Drawing from a variety of disciplines and incorporating a wide range of Chinese documentary sources, material artifacts, and contemporaneous foreign accounts, the chapters in this volume offer a multifaceted portrait of the Ming dynasty court (1368–1644). They demonstrate that the court was an arena of competition and negotiation. In this arena, a large cast of actors pursued individual and corporate ends, personal agency deeply shaped protocol and style, and people, goods, and tastes from all corners of the empire (and beyond) converged. Rather than a monolithic and immutable set of traditions, Ming court culture underwent frequent reinterpretation and rearticulation,...

This chapter is intended to provide background information for the more focused discussions that follow by situating the Ming court in historical terms and in the scholarly literature. It begins with a sketch of the Ming court as it developed in Beijing and treats, among other matters, the composition and physical size of the court, the rhetoric of the emperor’s role, his relations with scholar-officials, tensions over courtly order, and outside observers’ insatiable interest in the court. The second half briefly reviews some influential characterizations of the Ming court, primarily in English-language scholarship, with special attention to the questions of...

The Wanli emperor reigned for forty-seven years (1573–1620), the longest and one of the most controversial and tumultuous reigns of the Ming. The period has become synonymous with imperial lassitude and avarice, eunuch abuses, bureaucratic factionalism and infighting, military reverses, and general dynastic decline. Historians have tended to place much of the blame squarely on Wanli’s shoulders. Indeed, his official biographers noted in the eighteenth-centuryOfficial History of the Ming Dynasty, “When discussing the fall of the Ming, in actuality its demise started with Wanli; certainly he cannot be excused from blame!”¹ Later historians have tended to follow this...

Ever since the Chinese writing system first appeared on oracle bones and bronze vessels in the Shang dynasty (1767–1045 bce), those who could read, write, recite, and interpret texts owned the past and thus became the cultural arbiters of their eras. They also owned or otherwise shared in political power. The text, or textuality, was therefore one of the most important cultural constructs of China’s imperial past.¹

This chapter is about books—more precisely, the woodblock-printed imperial publications produced by the Directorate of Ceremonial (Silijian 司禮監), the most powerful eunuch agency during the Ming dynasty. Woodblock-printed books were by...

In an imperial court that operated mainly through ceremonial protocol and written communication, as the Ming court did, one institution allowed the emperor and his learned officials to have direct intellectual and social contact: the thrice-monthly classics-mat lectures and the daily lectures on the classics and histories. Patterns of interaction were fluid, because both the lecturers and the emperor assumed dual roles. The emperor was the ruler. The lecturers might consider him their student as well, and he in turn might see them not only as his teachers but also as his servitors. Furthermore, according to classical precepts, he was...

This chapter examines Ming officials’ use of pictures as a means of encouraging a young emperor or heir apparent to develop into an ideal Confucian sage ruler. It focuses on four illustrated anthologies of historical exemplars, all of which were devised as supplements to the normal princely curriculum of theFour BooksandFive Classics. Created over a 100-year period, from 1495 to about 1595, these compendia took the form of albums of paintings matched with punctuated and annotated texts. Three were sponsored by officials whose duties included lecturing to the emperor or crown prince, and one was submitted by...

Emperors shaped not only empires but also music cultures.¹ Whether this traditional Chinese view reflects a past reality, an intellectual-political agenda, or a mixture of fact and fiction, it is historically significant as a native interpretation and historiographically stimulating as a perspective. As described in Chinese dynastic histories and other records of imperial activities, emperors had an undeniable presence in traditional Chinese music culture, playing roles that no historical narrative can ignore.² Emperors, however, did not shape music cultures by themselves. They made music with many of their subjects—imperial clansmen, palace ladies, eunuchs, scholar-officials, court musicians, and commoners. All...

In a little over a century, between the reigns of the first and ninth emperors, the Hongwu emperor (r. 1368–98, Fig. 7.1) and the Hongzhi emperor (r. 1488–1505, Fig. 7.2), the Ming imperial image changed dramatically. At the beginning of the Ming dynasty, the Hongwu emperor was portrayed in a naturalistic pose that emphasized three-dimensionality.¹ Seated on a gold-leaf-covered chair in a nearly frontal position, he faces slightly to the viewer’s left. His right hand rests on his knee, and his left hand grasps the curled end of the arm rest. His countenance is stern, and his piercing...

When the Mongol empire collapsed in the fourteenth century after roughly 150 years of hegemony in Eurasia (circa 1200–1350), it bequeathed a complex legacy of political institutions, global trade networks, and notions of rulership. The way each of its successor polities dealt with this legacy reveals much about the particular polity and about Eurasia as a whole. This chapter examines how the Ming imperial family dealt with the Mongol Yuan legacy.

The Mongols created the greatest land empire known to Asia. Although established at a steep price in death and destruction, each of theuluses, or khanates, that constituted...