legislation: The Reordering of Chinese Society Following the Era of Mongol Rule. Sinica Leidensia 34. Leiden, The Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 1995.
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  71. This work translates The August Ancestral Instruction (Huang Ming zu xun), The Great Ming Commandant (Da Ming ling), and The Placard of People’s Instructions (Jiao min bang wen).
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  73. Jiang Yonglin, ed. and trans. The Great Ming Code. Asian Law 17. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005.
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  75. An annotated translation of the Ming dynasty’s law code.
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  77. Wade, Geoff. Southeast Asia in the Ming Shi-lu.
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  79. The single largest translation of Ming primary materials into English available today. Wade has culled through the most-important imperial annals of the Ming (the Veritable Records of the Ming) for entries on Southeast Asia, translated them into English, and produced a database searchable by date, topic, place name, and personal name. His introduction is also very useful.
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  81. Travelers’ Accounts
  82.  
  83. Rossabi 1983 and Ptak 1996 provide translations of accounts by Chinese travelers to central Asia and South/Southeast Asia during the early 15th century. Several contemporary accounts by Korean, Timurid, and European observers are also available in English translation (Boxer 2004, Ferguson 1901, Meskill 1965, Naqqash 1989, Ricci and Trigault 1953).
  84.  
  85. Boxer, Charles R., ed. and trans. South China in the Sixteenth Century, Being the Narratives of Galeote Pereira, Fr. Gaspar da Cruz, O.P. [and] Fr. Martín de Rada, O.E.S.A. (1550–1575). Bibliotheca Orientalis. Bangkok: Orchid, 2004.
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  87. Originally published in 1953 (London: Hakluyt Society). Firsthand accounts of southeastern China by merchants and missionaries (two Portuguese and one Spanish) who traveled in the Ming Empire during the third quarter of the 16th century. Boxer’s introduction provides useful information about the individual authors, the transmission of their texts, and the general background of Portuguese and Spanish interactions with China during the 16th century.
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  89. Ferguson, Donald. “Letters from Portuguese Captives in Canton, Written in 1534 and 1536: With an Introduction on Portuguese Intercourse with China in the First Half of the Sixteenth Century.” Indian Antiquary 30 (1901): 421–451, 467–491.
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  91. Letters written home from a group of Portuguese adventurers who were arrested and imprisoned in Canton. Published in book form in 1902 (Bombay: Education Society’s Steam Press).
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  93. Meskill, John T., ed. and trans. Ch’oe Pu’s Diary: A Record of Drifting Across the Sea. Monographs and Papers (Association for Asian Studies) 17. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1965.
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  95. An official envoy from the Korean court, Ch’oe Pu (b. 1454–d. 1504) traveled to China in 1488. He records his impressions as he journeyed from the southeastern coast, where he landed after a storm, northward along the Grand Canal to Beijing, and from the Ming capital back home via the overland route through Liaodong.
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  97. Naqqash, Ghiyathuddin. “Report to Mirza Baysunghur on the Timurid Legation to the Ming Court at Peking.” In A Century of Princes: Sources on Timurid History and Art. Edited and translated by W. M. Thackston, 279–297. Cambridge, MA: Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture, Harvard University, 1989.
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  99. A report prepared for the Timurid ruler Shahrukh, by an envoy who went to the Yongle emperor’s court in early 1422. Available online.
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  101. Ptak, Roderich, ed. Hsing-ch’a-sheng-lan: The Overall Survey of the Star Raft. Translated by J. V. G. Mills. South China and Maritime Asia 4. Wiesbaden, Germany: Harrassowitz, 1996.
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  103. An updated and annotated version of J. V. G. Mill’s translation of Xing cha sheng lan, an early-15th-century account by Xin Fei, which also includes an excellent bibliography of related primary and secondary materials.
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  105. Ricci, Matteo, and Nicolas Trigault. China in the Sixteenth Century: The Journals of Matthew Ricci, 1583–1610. Translated from the Latin by Louis J. Gallagher. New York: Random House, 1953.
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  107. Detailed observations by a Jesuit monk who acquired an advanced competence in spoken and written Chinese, socialized with educated Ming men, and had a vested interest in figuring out contemporary values and politics.
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  109. Rossabi, Morris. “A Translation of Ch’en Ch’eng’s Hsi-yü fan-kuo chih.” Ming Studies 17 (Fall 1983): 49–59.
  110. DOI: 10.1179/014703783788755467Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  111. A translation of the observations of Chen Cheng, a Ming envoy, of his travels to the Timurid court in 1414–1415.
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  113. Selections of Thinkers from the Ming Period
  114.  
  115. Several major collections of translated canonical texts contain sections on the Ming period. De Bary and Bloom 1999 provides accurate translations and useful introductions on individual authors and contexts. Another collection of translations of Chinese thinkers, Chan 1963 includes samples of two influential texts by Wang Yangming. De Bary 1993 is a full-length translation, with annotation, of an influential text on rulership, ministerial power, and the place of local society, by an important late Ming–early Qing writer, Huang Zongxi.
  116.  
  117. Chan, Wing-tsit. A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963.
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  119. Chapter 35 is devoted to Wang Yangming and includes translations of his Inquiry on the Great Learning and Instructions for Practical Living.
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  121. de Bary, William Theodore, ed. and trans. Waiting for the Dawn: A Plan for the Prince. Translations from the Asian Classics. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993.
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  123. A full-length annotated translation of a highly influential text (S.B. Mingyi daifang lu 明夷待訪錄) by Huang Zongxi (b. 1610–d. 1695) that critically examines the role of the emperor and stresses the importance of ministerial remonstrance and local initiative.
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  125. de Bary, William Theodore, and Irene Bloom, comps. Sources of Chinese Tradition. Vol. 1, From Earliest Times to 1600. 2d ed. Introduction to Asian Civilization. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999.
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  127. Includes translations and short introductions of the writings of Zhu Yuanzhang, Fang Xiaoru, Wang Yangming, Li Zhi (Li Zhuowu), Lü Kun, and Gu Xiancheng, and samplings of late Ming morality books.
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  129. Official History of the Ming Dynasty
  130.  
  131. Several sections of the Official History of the Ming Dynasty are available in annotated English, modern Chinese, and Japanese translations. Compiled over several decades by an imperially appointed committee with a shifting membership, the Official History of the Ming Dynasty is a product of the 18th century. It contains useful information about the Ming that is sometimes not available elsewhere, but it must always be used in conjunction with Ming-period sources and with attention to Qing-period intellectual and political developments. Liew 1998, Wada 1960, and Li 1982 are annotated translations of important Ming institutions (the military and tax regimes). Wade 2003, Tsunoda 1979, and Dai 1984 are treatments of Ming interaction with foreign countries: Champa, Japan, and Portugal, respectively. Bretschneider 2000 is still useful for bringing together much material on a broader region, central and western Asia. Taylor 1975 focuses on the founder the Ming dynasty.
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  133. Bretschneider, Emil. Mediaeval Researches from Eastern Asiatic Sources: Fragments towards the Knowledge of the Geography and History of Central and Western Asia from the 13th to the 17th Century. 2 vols. Trübner’s Oriental Series 33–34. London: Routledge, 2000.
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  135. Originally published in 1888 (London: Kegan Paul, Trencher, Trübner). Available online at Ming History English Translation Project. Compilation of translated passages and paraphrases of Ming-period Chinese sources related to central and West Asia, with some annotation.
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  137. Dai Yixuan 戴裔煊. “Ming shi Folangji zhuan” jianzheng (《明史•佛郎機傳》箋正). Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe, 1984.
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  139. A detailed annotation of the chapter on the Portuguese in the Official History of the Ming Dynasty that draws on imperially compiled chronicles, administrative works, local gazetteers, and collected works by individual Ming writers. It makes limited use of Western-language materials.
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  141. Li Xun 李洵, ed. and trans. Mingshi shihuozhi jiaozhu (明史食货志校注). Lidai shihuozhi zhushi. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1982.
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  143. For those more comfortable with Chinese than Japanese, Li’s annotated translation may be useful. It is, however, less detailed than the Wada Sei translation (Wada 1960).
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  145. Liew, Foon-Ming 劉奮明. The Treatises on Military Affairs of the Ming Dynastic History (1368–1644): An Annotated Translation of the Treatises on Military Affairs, Chapter 89 and Chapter 90. 2 vols. Mitteilungen der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Natur- und Völkerkunde Ostasiens 129. Hamburg, Germany: Gesellschaft für Natur- und Völkerkunde Ostasiens Verlag, 1998.
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  147. Available online at Ming History English Translation Project. A meticulously annotated translation in two volumes that provides much information on the Ming military. A leading scholar on the Ming military, Liew offers some general introductory remarks on Ming military institutions and the historiographical background of the text found in the Official History of the Ming Dynasty.
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  149. Taylor, Romeyn, trans. Basic Annals of Ming T‘ai-tsu. Occasional Series 24. San Francisco: Chinese Material and Research Aids Service Center, 1975.
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  151. Available online at Ming History English Translation Project. A translation of the reign of the Ming founder, Zhu Yuanzhang, complete with glossary and index.
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  153. Tsunoda, Ryusaku, trans. and commentator. Japan in the Chinese Dynastic Histories: Later Han through Ming Dynasties. 2d ed. Edited by L. Carrington Goodrich. Perkins Asiatic Monographs 2. South Pasadena, CA: P. D. and Iona Perkins, 1979.
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  155. Originally published in 1951. Available online at Ming History English Translation Project. Translation of “Treatise on Japan” from the Official History of the Ming Dynasty, among other selections.
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  157. Wada Sei 和田清, ed. and trans. Minshi shokkashi yakuchū (明史食貨志譯注). Tōyō bunko ronsō 44. Tokyo: Tōyō bunko ronsō, 1960.
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  159. Originally published in 1957. A richly annotated translation of “Treatise on Taxes” from the Official History of the Ming Dynasty (chapters 173–175) by some of Japan’s leading scholars of the Ming period. Although published in the mid-1950s, it has yet to be surpassed.
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  161. Wade, Geoff. The Ming shi Account of Champa. ARI Working Paper 3. Singapore: Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore, June 2003.
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  163. An annotated translation of the account of Champa from the Official History of the Ming Dynasty, by a leading scholar of Ming relations with Southeast Asia.
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  165. Collections of Source Materials
  166.  
  167. An enormous wealth of primary sources across a wide variety of fields is available for researchers. During the last few decades, several large-scale photolithic reprint series have attempted to assemble materials either by topic or by collection. Ren and Li 2004 is a convenient point of departure organized topically, while Zhongguo diyi lishi dang’anguan and Liaoningsheng dang’anguan 2001 represents the two largest archival collections of Ming-period materials. Yu, et al. 2010 is a selection of works related to administration from an important Ming-period collector.
  168.  
  169. Ren Mengqiang 任夢強, and Li Li 李莉. Mingdai jiben shiliao congkan (明代基本史料叢刊). Beijing: Beijing xianzhuang shuju, 2004–.
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  171. A massive reprint set of Ming-period sources divided into memorials (one hundred volumes), border affairs (one hundred volumes), and foreign relations (eighty volumes).
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  173. Yu Haoxu 虞浩旭, Rao Guoqing 饒國慶, Yuan Hui 袁慧, and Wang Changlin 王長林, eds. Tianyige cang Mingdai zhengshu zhenben congkan (天一閣藏明代政書珍本叢刊). Beijing: Xianzhuang shuju, 2010.
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  175. A facsimile reproduction in twenty-two volumes of Ming-period administrative works from the Tianyige collection in Ningbo. It includes widely available sources such as the imperially commissioned Da Ming hui dian (two editions), legal statutes, materials on taxes and service labor obligations to the state, rituals related to the imperial family, and legal depositions.
