Page 15 - Ming_China_Courts_and_Contacts_1400_1450 Craig lunas

Plate 0.3 Shingei Gei’ami 真芸 Plate 0.4 Kenkō Shōkei 賢江祥啓, Mountain and River, Plate 0.5 Anonymous, copy of 1491 self-
芸阿弥, Scholar Viewing a 15th–16th century. Ink and light colour on paper, height portrait of Sesshū Tōyō 雪舟等楊, 16th
Waterfall, 15th century. 51cm, width 33.5cm. Nezu Museum, Tokyo century. Hanging scroll, ink and colour on
Hanging scroll, ink and paper, height 59.4cm, width 28.5cm. Fujita Art
colour on paper, height Museum, Osaka
106cm, width 30.3cm. Nezu
Museum, Tokyo
1443 the text celebrating the construction of the Fahai si, the momentous change for ‘the people’ too, as new forms of
lavish Buddhist burial temple erected in the outskirts of fertiliser made possible ‘the start of a new era in Jiangnan
23
Beijing by the high eunuch Li Tong 李童 (c. 1390–1453). rice cultivation’ in the early Ming; this was mainly due to the
Like so many of the highest officials of the Yongle, Xuande development of new fertilising techniques, and the coming
and Zhengtong reigns, Li Tong was from the province of into use of oil cake fertilisers (bean cakes, cottonseed cakes,
Jiangxi, and this association may well have trumped the rapeseed cakes), described by one specialist as ‘one of the
schematic hostility between ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ courts which most significant innovations in pre-modern Chinese
25
has so entranced many later historians. Here again a more agricultural history’. Other aspects of everyday life not
comparative history might help to move beyond treated here include changes in the status of women, where
unwarranted perceptions of Chinese exceptionalism, since the period saw on the one hand the abolition of the practice
eunuchs were a common feature of a number of Eurasian of aristocratic widow-suicide (forced or otherwise), but on
courts of the period, and a less judgemental approach to the other changes to women’s property rights which were to
their abject status can be shown to be a product of deeper prevail to the end of the imperial system and beyond.
understanding of their various roles. 24 Although Ming law was consciously based on Tang codes, it
Despite the best efforts of its curators, the exhibition followed Yuan precedent (a novelty in the Chinese context)
Ming: 50 years that changed China failed through the lack of in inheritance law, which largely cut women out of earlier
surviving material evidence to reflect adequately the lives of rights to inherit property from male relatives, and thus
the vast majority of China’s population in the early Ming (as reduced their economic independence. 26
at any premodern period): its peasantry. Their tools, their Given the focus of this volume on courts, there is
clothes, their homes, all are materially lost to us, even if their arguably too little attention paid here to literature,
appearance in images such as the painting sets showing the particularly given the perception of the courts of premodern
‘Water and Land’ ritual (see Pl. 6.20) give some information rulers which, in many contexts around the globe, have
concerning the clothing and equipment of carpenters, actors served as the incubators of ‘literary newness’, of new forms
and performers, foot soldiers etc. Yet this was a period of and new genres of writing as well as of new uses of

Introduction | 5