Page 11 - Ming_China_Courts_and_Contacts_1400_1450 Craig lunas

Introduction The exhibition held at the British Museum from 18
September 2014 to 5 January 2015, and entitled Ming: 50 years
that changed China, had as one of its central aims that of
bringing before a wide public some elements of the recent
Craig Clunas revolution in scholarly perception of the early Ming dynasty
(1368–1644). This has moved away from the tendency in
older scholarship of viewing the period essentially as a
nativist reaction to the Mongol conquest and the years of
Yuan rule, and one which saw China pulling down the
shutters on the outside world, in a ‘turning away from the
outside world [which] was accompanied by a growing
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introspection within Chinese life’. Although the emerging
new paradigm still requires further work (which this volume
is a contribution to), many scholars now see the early Ming
as a distinctive example among a group of states across
Eurasia which descended from the era of Chinggis Khan,
with its courtly culture in particular captured by the
cosmopolitan glamour of Mongol styles of rulership. Almost
all now see it as an age of unprecedented engagement, in
both peaceful and violent forms, with the world beyond the
borders of the Ming empire, the first period when (as in the
Tang dynasty), Chinese power was projected deep into
Central Asia, while at the same time (as in the Song dynasty)
the possibilities of a maritime hegemony were also explored.
The conference which was held at the British Museum on
9–11 October 2014 under the title ‘Ming: courts and contacts
1400–1450’, sought in its turn to bring together a body of
scholars working on the period from a range of disciplinary
perspectives, to examine in particular the ways in which the
material culture, visual culture and art of the (loosely
defined) half century from around 1400 to around 1450
might help in advancing an understanding of the changes
taking place in China at this time. The period chosen for
investigation here requires a degree of justification. At one
point in the study of Chinese history, both in China and
beyond its borders, the prestige of the long historiographical
tradition of taking the dynasty as a unit of analysis led to a
‘history of the Ming’ (or at most the early Ming, mid-Ming,
late Ming) seeming like a natural, indeed an inevitable task.
It was possible to write histories of more than one dynasty,
and while earlier scholarship preferred Ming–Qing (1368–
1911) as a unit, the most recent account by the Western doyen
of Ming historians prefers to take Yuan–Ming (1271–1644) as
its framework, perhaps thus implicitly endorsing the view of
the continuities between Yuan and Ming as being at least as
important as the many ruptures. More recently too scholars
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have been willing to disregard dynastic boundaries in
constructing frameworks of analysis; so for example Paul
Jakov Smith and Richard von Glahn have assembled a body
of studies on the period 1300–1550 (one they describe as ‘a
historiographical black hole’), with a view to understanding
what they term the ‘Song–Yuan–Ming transition’ as a
whole. It seems evident that we need both these large-scale
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accounts and the more focused look at a briefer period
presented by this volume and the research project/exhibition
which it accompanied, if we are to deepen understanding of
China’s history beyond the large generalisations which were
deemed sufficient in the past.
The decision to build the exhibition (and so by extension
this volume of essays) around the reigns of the Yongle,

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