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  177. Zhongguo diyi lishi dang’anguan 中國第一歷史檔案館 and Liaoningsheng dang’anguan 遼寧省檔案館, eds. Zhongguo Mingchao dang’an zonghui (中國明朝檔案總匯). Guilin, China: Guangxi shifan daxue chubanshe, 2001.
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  179. A reduced-size facsimile reproduction in 101 volumes of Ming-period archival materials housed in the First Historical Archives of China and the Liaodong Provincial Archives.
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  181. Specialized Journals
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  183. Several academic journals are devoted to the Ming period. Perhaps the most influential English-language journal is Ming Studies. In the People’s Republic of China (PRC), Mingshi yanjiu and Mingshi yanjiu luncong focus on Ming history, while in Japan, Mindaishi kenkyū was for many decades the specialized journal for scholars of Ming history. Both Ming Qing luncong and Myŏng-Ch’ŏngsa yŏn’gu are academic journals that feature academic essays on the Ming and Qing periods, published in the PRC and South Korea, respectively. Mingshi yanjiu zhuankan is published in the Republic of China and features essays on a variety of topics related to the Ming.
  184.  
  185. Mindaishi kenkyū 明代史研究.
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  187. A labor of love by the Japanese scholar Yamane Yukio 山根幸夫, who handwrote the contents of each issue until his death in 2004.
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  189. Ming Qing luncong 明清論叢.
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  191. Currently published by the Palace Museum (Beijing), this journal includes specialized studies both on the Ming and Qing periods.
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  193. Mingshi yanjiu 明史研究.
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  195. Currently edited by members of the Ming History group of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, this PRC journal publishes specialized articles in Ming history.
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  197. Mingshi yanjiu luncong 明史研究論叢.
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  199. Similar to Mingshi yanjiu, this PRC journal is currently edited by members of the Ming History group of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and publishes specialized articles in Ming history.
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  201. Mingshi yanjiu zhuankan 明代研究專刊.
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  203. A labor of love by the late Wu Zhihe 吳智和, this Taiwanese journal published specialized studies on topics in Ming history, including administrative, military, cultural, and intellectual history.
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  205. Ming Studies.
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  207. The leading English-language journal devoted to the Ming period, the US-based Ming Studies features essays on literature, history, and, occasionally, art. It also includes bibliographies and news on Ming-related conferences.
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  209. Myŏng-Ch’ŏngsa yŏn’gu 明清史研究.
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  211. This South Korean journal includes specialized studies both on the Ming and Qing periods and news on recent related conferences and publications.
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  213. Emperors and Court Politics
  214.  
  215. Emperors and court politics constituted a central feature of Chinese history and historiography. During the Ming period, time was marked in terms of individual emperor’s reigns; for example, 1368 appears in most Ming documents as the first year of the reign of the Founding Ming Emperor, Hongwu. As scholarship in recent decades has made clear, long-term socioeconomic trends, intellectual traditions, climatic change, geopolitical shifts, and other factors deeply shaped many facets of Ming history. However, the temperaments, perspectives, and ambitions of individual emperors; their relations with senior ministers and the bureaucracy in general; and specific political incidents also exercised a profound influence over everything from the allocation of dynastic resources, foreign relations, and administration structures to cultural patronage, education policy, and the look and feel of the capital. Decisions in the center mattered. Because of their signal importance to the dynasty and because of their distinctive styles, both the founding emperor Hongwu and his son the Second Founding Emperor, Yongle have received substantial scholarly attention. Although the founding emperors remained important reference points and sources of legitimacy, later rulers and Court Politics during the Mid-Ming varied widely, developing new notions of rulership and ministerial authority and facing new questions in governing one of the world’s most populous empires.
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  217. The Founding Ming Emperor, Hongwu
  218.  
  219. Zhu Yuanzhang clawed his way from the bottom of Chinese society to found the Ming dynasty in 1368. He simultaneously drew on the personnel and institutions of the Yuan and distanced himself from them. Zhu aggressively recruited former Yuan officials and officers, both Chinese and Mongols, while incorporating features of the Yuan administrative and military organization (Taylor 1969). Zhu repeatedly argued that the Yuan had lost the Mandate of Heaven through poor rule, most especially moral corruption and the delegation of too-much authority to grasping local officials and clerks (Dardess 1983) and a failure to respect Chinese ritual and customs. The answer was a particularly robust form of Confucianism, which scholars have sometimes described as fundamentalist, a concerted campaign to cow potential challengers, and an effort to rectify China through rituals, written guides to behavior, and social codes (Farmer 1995, Langlois 1988). Zhu Yuanzhang’s repeated purges against educated elites, which resulted in the deaths of an estimated seventy thousand people, and his apparent contempt for literati have been explained as overcompensation for a peasant’s sense of inferiority vis-à-vis educated elites, a deepening paranoia, the natural culmination of centuries of autocratic rule, a legacy of the Mongols’ proclivity for brutal treatment of officials, and a desire to eliminate any possible challenges to dynastic rule before his more sheltered and less vigorous sons succeeded him (Langlois 1988, Mote 1961, Wu 2010). The Ming founder has exercised a lasting fascination over the centuries for a wide variety of observers and an equally diverse set of motives (Chu 2010, Schneewind 2008).
  220.  
  221. Chu Hung-lam 朱鴻林 (Zhu Honglin). Ming Taizu de zhiguo linian jiqi shijian (明太祖的治國理念及其實踐). Essays from “Ming Taizu jiqi shidai guoji xueshu huiyi,” held 28–30 March 2006 at Chinese University of Hong Kong. Hong Kong: Zhongwen daxue chubanshe, 2010.
  222. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  223. Ming Taizu’s Ideas on Statecraft and Their Implementation contains essays of consistently high scholarship that offer new interpretations on the Ming founder, the challenges he faced, the resources he drew upon, and his successes and failures in meeting those difficulties. As Chu observes in his introduction, the collection as a whole opens the way for a reconsideration and reevaluation of Zhu Yuanzhang.
  224. Find this resource:
  225. Dardess, John W. Confucianism and Autocracy: Professional Elites in the Founding of the Ming Dynasty. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983.
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  227. A close examination of Confucian political engagement and Zhu Yuanzhang’s understanding of his role as ruler and teacher to the realm during the period 1350 to 1400.
  228. Find this resource:
  229. Farmer, Edward L. Zhu Yuanzhang and Early Ming Legislation: The Reordering of Chinese Society Following the End of Mongol Rule. Sinica Leidensia 34. Leiden, The Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 1995.
  230. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  231. Detailed analysis of several sets of regulations that the Ming founder compiled, promulgated, and repeatedly revised to better order the empire, the imperial family, and social order.
  232. Find this resource:
  233. Langlois, John D., Jr. “The Hung-wu Reign, 1368–1398.” In The Cambridge History of China. Vol. 7, The Ming Dynasty, 1368–1644, Part 1. Edited by Frederick W. Mote and Denis Twitchett, 107–181. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
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  235. A political history of the founder’s reign that charts Zhu Yuanzhang’s transformation from successful rebel to the Son of Heaven. Langlois traces Zhu’s efforts to establish control through building institutions, waging war, and intimidating his officials.
  236. Find this resource:
  237. Mote, Frederick W. “The Growth of Chinese Despotism: A Critique of Wittfogel’s Theory of Oriental Despotism as Applied to China.” Oriens Extremus 8 (1961): 1–41.
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  239. Rebutting Wittfogel’s ideas about Oriental despotism as ahistorical and ill informed, Mote makes the case that Zhu Yuanzhang brought an unprecedented degree of despotism and brutality to Chinese political life.
  240. Find this resource:
  241. Schneewind, Sarah, ed. Long Live the Emperor! Uses of the Ming Founder across Six Centuries of East Asian History. Minneapolis: Society for Ming Studies, 2008.
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  243. This volume assembles twenty essays on the diverse ways that observers from the 14th to 20th centuries understood and attempted to use the legacy of the Ming founder. Especially noteworthy is that the contributors explore how Vietnamese, Korean, Mongolian, Muslim, Japanese, Manchu, and European authors wrote about Zhu Yuanzhang.
  244. Find this resource:
  245. Taylor, Romeyn. “Yuan Origins of the Wei-so System.” Paper presented at the Research Conference on Ming Government held in 1965 at the University of Illinois. In Chinese Government in Ming Times: Seven Studies. Edited by Charles O. Hucker, 23–40. Studies in Oriental Culture 2. New York: Columbia University Press, 1969.
  246. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  247. Taylor shows that the hereditary military household system, a profoundly important Ming institution that directly shaped law, land tenure, taxes, demography, and military organization, had its origins in the preceding Mongol period.
  248. Find this resource:
  249. Wu Han 吳晗. Zhu Yuanzhang zhuan (朱元璋傳). Hong Kong: Zhonggua shuju, 2010.
  250. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  251. In this pioneering study, originally published in 1949 (Shanghai: Sanlian shudian), Wu chronicled the transformation of Zhu from the impoverished son of illiterate tenant farmers to the Son of Heaven, paying close attention to what he described as the acme of “autocratic power” and the emergence of “the politics of terror.”
  252. Find this resource:
  253. The Second Founding Emperor, Yongle
  254.  
  255. Shortly after the founder’s death in 1398, one of his sons made a power grab, plunging the country into a destructive civil war, before seizing power as emperor and Son of Heaven (Chan 1976). To augment the new regime’s legitimacy, the Yongle emperor and his ministers rewrote the dynasty’s histories to show that he was his father’s rightful and intended successor (Chan 2005). In many ways, Yongle refounded the dynasty (Miyazaki 1969): he moved the primary capital from Nanjing in the affluent and agricultural productive south to Beijing, a border garrison and former site of the Mongol capital; embarked upon expansive military campaigns into the steppe; occupied the northern part of Vietnam, which he integrated into the Ming Empire (Lo 1970, Whitmore 1985); launched five major maritime expeditions into Southeast and South Asia, headed by Commander Zheng He (see Zheng He and Maritime Ming); and commissioned several large-scale historical, intellectual, cultural, and religious projects (Tsai 2001, Watt and Leidy 2005).
  256.  
  257. Chan, David B. The Usurpation of the Prince of Yen, 1398–1402. Chinese Materials and Research Aids Service Center: Occasional Series. San Francisco: Chinese Materials Center, 1976.
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  259. Although slightly dated, the most detailed English-language account of the Yongle’s usurpation of power.
  260. Find this resource:
  261. Chan, Hok-lam. “Xie Jin (1369–1415) as Imperial Propagandist: His Role in the Revisions of the Ming Taizu shilu.” T’oung Pao 2d ser. 91.1–3 (2005): 58–124.
  262. DOI: 10.1163/1568532054905142Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  263. Chan looks at the role of one official who shaped the portrait of the Ming founder and his relation to the son who gained power by violating his father’s wishes and usurping the throne. Available online by subscription.
  264. Find this resource:
  265. Lo, Jung-pang. “Intervention in Vietnam: A Case Study of the Foreign Policy of the Early Ming Government.” Tsinghua Journal of Chinese Studies 8.1–2 (1970): 154–182.
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  267. An examination of the early-15th-century Ming intervention in Annam (Vietnam), in the context of foreign policy and geopolitical calculation. Lo is especially interested in the interplay of changing styles of rulership and foreign policy.
  268. Find this resource:
  269. Miyazaki Ichisada 宮崎市定. “Kōbu kara Eiraku e—shoki Minchō seiken no seikaku” (洪武から永楽へ—初期明朝政権の性格). Tōyōshi kenkyū (東洋史研究) 27.4 (1969): 363–385.
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  271. A classic study contrasting the policies and postures of the Ming founder and his ambitious son Yongle (Zhu Di).
