Page 219 - The Arts of China, By Michael Sullivan Good Book

Ho The Great Will at Pa-<i-ling.
Chiefly Ming period.
the weak and dreamy Sung, whom they despised, but the splen-
dour, the vigour—and, be it said, the occasional vulgarity—of
T'ang. In the early fifteenth century Ming China was immensely
powerful. Her navies roamed the southern seas under the remark-
able admiral Cheng Ho, a eunuch in high favour with the em-
peror. But he was not bent on conquest: the Chinese have never
been interested in stretching their empire beyond the seas. The ad-
miral's five expeditions between 1405 and 1433 were carried out
for the purpose of showing the flag, making alliances, and open-
ing up trade routes, and incidentally collecting curiosities for the
entertainment of the court. China had no other interest in the out-
side world. Before the end of the century, however, Vasco da
Gama had rounded the Cape of Good Hope; by 1 509 the Por-
tuguese were in Malacca, by 1 516 in Canton, and China was fi-
nally forced to take account of the existence of the Western barbar-
ians by reason of their aggressive conduct around her own shores.
The splendour of the Ming court concealed a creeping paraly-
sis. Officials, selected by civil service examinations which centred
round the stultifying complexities of the "eight-legged essay,"
became increasingly conservative and conventional in outlook.
The energies of savants at court were devoted less to original
scholarship than to the preparation of such vast works as the Yung-
lo ta-tien, an encyclopaedia in 1 1,095 volumes compiled between
1403 and 1407. The Sung emperors had been men of taste and ed-
ucation, able to inspire the best in their scholars and painters; the
Ming emperors were for the most part ruffians, usurpers, or weak
victims of court intrigue. As a result, the palace tradition in paint-
ing petered out in a frozen academicism, and for significant dev-
lopmcnts we must look not to the court but to the scholars, collec-
tors, and amateurs, many of them men of private means, who
carried on the tradition that had been established by the indepen-
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