China

Culture

The predominance of state power also marked the intellectual and aesthetic life of Ming China. By requiring use of their interpretations of the Classics in education and in the civil service examinations, the state prescribed the Neo-Confucianism of the great Song thinkers Cheng Yi and Zhu Xi as the orthodoxy of Ming times; by patronizing or commandeering craftsmen and artists on a vast scale, it set aesthetic standards for all the minor arts, for architecture, and even for painting, and, by sponsoring great scholarly undertakings and honouring practitioners of traditional literary forms, the state established norms in those realms as well. Thus, it has been easy for historians of Chinese culture to categorize the Ming era as an age of bureaucratic monotony and mediocrity, but the stable, affluent Ming society actually proved to be irrepressibly creative and iconoclastic. Drudges by the hundreds and thousands may have been content with producing second-rate imitations or interpretations of Tang and Song masterpieces in all genres, but independent thinkers, artists, and writers were striking out in many new directions. The final Ming century especially was a time of intellectual and artistic ferment akin to the most seminal ages of the past.

Poet on a Mountain Top, ink on paper or ink and light colour on paper, album leaf mounted as a hand scroll, by Shen Zhou, Ming dynasty; in the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Mo., U.S. 38.7 × 60.2 cm.The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri; purchase Nelson Trust (46–51/2)