  272. Find this resource:
  273. Tsai, Shih-shan Henry. Perpetual Happiness: The Ming Emperor Yongle. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 2001.
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  275. The only full-length English-language biography of a Ming emperor. Tsai’s account is highly readable and is based on primary-source research.
  276. Find this resource:
  277. Watt, James C. Y., and Denise Patry Leidy. Defining Yongle: Imperial Art in Early Fifteenth-Century China. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005.
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  279. A handsomely illustrated museum catalogue written in the eponymous exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, focusing on imperial art patronage and production. It is especially useful for showing Yongle’s engagement in Tibetan Buddhism.
  280. Find this resource:
  281. Whitmore, John K. Vietnam, Ho Quý Ly, and the Ming (1371–1421). Lạc Việt 2. New Haven, CT: Yale Center for International and Regional Studies, 1985.
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  283. The best analysis of the Ming interlude in Annam (Vietnam), by a leading scholar familiar both with Chinese and Vietnamese primary sources.
  284. Find this resource:
  285. Court Politics during the Mid-Ming
  286.  
  287. With the death of Yongle’s grandson, Xuande, in 1435, civil officials increasingly dominated court politics and policies (Dreyer 1982). During the remainder of the 15th century, new ideas about rulership took hold among increasing numbers of officials and other educated men. Emperors were to assiduously cultivate their virtue under the guidance of officials and in the safety of the imperial palace. Rulers were to be similarly guided in determining policy, which senior officials increasingly regarded as their prerogative (Lo 1969). In 1449, the emperor Zhengtong led an army into the field against a powerful Mongol ruler, Esen. When Esen smashed the Ming armies and took Zhengtong captive, the Ming court scrambled to find a new and creditable Son of Heaven. For the next decade, coups and countercoups rocked the court (de Heer 1986, Robinson 1999). The disastrous loss to Esen and the ensuing decade of instability illustrated what happened when emperors took armies into the field and ignored the advice of senior ministers. Sixteenth-century emperors who through political ineptitude, personal temperament, or political principle openly challenged these new conventions of court politics risked debilitating conflict with their bureaucracy (Fisher 1990, Geiss 1987, Geiss 1988, Huang 1981).
  288.  
  289. de Heer, Philip. The Care-Taker Emperor: Aspects of the Imperial Institution of the Fifteenth Century, as Reflected in the Political History of the Reign of Chu Ch’i-yü, Seventh Ruler of the Ming Dynasty (1449–1457). Leiden, The Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 1986.
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  291. A detailed political history of what happened after the reigning emperor, Zhengtong, was seized by the Mongols while on campaign in 1449 and the Ming court had to find a new Son of Heaven in a hurry.
  292. Find this resource:
  293. Dreyer, Edward L. Early Ming China: A Political History, 1355–1435. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1982.
  294. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  295. An important study that demonstrates the prominence of military concerns and personnel at the early Ming court. Dreyer argues that the death of the Xuande emperor marked a growing dominance of civil officials in court politics and dynastic policy.
  296. Find this resource:
  297. Fisher, Carney T. The Chosen One: Succession and Adoption in the Court of Ming Shizong. FEH/ASAA East Asia. Sydney, Australia, and Boston: Allen & Unwin, 1990.
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  299. The most detailed analysis of the Great Rites controversy, the Jiajing emperor’s towering mid-16th-century conflict with his officials over the appropriate ritual status of his parents. The controversy shaped personnel decisions, political factions, and ideas about rulership.
  300. Find this resource:
  301. Geiss, James. “The Leopard Quarter during the Cheng-te Reign.” Ming Studies 24 (Fall 1987): 1–38.
  302. DOI: 10.1179/014703787788760584Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  303. Thorough analysis of the Leopard Quarter, a controversial alternate center of political power that Zhengde built. Geiss argues that the Zhengde emperor, usually dismissed as a moral reprobate, was attempting to revive the tradition of ruler as active military leader, which was prevalent during the early reigns of the dynasty. Available online for purchase or by subscription.
  304. Find this resource:
  305. Geiss, James. “The Chia-ching Reign, 1522–1566.” In The Cambridge History of China. Vol. 7, The Ming Dynasty, 1368–1644, Part 1. Edited by Frederick W. Mote and Denis Twitchett, 440–510. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
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  307. Insightful political history of Jiajing’s tumultuous reign. His treatment of the Great Rites controversy provides useful contrast to Fisher 1990.
  308. Find this resource:
  309. Huang, Ray. 1587, a Year of No Significance: The Ming Dynasty in Decline. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981.
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  311. An evocative study of Ming political culture, organized in finely drawn chapters of key figures from the late 16th century. It is essential reading that serves as a point of departure for many studies, whether they accept or reject Huang’s notion about the inflexibility of Ming administrative structures.
  312. Find this resource:
  313. Lo, Jung-pang. “Policy Formulation and Decision-Making on Issues Respecting Peace and War.” Paper presented at the Research Conference on Ming Government held in 1965 at the University of Illinois. In Chinese Government in Ming Times: Seven Studies. Edited by Charles O. Hucker, 41–72. Studies in Oriental Culture 2. New York: Columbia University Press, 1969.
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  315. After reviewing the institutional mechanisms involved in policy formation, Lo offers an analysis of decision making at the Ming court, through eight cases dating from the early 15th to the mid-17th centuries.
  316. Find this resource:
  317. Robinson, David M. “Politics, Force and Ethnicity in Ming China: Mongols and the Abortive Coup of 1461.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 59.1 (June 1999): 79–123.
  318. DOI: 10.2307/2652684Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  319. A narrative of an abortive coup in 1461, launched by military officers in response to efforts to purge the senior ranks of civil and military authorities of men who owed their position to participation in the 1457 coup that put Zhengtong back on the throne. Available online by subscription.
  320. Find this resource:
  321. Military History
  322.  
  323. Like every other dynasty in Chinese history, the Ming polity came to power through war, devoted enormous resources to its military, and deployed troops both against domestic and foreign enemies. Debates about how best to respond to the Mongols persisted through most of the dynasty and resulted in the periodic preemptive strikes against the steppe and the construction of the Great Wall during the 15th and 16th centuries (Waldron 1990). Suppression of domestic challengers across the empire was ongoing; large-scale campaigns during the mid-15th, early 16th, and late 16th centuries have been studied in some detail (Robinson 2001, Shin 2006, Swope 2003). Sun 2003, Sun 2006, and Swope 2005 have drawn attention to the importance of military technology, both as a factor in battle and as a transformative export to foreign lands. Swope 2009 describes East Asia’s biggest military conflict of the 16th century, Japan’s Hideyoshi’s abortive campaigns in Korea.
  324.  
  325. Robinson, David M. Bandits, Eunuchs, and the Son of Heaven: Rebellion and the Economy of Violence in Mid-Ming China. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2001.
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  327. Robinson chronicles a major early-16th-century rebellion that affected approximately one-third of the Ming Empire. He contextualizes the rebellion in enduring social and political institutions that made systematic use of illicit violence.
  328. Find this resource:
  329. Shin, Leo K. “The Last Campaigns of Wang Yangming.” T’oung Pao 2d ser. 92.1–3 (2006): 101–128.
  330. DOI: 10.1163/156853206778553225Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  331. Examining the contrasting approaches that Wang Yangming used in his campaigns against different “non-Chinese” groups, Shin illustrates the interplay of contemporary ideas about China and the Other with military and political exigencies.
  332. Find this resource:
  333. Sun Laichen. “Military Technology Transfers from Ming China and the Emergence of Northern Mainland Southeast Asia (c. 1390–1527).” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 34.3 (2003): 495–517.
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  335. Arguing that scholars have privileged Southeast Asia’s maritime ties at the expense of overland connection, Sun shows how Southeast Asian rulers acquired and employed gunpowder technology from the Ming to enhance political and military power. Sun describes the Ming as military superpower, whose founding must be considered the beginning of a world military revolution. Available online by subscription.
  336. Find this resource:
  337. Sun Laichen. “Chinese Gunpowder Technology and Ðại Việt, ca. 1390–1497.” In Việt Nam: Borderless Histories. Edited by Nhung Tuyet Tran and Anthony J. S. Reid, 72–120. New Perspectives in Southeast Asian Studies. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006.
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  339. Sun’s work is broadly important for thinking about the role of military technology in foreign relations and state formation. Arguing that scholars have dangerously privileged Southeast Asia’s maritime ties at the expense of overland connection, Sun shows how Southeast Asian rulers acquired and employed gunpowder technology from the Ming to enhance political and military power. This essay focuses on the example of Dai Viet.
  340. Find this resource:
  341. Swope, Kenneth. “All Men Are Not Brothers: Ethnic Identity and Dynasty Loyalty in the Ningxia Mutiny of 1592.” Late Imperial China 24.1 (2003): 79–129.
  342. DOI: 10.1353/late.2003.0010Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  343. A detailed narrative of a mutiny in the northwest corner of the Ming Empire, by an imperial military commander who was of Mongol descent and who openly appealed to Mongols on the steppe.
  344. Find this resource:
  345. Swope, Kenneth. “Crouching Tigers, Secret Weapons: Military Technology Employed during the Sino-Japanese-Korean War, 1592–1598.” Journal of Military History 69.1 (2005): 11–43.
  346. DOI: 10.1353/jmh.2005.0059Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  347. Swope examines the contrasting uses and impact of Ming cannon and Japanese firearms as seen in Hideyoshi’s abortive but highly destructive invasion of Korea in the 1590s. Swope argues that large cannon provided an important but underappreciated military advantage for the imperial Ming forces. Available online by subscription.
  348. Find this resource:
  349. Swope, Kenneth. A Dragon’s Head and a Serpent’s Tail: Ming China and the First Great East Asian War, 1592–1598. Campaigns and Commanders 20. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2009.
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  351. Swope makes extensive use of Chinese and Korean primary sources, in this detailed narrative of the abortive campaigns by Hideyoshi, Japan’s paramount leader, in Korea.
  352. Find this resource:
  353. Waldron, Arthur. The Great Wall of China: From History to Myth. Cambridge Studies in Chinese History, Literature, and Institutions. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
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  355. A pioneering study that examines the interplay of cultural constructs regarding self and the Other, geopolitical strategy, logistics, and politics. Waldron argues that the Great Wall was the result of debate and compromise at the Ming court rather than an emblem of xenophobia or some unchanging Chinese attitudes toward the rest of the world.
  356. Find this resource:
  357. Zheng He and Maritime Ming
  358.  
  359. During the early decades of the 15th century, the Ming state dispatched seven massive maritime expeditions (often called the Zheng He voyages, after the name of a Muslim eunuch appointed by the court to oversee several of the missions) to Southeast and South Asia (Dreyer 2007, Levathes 1994). Scholars have debated the objectives, accomplishments, and historical significance of these expeditions. They have been interpreted as a form of gunboat diplomacy, an effort to restart the global economy, a diplomatic display, and even evidence of China’s fundamentally pacific approach to foreign relations (Wade 2005). Although some have seen the end of the expeditions as evidence of China’s turn inward, the movement of goods and people across the seas continued long after the central government ceased to sponsor dramatic armadas (Ptak 1999; Wang 1998, cited under Foreign Relations) and the Ming state retained strategic interests in Southeast Asia (Wade 2008). For all these reasons, it is important contextualize the “Zheng He voyages” as part of wider regional patterns of interaction (Wade and Sun 2010).
  360.  
  361. Dreyer, Edward L. Zheng He: China and the Oceans in the Early Ming Dynasty, 1405–1433. Library of World Biography. New York: Pearson/Longman, 2007.
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  363. The most comprehensive English-language account of Zheng He and his voyages. The appendix includes translations of Zheng He’s biography from the Official History of the Ming Dynasty and several inscriptions commissioned in Zheng He’s name. The “Notes on Sources” section at the end of the book is a convenient guide to past scholarship.
