The Ming World

1. Mapping the background: the uncertain influence of the Ming state and imperial leadership
2. Nanjing’s Longjiang Shipyard Treatise and our knowledge of Ming ships
3. How Yongle learned to stop worrying and love the gun: perspectives on early Ming military history
4. The paradoxical effect of autocracy: collective deliberation in the Ming offcial merit-evaluation system
5. Deserts and islands: the politics of border control, 1547–49
6. Cartography in the Ming
7. Gender and religion in the Ming
8. Adopting The Orphan: theater and urban culture in Ming China
9. Theater and society in the Ming world
10. The Han-ness of Ming China
11. The Hall of Supreme Harmony as a simulacrum of Ming dynasty construction
12. The Confucian ideal friend
13. The lineage organization in Ming China: a case study of Haining in the sixteenth century
14. Soaring dragon amid dynastic transition: dates and legitimacy among the post-Ming Chinese diaspora
15. The legend of Tang Saier
16. Wang Yangming in Chuzhou and Nanjing, 1513–1516: “I have only two words to say: ‘Be truthful!’”
17. Zhang Dai’s (1597–1680) music life in late Ming China
18. The making of an empress in life and death: empresses Xiaoduan’s and Xiaojing’s burial goods in the Ding Mausoleum
19. From peasant rebel to Ming loyalist: the career of Li Dingguo
20. The Ming as a Eurasian power
21. Contested histories of Ming agency in the Java Sea, Straits of Melaka, and Bay of Bengal region
22. Dai Viet in the Ming world
23. Korean eunuchs as imperial envoys: relations with Chosŏn through the Zhengde reign
24. War, commerce, and tributary relations in the Sino-Korean borderland of the late sixteenth century

The Ming World draws together scholars from all over the world to bring China’s Ming Dynasty (1368-1662) to life, exploring recent scholarly trends and academic debates that highlight the dynamism of the Ming and its key place in the early modern world. The book is designed to replicate the structure of popular Ming-era unofficial histories that gathered information and gossip from a wide variety of fields and disciplines. Engaging with a broad array of primary and secondary sources, the authors build upon earlier scholarship while extending the field to embrace new theories, methodologies, and interpretive frameworks. It is divided into five thematically linked sections: Institutions, Ideas, Identities, Individuals, and Interactions. Unique in its breadth and scope, The Ming World is essential reading for scholars and postgraduates of early modern China, the history of East Asia and anyone interested in gaining a broader picture of the colorful Ming world and its inhabitants.