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Plate 0.6 (left) Sesshū Tōyō 雪舟等楊, splashed-ink style landscape, Muromachi Period, 1495. Hanging
scroll, ink on paper, height 148.6cm, width 32.7cm. Tokyo National Museum
Plate 0.7 (above) Sesshū Tōyō 雪舟等楊, Landscapes of Autumn and Winter, 15th–16th century. Hanging
scrolls, ink on paper, height of each 47.7cm, width of each 30.2cm. Tokyo National Museum

language. Scholars of Chinese literature have in general and Chengzhai zaju 誠齋雜劇. These have been described as,
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been disdainful of the period 1400–50, seeing it as one ‘not only the earliest dramas but also the first zaju in which
distinguished by a literature (particularly in poetry) devoted all the elements are presented in complete form’. While it is
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to servile fawning on the imperial project. Certainly very unlikely that the court poetry of the era will ever come
literature was constrained in a number of ways. A law of to achieve comparable esteem, its success in its own terms
Yongle 9 [1411] banned zaju 雜劇 dramas which had surely makes it worthy of more serious investigation than it
emperors in lead roles, lest rulers should be presented in a has hitherto received. In particular, the literary cultures of
less than flattering light. So sensitive was early Ming court the numerous princely courts have received very little
censorship to historical parallels that a number of drama sustained attention to date, and there is surely further work
texts were banned, rewritten or amended. In one case it can to be done in this area, as we move towards seeing the Ming
be demonstrated that the sensitive phrase ‘kingly aura’ regional aristocracy as significant cultural and social actors
(wangqi 王氣), much used in the justificatory propaganda for in the vast majority of the empire which lay beyond the
the Yongle emperor’s usurpation of the throne, is written out Jiangnan heartland of ‘literati’ culture.
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of one text. And yet, it is almost entirely due to the activities In his afterword for this volume (Chapter 29), Timothy
of early Ming editors, some of them of royal birth Brook looks at one of the ways in which events of the years
themselves, that we know anything at all about what the between the Yongle and Zhengtong reigns were
textbooks still call ‘Yuan drama’, an important part of the remembered, half-remembered and sometimes deliberately
new and vernacularly inclined canon of ‘Chinese literature’ forgotten, through the rest of the Ming dynasty’s course to its
developed since the New Culture movement of the early drawn-out collapse in the 17th century. And in fact the
20th century. Only a small minority of surviving ‘Yuan’ afterlife of the early Ming would in itself be a significant
dramas actually date from that era, and the earliest printed topic for further investigation, whether it is the ways in
editions we have are those done by the Ming prince Zhu which the Zheng He voyages were used in the ‘present-day’
Youdun (1379–1439), in his collections Chengzhai yuefu 誠齋樂府 fiction of the late Ming, or the ‘pervasive nostalgia’ for the

6 | Ming China: Courts and Contacts 1400–1450