  364. Find this resource:
  365. Levathes, Louise. When China Ruled the Seas: The Treasure Fleet of the Dragon Throne, 1405–1433. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994.
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  367. An informed and accessible account of Zheng He’s voyages, written for an educated general audience. The book works well in undergraduate college courses.
  368. Find this resource:
  369. Ptak, Roderich. China’s Seaborne Trade with South and Southeast Asia, 1200–1750. Collected Studies CS640. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 1999.
  370. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  371. A collection of fourteen previously published essays on sharply focused topics, by a leading scholar of Chinese maritime trade during the premodern period. These painstakingly documented essays are perhaps most useful for those who bring substantial background knowledge to the table.
  372. Find this resource:
  373. Wade, Geoff. “The Zheng He Voyages: A Reassessment.” Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 77.1 (2005): 37–58.
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  375. Wade critically examines claims made about objectives, accomplishments, and limitations of the Ming dynasty’s early-15th-century maritime expeditions into Southeast and South Asia, arguing that the Ming was engaged in a variety of gunboat diplomacy and military intimidation.
  376. Find this resource:
  377. Wade, Geoff. “Engaging the South: Ming China and Southeast Asia in the Fifteenth Century.” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 51.4 (2008): 578–638.
  378. DOI: 10.1163/156852008X354643Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  379. Drawing primarily on the Veritable Records of the Ming, Wade introduces Ming foreign policy, traces the Ming state’s political and economic policies pursued vis-à-vis Southeast Asia, and considers their impact on the political, economic, technological, and cultural topographies of Southeast Asia. Available online for purchase or by subscription.
  380. Find this resource:
  381. Wade, Geoff, and Sun Laichen, eds. Southeast Asia in the Fifteenth Century: The China Factor. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2010.
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  383. An important collection of essays that explore transitions in 15th-century Southeast Asia, with special attention to the relative importance of China. The introductory essays by Wade and Sun provide cogent synthesis of the relevant issues and offer useful insights into how to frame both Southeast Asia and the Ming’s impact at a regional and a global level.
  384. Find this resource:
  385. Smuggling and Piracy
  386.  
  387. During the late 14th century, smuggling and piracy along the Eastern Seaboard had been a major concern of domestic security and international relations. During the mid-16th century, these problems assumed far-greater severity, throwing into relief several interrelated issues of governance, including the growing importance of international maritime commerce to local economies; widespread collusion among regional elites, imperial military personnel, and private merchants; tensions over how best to regulate international trade and diplomatic relations; and, finally, how to balance the conflicting interests of the court in Beijing with those of the provinces. Higgins 1980 examines the collusion of local elite families with men involved in illicit trade, while Hucker 1974 stresses the complex strategies Ming officials used either to co-opt or destroy the men who led smuggling and illicit trading operations. Meskill 1994 focuses on local perception of piracy, and So 1975 provides a broad analysis and copious translations of contemporary documents.
  388.  
  389. Higgins, Roland L. “Pirates in Gowns and Caps: Gentry Law-Breaking in the Mid-Ming.” Ming Studies 10 (Spring 1980): 30–37.
  390. DOI: 10.1179/014703780788764965Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  391. A succinct account of how an official dispatched by the court, Zhu Wan, to suppress smuggling and piracy was undone by the resistance of local elites who were deeply invested in illicit international trade. Defeated and humiliated, Zhu Wan committed suicide in 1550. Available online for purchase or by subscription.
  392. Find this resource:
  393. Hucker, Charles O. “Hu Tsung-hsien’s Campaign against Hsü Hai, 1556.” In Chinese Ways in Warfare. Edited by Frank A. Kierman Jr. and John K. Fairbank, 273–307. Harvard East Asian Series 74. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974.
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  395. A detailed narrative of how an official dispatched by the court, Hu Zongxian 胡宗憲, used a mix of military force, negotiations, and deception to capture a leading Chinese merchant active in smuggling and piracy.
  396. Find this resource:
  397. Meskill, John T. Gentlemanly Interests and Wealth on the Yangtze Delta. Monographs and Occasional Papers 49. Ann Arbor, MI: Association for Asian Studies, 1994.
  398. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  399. In the chapter “Marauders and the Aftermath,” Meskill examines the mid-16th century through the experiences and perceptions of Songjiang, an affluent prefecture located on the Yangzi delta.
  400. Find this resource:
  401. So, Kwan-wai. Japanese Piracy in Ming China during the 16th Century. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1975.
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  403. Slightly dated, this study is still useful for the extensive translations of mid-16th-century Chinese accounts of piracy, its origins, and the campaigns of suppression.
  404. Find this resource:
  405. Military Institutions
  406.  
  407. Although English-language scholarship on Ming military institutions is limited, a rich and rapidly expanding body of Chinese and Japanese scholarship offers a wide variety of perspectives and methodologies for understanding military institutions of the Ming. A number of studies have examined such core institutions as military agricultural lands (Gu 1989a, Wang 1965), military exile (Wu 2003), military registration and households (Gu 1989b, Taylor 1969, Yu 1987, Zhang 2007), and military examinations for officers.
  408.  
  409. Gu Cheng 顧誠. “Mingdiguo de jiangtu guanli tizhi” (明帝國的疆土管理體制). Lishi yanjiu (歴史研究) 3 (1989a): 135–150.
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  411. One of several highly influential essays by a senior historian that are related to the intersection of land tenure, the garrison system, and hereditary military households, this article looks at the administrative structures for managing the vast tracts of lands devoted to the imperial military.
  412. Find this resource:
  413. Gu Cheng 顧誠. “Tan Mingdai de weiji” (談明代的衛籍). Beijing shifan daxue xuebao 5 (1989b): 56–65.
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  415. This article shows how only a small portion of those registered as military households actually shouldered any military responsibilities. Deciding how to apportion those duties among branches of a family often created acute tensions.
  416. Find this resource:
  417. Taylor, Romeyn. “Yuan Origins of the Wei-so System.” Paper presented at the Research Conference on Ming Government held in 1965 at the University of Illinois. In Chinese Government in Ming Times: Seven Studies. Edited by Charles O. Hucker, 23–40. Studies in Oriental Culture 2. New York: Columbia University Press, 1969.
  418. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  419. Taylor shows that the hereditary military household system had its origins in the preceding Mongol period.
  420. Find this resource:
  421. Wang Yuquan 王毓銓. Mingdai de juntun (明代的軍屯). Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1965.
  422. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  423. An influential study based on extensive use of a variety of Ming-period primary documents, Wang examines in detail the establishment of military agricultural colonies; their size; tax rates and collections; conditions and obligations of personnel who worked the lands; their forms of resistance; and the de facto and often-illegal privatization of such lands. Republished in 2009.
  424. Find this resource:
  425. Wu Yanhong 吳艷紅. Mingdai chongjun yanjiu (明代充軍研究). Beijing: Shehui kexue wenxian chubanshe, 2003.
  426. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  427. An in-depth look at how military exile as a form of punishment worked during the Ming. Wu examines the laws governing military exile and their enforcement; the details of transportation, relocation, and their impact on demography; and the significance of the military exile system for the Ming military.
  428. Find this resource:
  429. Yu Zhijia 于志嘉. Mingdai junhu shixi zhidu (明代軍戶世襲制度). Shixue congshu 7. Taibei: Taiwan xuesheng shuju, 1987.
  430. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  431. A pioneering work on the institutional workings of the hereditary military household system, by the most important scholar of the topic.
  432. Find this resource:
  433. Zhang Jinkui 張金奎. Mingdai weisuo junhu yanjiu (明代衛所軍戶研究). Beijing: Xianzhuang shuju, 2007.
  434. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  435. A detailed and wide-ranging study of Ming military households that includes useful analysis of the judicial organization of garrisons, households’ extra-institutional economic activities, housing patterns, and welfare provisions for military families.
  436. Find this resource:
  437. Garrisons
  438.  
  439. Several scholars have examined the evolution of the capital garrisons and the links between their organization and military crises, while others have focused their attention on the development of hired soldiers, local paramilitary security forces, and border defenses (Aoyama 1996, Peng 2006). Where some studies have offered panoptic overviews encompassing the temporal and geographical span of the entire dynasty, others have focused on a particular period or, especially in recent years, a particular region (Yu 2010).
  440.  
  441. Aoyama Jirō 青山治郎. Mindai keieishi kenkyū (明代京営史研究). Sapporo, Japan: Kyobunsha, 1996.
  442. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  443. A detailed examination of the shifting organization and composition of the capital garrisons during the Ming period.
  444. Find this resource:
  445. Peng Yong 彭勇. Mingdai banjun zhidu yanjiu (明代班軍制度研究). Beijing: Zhongyang minzu daxue chubanshe, 2006.
  446. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  447. The most detailed account of the capital rotation system, an institution that rotated troops from the provinces to the capital for duty. Peng notes that although other elements of the Ming garrison may have fallen into decline as early as the mid-15th century, rotation duty persisted.
  448. Find this resource:
  449. Yu Zhijia 于志嘉. Weisuo, junhu yu junyi: Yi Ming Qing Jiangxi diqu wei zhongxin de yanjiu (衛所，軍戶與軍役：以明清江西地區為中心的研究). Zhongguo shehui wenhua shicongshu. Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe, 2010.
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  451. Yu combines a regional focus (Jiangxi Province) with a concern about how the hereditary military household system influences factors such as land tenure, corvee labor obligations (particularly grain transport), and legal jurisdiction. The last chapter is a useful review of the field of Ming military history.
  452. Find this resource:
  453. State and Society
  454.  
  455. Several interrelated questions have informed much scholarship on the Ming since the early 20th century. What was the nature and reach of the Ming state? How are we to understand the relationship among the state, elite families, and the people? Early articulations ranged from notions of oriental despotism to the idea that Chinese society and the state proceeded along largely separate tracks. Mote 1961 (cited under the Founding Ming Emperor, Hongwu) rejects a generalized view of China as the homeland of despotism, arguing simultaneously that the Ming represented an unprecedented level of despotism and that realization of individual emperor’s theoretically unlimited power was limited by conventions of acceptable power. Huang 1981 (cited under Court Politics during the Mid-Ming) further emphasizes the limits of Ming emperors’ power, which he argues were circumscribed by dynastic traditions established by Hongwu and by the modest organizational capacity of the Ming state. Brook 1993 finds a version of the “public realm” in 17th-century gentry patronage of Buddhist temples, a field of social activity outside government control and individual families. Other works have suggested that the resources of the state were exploited by individuals and families, ranging from landed elites to the humblest subjects in the realm. The interplay among these varied groups was an essential element both of Ming governance and family fortunes (Robinson 2001, Schneewind 2006a, Schneewind 2006b, Szonyi 2002).
  456.  
  457. Brook, Timothy. Praying for Power: Buddhism and the Formation of Gentry Society in Late-Ming China. Harvard-Yenching Institute Monograph 38. Cambridge, MA: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1993.
  458. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  459. A study of gentry patronage of Buddhist temples during the 17th century, with particular focus on what Brook describes as the emergence of a distinctive realm of social activity located between the public sphere of government service and the private sphere of the family.
  460. Find this resource:
  461. Robinson, David M. Bandits, Eunuchs, and the Son of Heaven: Rebellion and the Economy of Violence in Mid-Ming China. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2001.
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  463. Robinson looks at the economy of violence in and around the capital, which bound political elites at court, local officials, garrison authorities, imperial troops, and outlaws. He argues that just as government officials attempted to turn the talents of outlaws to their advantage, these local toughs simultaneously exploited such ties to the state to pursue their own interests.
  464. Find this resource:
  465. Schneewind, Sarah. Community Schools and the State in Ming China. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006a.
  466. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  467. Schneewind considers that the community school, an institution mandated by the central government, changed over time. She argues that many elements of the Ming state were created as much from below as from above, demonstrating that the founding emperor’s institutions and edicts were subject to repeated reinterpretation, selective implementation, and skillful manipulation.
  468. Find this resource:
  469. Schneewind, Sarah. A Tale of Two Melons: Emperor and Subject in Ming China. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2006b.
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  471. Using a minor episode in Ming history, the presentation to Hongwu of two melons grown from a single stalk by local farmers in 1372, Schneewind offers a primer on how to read primary sources (with their competing agendas and perspectives) and how to approach the nature of imperial power (contested at every turn and subject to repeated reinterpretation and appropriation).
  472. Find this resource:
  473. Szonyi, Michael. Practicing Kinship: Lineage and Descent in Late Imperial China. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002.
  474. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  475. Drawing on a wide base of historical materials, social theory, and field observations, this important study explores the constructed nature of kinship; the imaginative ways that individuals and families negotiated state demands of labor and taxes; and the dynamic interaction among religion, ritual, and identity during the Ming and Qing periods.
  476. Find this resource:
  477. The Imperial Family and Court Culture
  478.  
  479. Although emperors have long figured in political histories of the Ming period, until recently relatively little attention had been paid to the imperial family and court culture. Chan 2007 gives a good sense of the formidable Hongwu’s frustrations with his errant offspring. Soullière 1987 and Soullière 2005 shed light on the place and origins of palace women. Essays in Robinson 2008 examine the Ming court from a variety of perspectives and draw on diverse materials. Wan 2009 explores the mid-16th-century emperor Jiajing and his efforts to create a Daoist paradise on the grounds of the imperial palace complex. The most ambitious exploration of the Ming court is a multivolume series published by Zijincheng chubanshe (the Forbidden City Press) (Li and Zhao 2010–).
  480.  
  481. Chan, Hok-lam. “Ming Taizu’s Problem with His Sons: Prince Qin’s Criminality and Early-Ming Politics.” Asia Major 3d ser. 20.1 (2007): 45–103.
  482. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  483. Chan documents the errant behavior of the Ming founder’s sons, with special attention to the Qin Prince. Especially striking is how the mighty Hongwu never figured out how to regulate his offspring’s sometimes violent behavior.
  484. Find this resource:
  485. Li Zhenyu 李真瑜, and Zhao Zhongnan 趙中男. Mingdai gongtingshi yanjiu congshu (明代宮廷史研究叢書). Beijing: Zijincheng chubanshe, 2010–.
  486. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  487. This multiauthor series includes volumes devoted to institutions, politics, finances, diplomacy, architecture, gardens, religion, women, eunuchs, painting, porcelains, textiles, furniture, literature, publications, and theater at the Ming court.
  488. Find this resource:
  489. Robinson, David M., ed. Culture, Courtiers, and Competition: The Ming Court (1368–1644). Harvard East Asian Monograph 301. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2008.
  490. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  491. A collection of eight essays on music, portraiture, education, publishing, eunuchs, military patronage, and styles of rulership at the Ming.
  492. Find this resource:
  493. Soullière, Ellen F. “Palace Women in the Ming Dynasty, 1368–1644.” PhD diss., Princeton University, 1987.
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  495. The fullest study of palace women during the Ming, including their social backgrounds, administrative functions in the palace, role as patrons, and political functions.
  496. Find this resource:
  497. Soullière, Ellen F. “Structural Features of the Organization of Imperial Women in China’s Ming Dynasty (1368–1644).” In Asian Futures, Asian Traditions. Edited by Edwina Palmer, 37–59. Folkstone, UK: Global Oriental, 2005.
  498. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  499. This essay examines the fertility, recruitment geographical origins, administrative organization, foot binding, and political status of Ming imperial women.
  500. Find this resource:
  501. Wan, Maggie C. K. “Building an Immortal Land: The Ming Jiajing Emperor’s West Park.” Asia Major 3d ser. 22.2 (2009): 65–99.
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  503. Wan examines the mid-16th-century Jiajing emperor’s efforts to create a Daoist paradise (through the renaming or construction of temples, altars, and gardens) in the West Park, a large park located on the grounds of the Ming imperial palace complex.
  504. Find this resource:
  505. Imperial Princes
  506.  
  507. More recently still, scholars have begun to explore the branches of the imperial family resident in the provinces. The founding emperor had believed that his sons would serve as local bulwarks of dynastic power, and thus he gave them important military, administrative, and financial responsibilities. Early in the 15th century, one son, the Yan Prince, usurped the throne to become the Yongle emperor (see the Second Founding Emperor, Yongle). Even after imperial princes ceased to command military forces or to direct local administration, they remained powerful. Because of the prince’s special status and local influence, their revolts demanded the dynasty’s full attention (Robinson 2012b). Scholarship produced in the People’s Republic of China has tended to characterize this ever-expanding body of imperial princes as self-indulgent, often-brutal parasites who battened on dynastic coffers and abused local populations (Robinson 2012a). The most detailed examination of princely support of Taoism is Wang 2012. Princes also underwrote the printing of literary, philosophical, and historical works (Kerlouégan 2011) and exercised significant political and economic influence through their status as imperial clan members. Yang 2012 examines what archaeological excavations reveal about princely courts.
  508.  
  509. Kerlouégan, Jérôme. “Printing for Prestige? Publishing and Publications by Ming Princes.” East Asian Publishing and Society 1.1 (2011): 39–73.
  510. DOI: 10.1163/221062811X577503Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  511. Continued in East Asian Publishing and Society 1.2 (2011): 105–144; 2.1 (2012): 3–75; and 2.2 (2012): 109–198. The most detailed study of the printing activities of Ming princes that is available in any language. Kerlouégan has an excellent command of the relevant sources and has gathered an enormous amount of bibliographic information in convenient form.
  512. Find this resource:
  513. Robinson, David M “Princely Courts of the Ming Dynasty.” Ming Studies 65 (2012a): 1–12.
  514. DOI: 10.1179/0147037X12Z.0000000005Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  515. A short introduction to Chinese and Western scholarship on Ming princely courts.
  516. Find this resource:
  517. Robinson, David M. “Princes in the Polity: The Anhua Prince’s Uprising of 1510.” Ming Studies 65 (2012b): 13–56.
  518. DOI: 10.1179/0147037X12Z.0000000004Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  519. A detailed narrative of a princely revolt that occurred in 1510 in Ningxia, a strategic garrison town in the northwest corner of the empire. Robinson argues that the revolt was appropriated by court ministers and chroniclers in the capital to illustrate the dangerous power of a powerful eunuch, Liu Jin.
  520. Find this resource:
  521. Wang, Richard G. The Ming Prince and Daoism: Institutional Patronage of an Elite. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.
  522. DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199767687.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  523. The most detailed study of Ming princely patronage of Daoism, in any language. Wang makes use of a wealth of primary documents and secondary studies.
  524. Find this resource:
  525. Yang, Xiaoneng. “Archaeological Perspectives on the Princely Burials of the Ming Dynasty Enfeoffments.” Ming Studies 65 (2012): 93–118.
  526. DOI: 10.1179/0147037X12Z.0000000002Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  527. Yang surveys archaeological work on the construction and layout of princely tombs and on the clothes and objects buried with princes and their consorts, with attention to regional variation and the personal agency of individual princes. His bibliography is particularly useful for those interested in pursuing these lines of analysis further.
  528. Find this resource:
  529. Local Governance
  530.  
  531. Much of Ming government depended on local magistrates, responsible for assessing and collecting taxes, extracting corvee labor, and maintaining a modicum of order. Although early studies sometimes highlighted corruption and ossification (Huang 1974), much scholarship since the early 1990s has in contrast stressed the flexibility of local government and its ability to adapt to changing socioeconomic conditions on the ground. Understanding how the humblest levels of the Ming imperial administration interacted with local society is an important avenue for exploring state-society relations. Brook 2005 conveniently brings together several previously published essays related to the lower levels of Ming administration (among other things) and a short introduction by a senior scholar of the Ming period. Littrup 1981 and Nimick 2008 focus on local administration. Heijdra 1998 traces how Ming administrative structures adapted to shifting socioeconomic conditions.
  532.  
  533. Brook, Timothy. The Chinese State in Ming Society. Critical Asian Scholarship. New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2005.
  534. DOI: 10.4324/9780203311332Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  535. Brook considers the details of local administrative units, reforms in taxation to changes in local landscape (through the example of cultivated lands within embankments built in low-lying lands), and one magistrate’s efforts to map out the territory he oversaw with an eye to improving taxation.
  536. Find this resource:
  537. Heijdra, Martin. “The Socio-economic Development of Rural China during the Ming.” In The Cambridge History of China. Vol. 8, The Ming Dynasty, 1368–1644, Part 2. Edited by Frederick W. Mote and Denis Twitchett, 417–578. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
  538. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  539. Drawing on a wide variety of East Asian and Western scholarship, Heijdra offers a clear analysis of how rural administration responded to demographic changes and fiscal demands of the state. He covers the organization of the lijia system, tax assessment and collection, and periodic reform.
  540. Find this resource:
  541. Huang, Ray. Taxation and Governmental Finance in Sixteenth-Century Ming China. Cambridge Studies in Chinese History, Literature, and Institutions. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1974.
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  543. A detailed examination of the Ming dynasty’s fiscal institutions. Huang highlights the inefficiency and rigidity of administrative structures, arguing that low tax rates failed to keep pace with a dynamic commercial economy, which in turn rendered the dynasty incapable of responding effectively to new challenges.
  544. Find this resource:
  545. Littrup, Leif. Subbureaucratic Government in China in Ming Times: A Study of Shandong Province in the Sixteenth Century. Instituttet for Sammenlignende Kulturforskning, Serie B 64. Oslo, Norway: Universitetsforlaget, 1981.
  546. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  547. Through a detailed case study of a county in Shandong Province from 1550 to the mid-17th century, Littrup examines the lijia system, groups of 110 households organized for tax and administrative purposes. He focuses on the state’s attempts to mobilize local resources and on local communities’ efforts to cope with what Littrup characterizes as an antiquated system.
  548. Find this resource:
  549. Nimick, Thomas G. Local Administration in Ming China: The Changing Roles of Magistrates, Prefects, and Provincial Officials. Ming Studies Research 5. Minneapolis: Society for Ming Studies, 2008.
  550. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  551. Analysis of local administration on the basis of an excellent grasp of primary sources, including a wide variety of works written by and for local magistrates. Nimick shows that the organization and functioning of local administration responded to shifting demands and that local magistrates exercised considerable autonomy and initiative in adapting to local conditions and state mandates.
  552. Find this resource:
  553. Society and Culture
  554.  
  555. The 16th and early 17th centuries have been among the most intensely studied periods of Chinese history, with great attention lavished on developments in thought, society, economy, religion, and art, which have been variously described as an age of cultural florescence, precocious frustrated modernity, and a time of individualism and innovation. How to integrate the conflicting demands of a commercial economy, an information explosion, personal cultivation, and morality became a recurring concern that took many forms. De Bary 1970 and de Bary 1975 explore how educated men struggled to understand themselves and their potential in the contexts of family, society, the polity, and the cosmos. New wealth and material abundance simultaneously increased cultural patronage and production, expanded the possibilities of visual culture, and deepened anxiety over the corrosive influence of wealth on “proper” social hierarchies (Brook 1998, Clunas 1991, Clunas 2007). Despite a well-established rhetorical tradition that decried financial considerations among true gentleman as base and demeaning, monetary concerns deeply shaped the production and consumption of art (Cahill 1994).
  556.  
  557. Brook, Timothy. The Confusions of Pleasure: Commerce and Culture in Ming China. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.
  558. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  559. A lively account of how the expansion of commerce changed life in Ming China. Brook shows that for many educated men, greater levels of physical and social mobility; the spreading influence of commerce; and richer possibilities for education, entertainment, and expression were profoundly disturbing, resulting in strong nostalgia for an idealized vision of the early decades of the dynasty.
  560. Find this resource:
  561. Cahill, James. The Painter’s Practice: How Artists Lived and Worked in Traditional China. Bampton Lectures in America. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.
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  563. Cahill shows that pecuniary concerns often informed what gentlemanly painters produced, despite a rhetoric that dismissed financial considerations as beneath a man of good breeding.
  564. Find this resource:
  565. Clunas, Craig. Superfluous Things: Material Culture and Social Status in Early Modern China. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991.
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  567. A detailed analysis of how a dynamic commercial economy loosened the connections among wealth, taste, and social status, creating a niche for cultural advisors whose guidance was available, for a price, to insecure nouveau riche.
  568. Find this resource:
  569. Clunas, Craig. Empire of Great Brightness: Visual and Material Cultures of Ming China, 1368–1644. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2007.
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  571. An engagingly written and handsomely illustrated volume by a pioneering art historian that explores the social history of art and material goods during the Ming.
  572. Find this resource:
  573. de Bary, William Theodore, ed. Self and Society in Ming Thought. Studies in Oriental Culture 4. New York: Columbia University Press, 1970.
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  575. Twelve essays that explore how Ming men approached the question of self and society, from Confucian, Buddhist, and Daoist perspectives. In the still-useful introduction, de Bary describes the 16th and 17th centuries as “one of the most creative and stimulating periods in the history of Chinese thought.”
  576. Find this resource:
  577. de Bary, William Theodore, ed. The Unfolding of Neo-Confucianism. Studies in Oriental Culture 10. New York: Columbia University Press, 1975.
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  579. Thirteen essays that focus on facets of Neo-Confucianism, including its connection to politics, Buddhism, desire, and Christianity, during the 17th century.
  580. Find this resource:
  581. Socioeconomic Developments
  582.  
  583. Since the mid-20th century, scholars have been keenly interested in commercial growth, increasing use of silver, and their consequences for governance, society, culture, and thought during the Ming period. Beginning in the 1950s, scholars in the People’s Republic of China conceptualized such developments as the “sprouts of capitalism”; detailed studies, large compendia of related primary sources, and periodic debates about the definition, form, and impact of socioeconomic development during the Ming resulted in a large body of work only partially engaged in Western scholarship. During the 1990s, a series of English-language studies examined the interaction of rapid economic and social change through a number of prisms. The fullest synthesis is Heijdra 1998. Brook 1998 offers a good sense of developments in transportation, communication, commerce, and culture. Although the importance of silver in the Ming economy is widely recognized, scholars have debated the relative importance of silver imports from the New World and Japan (Atwell 1998, Von Glahn 1996). Others have framed the question differently, arguing that Chinese demand drove much of the world economy during the Ming period (Flynn and Giráldez 1995).
  584.  
  585. Atwell, William. “Ming China and the Emerging World Economy, c. 1470–1650.” In The Cambridge History of China. Vol. 8, The Ming Dynasty, 1368–1644, Part 2. Edited by Frederick W. Mote and Denis Twitchett, 376–416. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
  586. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  587. A broad survey of the place of the Chinese economy in the world. Atwell is particularly interested in global silver flows.
  588. Find this resource:
  589. Brook, Timothy. “Communications and Commerce.” In The Cambridge History of China. Vol. 8, The Ming Dynasty, 1368–1644, Part 2. Edited by Frederick W. Mote and Denis Twitchett, 579–707. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
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  591. This essay provides a clear analysis of the state’s courier service and postal service, the Grand Canal, overland and maritime transport, and various forms of travel. Brook also discusses the production and circulation of printed information and developments in commerce.
  592. Find this resource:
  593. Flynn, Dennis O., and Arturo Giráldez. “Born with a ‘Silver Spoon’: The Origin of World Trade in 1571.” Journal of World History 6.2 (1995): 201–221.
  594. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  595. Arguing that the silver market was essential to the emergence of world trade, this essay challenges the notion that Europe was the epicenter of early modern commercial activity, instead highlighting the centrality of China’s insatiable appetite for silver. Available online by subscription.
  596. Find this resource:
  597. Heijdra, Martin. “The Socio-economic Development of Rural China during the Ming.” In The Cambridge History of China. Vol. 8, The Ming Dynasty, 1368–1644, Part 2. Edited by Frederick W. Mote and Denis Twitchett, 417–578. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
  598. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  599. Although dense going, this lengthy essay is essential reading. Masterfully synthesizing an enormous body of secondary studies in Japanese, Chinese, and European languages, Heijdra offers insightful and well-informed interpretations on everything from periodic markets, silver usage, and the monetization of taxes to land tenure, demographic trends, and the place of gentry elites.
  600. Find this resource:
  601. Von Glahn, Richard. Fountain of Fortune: Money and Monetary Policy in China, 1000–1700. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.
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  603. Clearly explains Chinese monetary history and economic theory. Von Glahn traces the uneven efforts of successive Chinese governments to control the value of currency and the subsequent rise of the “silver economy” that reflected the power of the autonomous market.
  604. Find this resource:
  605. Cities
  606.  
  607. The growth of periodic markets, townships, and large metropolitan areas has figured prominently in scholarship on the Ming. By the mid- to late 15th century, periodic markets where farmers, craftsmen, merchants, and others exchanged goods had grown increasingly common in many parts of the empire (Yamane 1995). Major urban areas grew up around frontier garrisons, sites of foreign trade and commerce, and political centers; their spatial configuration, economic activities, and relations with the state varied accordingly (Han 2009, Marmé 2005). Urban centers in the Jiangnan region and Beijing have been the most closely studied cities (Geiss 1979, Johnson 1993, Mote 1973, Naquin 2000, Xu 1959).
  608.  
  609. Geiss, James. “Peking under the Ming (1368–1644).” PhD diss., Princeton University, 1979.
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  611. Although never published, Geiss’s dissertation remains the standard treatment of Beijing’s transformation from a frontier military garrison early in the 15th century to the empire’s political center. Geiss shows the importance of the imperial court, its needs, and its tastes to the socioeconomic development of Beijing.
  612. Find this resource:
  613. Han Dacheng 韓大成. Mingdai chengshi yanjiu (明代城市研究). Rev. ed. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2009.
  614. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  615. A classic work that examines cities that developed around commerce, foreign trade, frontier garrisons, and administrative centers during the Ming. Han highlights socioeconomic over cultural developments.
  616. Find this resource:
  617. Johnson, Linda Cooke, ed. Cities of Jiangnan in Late Imperial China. SUNY Series in Chinese Local Studies. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993.
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  619. A collection of essays that examine some of the most affluent cities in China from the 12th to 19th centuries, including Shanghai, Suzhou, Hangzhou, and Yangzhou. They variously show the material wealth, cultural sophistication, social tensions, and shifting economic structures of these southeastern cities.
  620. Find this resource:
  621. Marmé, Michael. Suzhou: Where the Goods of All the Provinces Converge. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005.
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  623. A detailed examination of one of the premodern world’s most affluent cities, Suzhou explores the complex interplay of the state and local elites; the shifting dynamics among commercial wealth, scholarship, and social status; and the place of the Ming in longer patterns of Chinese history.
  624. Find this resource:
  625. Mote, Frederick W. “A Millennium of Chinese Urban History: Form, Time, and Space Concepts in Soochow.” Rice University Studies 59.4 (1973): 35–65.
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  627. Mote notes the lack of a clear divide between the city and the surrounding countryside; the preference for monuments in writing and memory rather than buildings; and the attraction of the rural, both actual and imagined, through his discussion of Suzhou, an important and affluent city in Jiangnan. These concepts are also readily apparent in his other writings.
  628. Find this resource:
  629. Naquin, Susan. Peking: Temples and City Life, 1400–1900. Philip E. Lilienthal Book in Asian Studies. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.
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  631. A detailed examination of communities and urban activity that draws on and is in many ways shaped by the body of primary documents (including temple inscriptions, stelae, travel accounts, pilgrimage and tourist guides, private literati jottings, and observations by foreign visitors, to name just a few) that Naquin uses to recreate the social world of the city that served as the capital both for the Ming and Qing dynasties.
  632. Find this resource:
  633. Xu Daling 許大齡. “Mingdai Beijing de jingji shenghuo” (明代北京的經濟生活). Beijing daxue xuebao (北京大學學報) 42 (1959): 185–207.
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  635. An early and still-useful essay that examines agriculture and land tenure in Beijing’s suburbs, imperial pasturages and military agricultural colonies, craftsmen in state employ, merchants, the growth of the commercial economy, and the impact of the imperial family on economic activities in Beijing. Available online for purchase or by subscription.
  636. Find this resource:
  637. Yamane Yukio 山根幸夫. Min-Shin kahoku teikishi no kenkyū (明清華北定期市の研究). Kyūko Shoin. Tokyo: Kyūko, 1995.
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  639. This is a collection of the author’s pioneering series of essays on periodic and temple markets in North China during the Ming and Qing dynasties. Yamane makes extensive use of local gazetteers to trace the markets’ growth, their function in local economies, their connections to local elites, and the spreading use of silver.
  640. Find this resource:
  641. Gender and Sexuality
  642.  
  643. Works on gender during the Ming have tended to focus on women. Carlitz 1997 examines heroines of female fidelity as a discursive strategy employed by elite families to highlight their Confucian morality and their ties to empire-wide values. Cass 1999 attempts “a study in the private language of women,” but as the author observes, her sources were written almost entirely by highly educated men. Cai 2011 also offers a wide-ranging account of women’s lives that tries to go beyond prescriptive, didactic accounts. The late Ming witnessed the rapid growth of erotic literature and prints that reveal much of contemporary social, gender, and religious concerns (McMahon 1987, van Gulik 1961, Wang 2011). Ko 1994 analyzes the literary activities and emotional lives of a small coterie of elite women in the affluent Jiangnan region during the 17th century. Waltner 1996 considers notions of gender and hierarchy as seen in the parts of the Ming Code related to families.
  644.  
  645. Cai Shih-shan 蔡石山 (Henry Tsai). Mingdai de nüren (明代的女人). Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2011.
  646. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  647. In this accessible book, Cai examines the experiences of women in the contexts of the imperial court, literary production, the cult of widow fidelity, brothels, and theater, among others.
  648. Find this resource:
  649. Carlitz, Katherine. “Shrines, Governing-Class Identity, and the Cult of Widow Fidelity in Mid-Ming Jiangnan.” Journal of Asian Studies 56.3 (1997): 612–640.
  650. DOI: 10.2307/2659603Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  651. Carlitz traces the emergence of monuments to heroines of female fidelity, with special attention to the self-representation of local communities, particularly elite families. She considers such influences as the School of the Way, shifting literary tastes, and relations between the local and the state. Available online by subscription.
  652. Find this resource:
  653. Cass, Victoria B. Dangerous Women: Warriors, Grannies, and Geishas of the Ming. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield 1999.
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  655. This engaging and well-written book explores several enduring archetypes during the Ming period, with special attention to the ways that they threatened to subvert established gender, family, social, and political order. The first and longest chapter of the book sets out the wider cultural and social world of the Ming, including both the appeal and danger of urban life.
  656. Find this resource:
  657. Ko, Dorothy. Teachers of the Inner Chambers: Women and Culture in Seventeenth-Century China. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994.
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  659. In this influential work, Ko shows how a commercialized economy and booming print culture in the affluent Jiangnan region opened up new possibilities for greater freedom of expression among educated elite women. Ko’s introduction is highly useful for those trying to get a sense of the historiography and for unpacking long-standing assumptions about women in Chinese history.
  660. Find this resource:
  661. McMahon, Keith. “Eroticism in Late Ming, Early Qing Fiction: The Beauteous Realm and the Sexual Battlefield.” T’oung Pao 2d ser. 73.4–5 (1987): 217–264.
  662. DOI: 10.1163/156853287X00032Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  663. McMahon argues that late Ming fiction saw an unprecedentedly intense interest in often-disruptive sexuality that during the early Qing was largely replaced by what he says was a return to inner beauty and sexual harmony between men and women. Available online by subscription.
  664. Find this resource:
  665. van Gulik, Richard H. Sexual Life in Ancient China: A Preliminary Survey of Chinese Sex and Society from ca. 1500 B.C. till 1644 A.D. Leiden, The Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 1961.
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  667. Although somewhat dated, van Gulik’s survey remains useful as a point of departure. Although the title suggests a daunting time span, much of the book focuses on the Ming period.
  668. Find this resource:
  669. Waltner, Ann. “Breaking the Law: Family Violence, Gender and Hierarchy in the Legal Code of the Ming Dynasty.” Ming Studies 36 (Spring–Fall 1996): 29–43.
  670. DOI: 10.1179/014703796788763626Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  671. Through examination of laws related to parental authority and spousal violence, Waltner argues that the Ming Code understood the family as a social construct nested within wider ideas about contingent hierarchy. Available online for purchase or by subscription.
  672. Find this resource:
  673. Wang, Richard G. Ming Erotic Novellas: Genre, Consumption, and Religiosity in Cultural Practice. Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2011.
  674. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  675. Wang argues that erotic novella represented a new literary genre that must be understood in the wider social, cultural, and commercial context of the 16th and 17th centuries. He is particularly interested in the interplay of erotic novellas and Taoist beliefs.
  676. Find this resource:
  677. Cultural History
  678.  
  679. Since the late 20th century, scholars have increasingly turned their attention to the cultural history of the Ming period. Meskill 1994 gives an excellent sense of the self-perceptions and self-representations of Ming “gentlemen” in a time of rapid change. More recently, light has been shed on the place of the military and the martial in elite and popular culture (Clunas 2007, Ryor 2009). Brokaw 1991 shows how elites and non-elites thought about the tangible and intangible benefits of leading a moral life during the Ming. Such studies often begin with discussion of the impact of a commercializing economy and a thriving print culture. Chia 2002 provides an insightful look at a corner of the publishing world, the printers of Jianyang, whose fortunes and commercial strategies were intimately linked to wider changes in the economy and culture.
  680.  
  681. Brokaw, Cynthia J. The Ledgers of Merit and Demerit: Social Change and Moral Order in Late Imperial China. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991.
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  683. Brokaw examines the impact of commercialization on social values, through examination of moral guides patterned after merchants’ ledgers; in some schemes, good and bad deeds were “monetized” or assigned a point value, which could be tallied on a daily, weekly, or yearly basis to help individuals control their fortunes in this world and the next.
  684. Find this resource:
  685. Chia, Lucille. Printing for Profit: The Commercial Publishers of Jianyang, Fujian (11th–17th Centuries). Harvard-Yenching Institute Monograph 56. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2002.
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  687. The definitive account of the publishing houses in Jianyang, which specialized in relatively low-end works that ranged from vernacular fiction and plays to medicine and geography to study aids for the civil-service examination. A leading specialist in the field, Chia discusses with insight how changes in calligraphy, page layout, and wood blocks related to shifting readerships.
  688. Find this resource:
  689. Clunas, Craig. Empire of Great Brightness: Visual and Material Cultures of Ming China, 1368–1644. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2007.
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  691. This innovative study attempts to recreate the visual culture(s) of Ming China, through consideration of paintings, porcelains, book illustrations, furniture, ancestral shrines, clothing, calligraphy, playing cards, and more. Chapter 6, “Dark Warriors: Cultures of Violence,” examines the ways that the military and the martial were represented during the Ming.
  692. Find this resource:
  693. Meskill, John T. Gentlemanly Interests and Wealth on the Yangtze Delta. Monograph and Occasional Paper Series 49. Ann Arbor, MI: Association for Asian Studies, 1994.
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  695. Through a detailed case study of Songjiang, an affluent prefecture located on the Yangzi delta, Meskill explores the ways that educated men of wealth and status thought and wrote about themselves. He makes extensive use of lengthy quotations to provide a sense of their language and tone.
  696. Find this resource:
  697. Ryor, Kathleen. “Wen and Wu in Elite Cultural Practices during the Late Ming.” In Military Culture in Imperial China. Edited by Nicola di Cosmo, 219–242. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009.
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  699. Ryor shows the considerable interplay between the educated men of culture and the elite members of hereditary military households, who interacted on a far more regular basis than is commonly assumed. Men of culture were deeply engaged in the martial, collecting swords, practicing martial arts, admiring martial heroes, and following military campaigns, while military men patronized famed painters, wrote poetry, and practiced painting.
  700. Find this resource:
  701. Education and the Examination System
  702.  
  703. The civil-service examination system was one of the most central institutions of the late imperial period, including the Ming. During the Ming period, the civil-service examination was the most prestigious way to enter government service and was a key avenue to social advancement (Ho 1980). Young boys began their education early, usually at home, and families lavished great wealth and attention on their later studies, which would normally continue for two decades or more. Whereas some see the examination system as a cultural prison, a tool of state control (Elman 2000), others stress intellectual vibrancy and the regular reinterpretation of the classical canon (Chow 2004). Private academies not only were sites of education but were also key nodes of intellectual, social, and political foment (Meskill 1982).
  704.  
  705. Chow, Kai-wing. Publishing, Culture, and Power in Early Modern China. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004.
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  707. Focusing on 16th- and 17th-century developments in commercial and private publishing, Chow explores a wide body of commentaries and other examination aids that in effect constituted a “literary public sphere” and that challenged state orthodoxy.
  708. Find this resource:
  709. Elman, Benjamin A. A Cultural History of Civil Examinations in Late Imperial China. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.
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  711. This stimulating work argues that the examination system was a signature element of late imperial social, intellectual, political, and economic life. Elman challenges the claim in Ho 1980 that the examinations promoted social mobility, instead arguing that the state used the examination to exclude most commoners and to imprison generations of elite males by controlling the interpretation of the classical canon.
  712. Find this resource:
  713. Ho, Ping-ti. The Ladder of Success in Imperial China: Aspects of Social Mobility, 1368–1911. Studies of the East Asian Institute. New York: Columbia University Press, 1980.
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  715. A pioneering study, originally published in 1962, that deeply influenced Western understanding of social mobility, status, and education in early modern China. Although education, academies, and the civil-service examination receive attention, Ho’s fundamental concern is with levels of social mobility, especially across the span of several generations.
  716. Find this resource:
  717. Meskill, John T. Academies in Ming China: A Historical Essay. Monographs of the Association for Asian Studies 39. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1982.
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  719. An important monograph of the shifting nature and place of private academies during the Ming. Developing first as supplements to the state school system during the early Ming, from the late 15th century onward, academies emerged as first sites of serious intellectual inquiry and then as places where intellectual, political, and social ambitions coalesced, often sparking condemnations from those who portrayed them as disruptive, even traitorous.
  720. Find this resource:
  721. Wang Yangming
  722.  
  723. The controversial and highly influential Wang Yangming (b. 1472–d. 1529) combined military and administrative success with keen interest in personal cultivation, inspiring both admiration and loathing. Chu 1988 examines the debates surrounding Wang’s status as a Confucian worthy. Shin 2006 explores the interplay between Wang Yangming’s understanding of the cosmos and his actions as a statesman. The only full-length English-language biography of Wang is Tu 1976.
  724.  
  725. Chu, Hung-lam. “The Debate over Recognition of Wang Yang-ming.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 48.1 (1988): 47–70.
  726. DOI: 10.2307/2719272Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  727. Chu analyzes the posthumous debates that raged around whether Wang Yangming merited incorporation into the official state cult of Confucian worthies. He argues that by late in the 16th century, Wang had become valued as a successful official as much as for any of his philosophical musings. Available online by subscription.
  728. Find this resource:
  729. Shin, Leo. “The Last Campaigns of Wang Yangming.” T’oung Pao 2d ser. 92.1–3 (2006): 101–128.
  730. DOI: 10.1163/156853206778553225Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  731. Shin looks at the final military campaigns of Wang Yangming, in the context of how contemporary cultural constructs of self (China) and Other (southwestern aboriginal groups) related to administrative policies of assimilation and separation. Available online for purchase or by subscription.
  732. Find this resource:
  733. Tu Wei-ming. Neo-Confucian Thought in Action: Wang Yang-ming’s Youth (1472–1509). Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976.
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  735. An early biography that traces Wang Yangming’s growth into a Confucian sage.
  736. Find this resource:
  737. Foreign Relations
  738.  
  739. Despite common assumptions to the contrary, China during the Ming period never isolated itself from the rest of the world. The Ming state engaged in foreign relations with dozens of polities and people, usually mediated through the “tributary system.” Several ideas undergirded the tributary system: neighboring polities and peoples were naturally drawn to the transformative virtue of the Son of Heaven; such an attraction was to be made manifest through the dispatch of official envoys to the Chinese capital, where they would have an audience with the emperor and present local tribute, and to demonstrate their concern for men from afar, the Chinese sovereign was to bestow gifts of even-greater value to foreign rulers. Kang 2010 argues that this tributary system, which recognized a regional hegemony and clear hierarchies, provided a political and cultural mechanism that led to low levels of military conflict among China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam. Even when the Ming state’s engagement in foreign relations waned, an enormously rich set of religious, economic, military, and personal connections wove Ming China into the rest of Eurasia. Most scholarship on Ming foreign relations has focused on a particular region: Wang 1953 examines relations with Japan, Wang 1968 and Wang 1998 focus on Southeast Asia, Sen 2006 looks at networks to South Asia, and Wills 1998 explores ties with maritime Europe. See also Wade 2008 (cited under Zheng He and Maritime Ming).
  740.  
  741. Kang, David C. East Asia before the West: Five Centuries of Trade and Tribute. Contemporary Asia in the World. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010.
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  743. Kang contrasts the Westphalian multilateral system of formally equal sovereign nations with the Chinese tributary system, recognized a single regional hegemony that ruled through superior achievements in culture. With buy-in from China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam, the system laid out a clear and accepted order that resulted in fewer wars than in western Europe during the early modern period.
  744. Find this resource:
  745. Sen, Tansen. “The Formation of Chinese Maritime Networks to Southern Asia, 1200–1450.” In Special Issue: Maritime Diasporas in the Indian Ocean and East and Southeast Asia (960–1775). Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 49.4 (2006): 421–453.
  746. DOI: 10.1163/156852006779048372Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  747. Spanning the Song, Yuan, and Ming periods, this study explores both official state-to-state relations and privately organized networks between China and South Asia.
  748. Find this resource:
  749. Wang Gungwu. “Early Ming Relations with Southeast Asia: A Background Essay.” In The Chinese World Order: Traditional China’s Foreign Relations. Edited by John King Fairbank, 34–62. Harvard East Asian Series 32. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968.
  750. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  751. An influential essay, by a leading specialist, that focuses on the early Ming’s relations with Southeast Asia but that provides much useful discussion of the political and ideological assumptions underpinning the tributary system as it unfolded during the Ming.
  752. Find this resource:
  753. Wang Gungwu. “Ming Foreign Relations: Southeast Asia.” In The Cambridge History of China. Vol. 8, The Ming Dynasty, 1368–1644, Part 2. Edited by Frederick W. Mote and Denis Twitchett, 301–332. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
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  755. Concise treatment of the Ming government’s relations with Southeast Asia by a world authority. The essay is weighted heavily toward the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
  756. Find this resource:
  757. Wang Yi-t’ung. Official Relations between China and Japan, 1368–1549. Harvard-Yenching Institute Studies 9. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953.
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  759. An early but still-useful look at the development of relations between China and Japan, from the earliest days of the Ming dynasty until the collapse of formal diplomatic ties in the mid-16th century. Wang examines the frequency, size, and verification of Japanese embassies to the port city of Ningbo, and the various commercial exchanges that occurred along the way to the capital.
  760. Find this resource:
  761. Wills, John E., Jr. “Relations with Maritime Europeans, 1514–1662.” In The Cambridge History of China. Vol. 8, The Ming Dynasty, 1368–1644, Part 2. Edited by Frederick W. Mote and Denis Twitchett, 333–375. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
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  763. Concise overview of relations with the Portuguese, Spanish, and the Dutch, with attention to how rivalries among the European powers shaped ties with the Ming government and coastal communities. Wills is a leading scholar of China’s relations with maritime Europe and provides an excellent set of bibliographic references to further reading.
  764. Find this resource:
  765. Ming and the Mongols
  766.  
  767. More than any other group, the Mongols shaped the Ming’s foreign relations. For close to half a century, Mongol polities that claimed Chinggisid descent challenged Ming political legitimacy on the Eurasian political stage. The political and military threat posed by later Mongol rulers dominated Ming strategic vision for two centuries (Waldron 1990). The Ming tried to dismiss the Mongols’ importance at the same time that it referred repeatedly to the Mongols in communications with neighboring countries; established narrative strategies to justify Mongol migration to China; and spent much time and energy on adjusting a shifting strategy of frontier markets, diplomatic negotiations, and periodic military campaigns (Johnston 1995, Rossabi 1998). Jagchid and Symons 1989 places Ming-Mongol interaction in the wider span of Chinese interaction with the steppe.
  768.  
  769. Jagchid, Sechin, and Van Jay Symons. Peace, War, and Trade along the Great Wall: Nomadic-Chinese Interaction through Two Millennia. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989.
  770. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  771. An account of long-term relations between China and various steppe groups, with extensive and detailed discussion of developments during the Ming period.
  772. Find this resource:
  773. Johnston, Alastair Iain. Cultural Realism: Strategic Culture and Grand Strategy in Chinese History. Princeton Studies in International History and Politics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995.
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  775. Challenging long-standing notions about the traditional defensive orientation of the Chinese military, this monograph combines political science theory, a close reading of military texts, and political/military actions taken by the Ming court vis-à-vis the Mongols. Johnston concludes that Ming policy demonstrated a clear preference for coercive, offensively oriented strategy.
  776. Find this resource:
  777. Rossabi, Morris. “The Ming and Inner Asia.” In The Cambridge History of China. Vol. 8, The Ming Dynasty, 1368–1644, Part 2. Edited by Frederick W. Mote and Denis Twitchett, 221–271. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
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  779. A concise and clear review of Ming-Mongol relations that draws on the author’s decades of research and dozens of his essays (conveniently listed in footnote 1, p. 221).
  780. Find this resource:
  781. Waldron, Arthur. The Great Wall of China: From History to Myth. Cambridge Studies in Chinese History, Literature, and Institutions. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
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  783. Waldron looks at Ming strategic choices vis-à-vis the Mongols. One set of choices resulted in the Great Wall.
  784. Find this resource:
  785. The Mongols and the Other Within
  786.  
  787. The Mongols were not just a foreign-relations problem; they also influenced domestic political discourse, migrated to China in large numbers, and served in the Ming government and military. The Ming court’s response was complex; it warred with the Mongols at the same time that it recruited Mongol personnel into the Ming state, most especially the military (Robinson 2004, Serruys 1959a, Serruys 1959b, Serruys 1961, Serruys 1966), and it denounced Yuan rule for polluting Chinese culture at the same time that it attempted to exploit the Yuan’s prestigious legacy for its own ends (Robinson 2008). The Mongols were far from the only non-Chinese group within the Ming Empire. Shin 2006 examines the spread of the imperial state and the creation of ethnic categories in southwestern China. Miles 2008 discusses how Chinese elites justified their expanding influence (and wealth) in newly opened lands in the South.
  788.  
  789. Miles, Stephen B. “Imperial Discourse, Regional Elite, and Local Landscape on the South China Frontier, 1577–1722.” Journal of Early Modern History 12.2 (2008): 99–136.
  790. DOI: 10.1163/138537808X334313Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  791. Traces the discursive strategies of Chinese elites to describe their expansion control in the Southwest by drawing on the rhetoric of the imperial state as a civilizing enterprise that brought Confucian education, rites, music, and modes of governance to an alien and barbaric Other. Available online for purchase or by subscription.
  792. Find this resource:
  793. Robinson, David M. “Images of Subject Mongols under the Ming Dynasty.” Late Imperial China 25.1 (June 2004): 59–123.
  794. DOI: 10.1353/late.2004.0010Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  795. A detailed examination of how the Mongols were incorporated into the administrative structures of the Ming dynasty and how they came to be represented in administrative geographies.
  796. Find this resource:
  797. Robinson, David M. “The Ming Court and the Legacy of the Yuan Mongols.” In Culture, Courtiers, and Competition: The Ming Court (1368–1644). Edited by David M. Robinson, 365–421. Harvard East Asian Monograph 301. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2008.
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  799. Drawing on imperial portraiture, funerary figurines from princely tombs, and patterns of court patronage for Tibetan Buddhism, this essay argues that through the early 16th century, several Ming emperors attempted to cultivate a persona as a Mongol qaghan, a “khan of khans.”
  800. Find this resource:
  801. Serruys, Henry. The Mongols in China during the Hung-wu Period, 1368–1398. Mélanges chinois et bouddhiques 11. Brussels: Institut Belge des Hautes Études Chinoises, 1959a.
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  803. A detailed account of the continued presence of Mongols in China under early Mongol rule, on the basis of close examination of Ming-period primary documents. Reprinted as recently as 1980.
  804. Find this resource:
  805. Serruys, Henry. “Were the Ming against the Mongols’ Settling in North China?” Oriens Extremus 6.2 (1959b): 131–159.
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  807. On the basis of a close reading Ming imperial annals, Serruys argues that while some statements by early Ming emperors might suggest otherwise, the Ming government actively encouraged Mongol migration to China through land grants, government posts, and other incentives.
  808. Find this resource:
  809. Serruys, Henry. “Foreigners in the Metropolitan Police during the Fifteenth Century.” Oriens Extremus 8.1 (1961): 59–83.
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  811. Sifting through the Ming Veritable Records, Serruys documents that large numbers of Mongol and Jurchen men were incorporated into the most-elite units of the capital garrisons from the late 14th to mid-15th centuries.
  812. Find this resource:
  813. Serruys, Henry. “Landgrants to the Mongols in China: 1400–1460.” Monumenta Serica 25 (1966): 394–405.
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  815. On the basis of a close reading of Ming imperial annals, Serruys argues that the Ming government actively encouraged Mongol migration to China through land grants, government posts, and other incentives. Available online by subscription.
  816. Find this resource:
  817. Shin, Leo K. The Making of the Chinese State: Ethnicity and Expansion on the Ming Borderlands. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
  818. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511523953Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  819. Describes the creation of ethnic labels as a by-product of expanding state administrative structures and family strategies in the southwestern borderlands of the empire.
  820. Find this resource:
  821. The Fall of the Ming
  822.  
  823. Poisonous factional infighting (Dardess 2002, Miller 2009), dangerous disparities in wealth, ossified fiscal institutions that failed to keep pace with a dynamic commercial economy, vulnerability to a volatile global economy (Atwell 2005), and dislocations caused by climatic disruptions (Atwell 2001) have all been considered as short- and long-term factors in the dynasty’s decline. Several English-language studies have examined the political, social, and cultural dynamics of the tumultuous last decades of the Ming, with particular attention to individual regions (Des Forges 2003, Spence and Wills 1979). Parsons 1970 remains the most detailed narrative account of the late Ming rebellions, which directly contributed to the dynasty’s collapse. The rise of Jurchen-led polity, which as the Manchu Qing dynasty supplanted the Ming as the ruling house of China, will be covered in a separate Oxford Bibliographies article on Qing. Struve 1988 traces efforts to restore the Ming ruling house to power, against increasingly long odds.
  824.  
  825. Atwell, William S. “Volcanism and Short-Term Climatic Change in East Asian and World History, c. 1200–1699.” Journal of World History 12.1 (2001): 29–98.
  826. DOI: 10.1353/jwh.2001.0002Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  827. This essay argues that the consequences of volcanic eruptions, such as dust released into the atmosphere (which in turn influenced temperature, sunlight, and rainfall), had a demonstrable impact on agricultural yields and political stability across the globe. Volcanism may have magnified the difficulties faced by the late Ming state. Available online by subscription.
  828. Find this resource:
  829. Atwell, William S. “Another Look at Silver Imports into China, ca. 1635–1644.” Journal of World History 16.4 (2005): 467–489.
  830. DOI: 10.1353/jwh.2006.0013Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  831. Drawing on Japanese- and Chinese-language scholarship, Atwell was one of the first Western scholars to consider the impact of silver flows from the New World on the Chinese economy. Responding to critics who questioned levels of silver imports into China, Atwell here reiterates his earlier arguments that declining bullion imports “exacerbated [the Ming dynasty’s] difficulties and helped to undermine its stability.” Available online by subscription.
  832. Find this resource:
  833. Dardess, John W. Blood and History in China: The Donglin Faction and Its Repression, 1620–1627. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i, 2002.
  834. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  835. A detailed examination of the brutal factional battles of the late Ming. Dardess is particularly interested in questions of moral righteousness, commemoration of the martyred, and how such issues both shape and are shaped by political culture.
  836. Find this resource:
  837. Des Forges, Roger V. Cultural Centrality and Political Change in Chinese History: Northeast Henan in the Fall of the Ming. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003.
  838. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  839. A nuanced study of the Ming collapse as experienced by the people of northeast Henan.
  840. Find this resource:
  841. Miller, Harry. State versus Gentry in Late Ming Dynasty China, 1572–1644. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.
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  843. A highly cogent account of factional conflicts that pays particular attention to the divergent and polarizing visions of whether sovereignty lay with the emperor and his close ministers or with the gentry.
  844. Find this resource:
  845. Parsons, James B. The Peasant Rebellions of the Late Ming Dynasty. Monographs and Papers (Association for Asian Studies) 26. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1970.
  846. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  847. In contrast to the voluminous body of work of Chinese- and Japanese-language scholarship on rebellions, Parsons’s is the only English-language monograph on the late Ming rebellions. He provides a detailed narrative of origins of the revolts in the 1620s through their denouement in the 1640s. Reprinted in 1993 (Ann Arbor, MI: Association for Asian Studies).
  848. Find this resource:
  849. Spence, Jonathan D., and John E. Wills Jr., eds. From Ming to Ch’ing: Conquest, Region, and Continuity in Seventeenth-Century China. New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1979.
  850. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  851. An outstanding collection of essays that explore the mid-17th century from a variety of perspectives, including the maritime realm, Central Asia, urban riots, the conflicting demands of dynastic loyalty and local leadership, and restorationist efforts. Reprinted in 1994 (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Books on Demand).
  852. Find this resource:
  853. Struve, Lynn A. “The Southern Ming, 1644–1662.” In The Cambridge History of China. Vol. 7, The Ming Dynasty, 1368–1644, Part 1. Edited by Frederick W. Mote and Denis Twitchett, 641–725. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
  854. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  855. A concise political narrative of attempts to restore the Ming ruling family to power in the face of the Qing.
  856. Find this resource:
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