China

Ming dynasty

Useful reference guides include Edward L. Farmer, Romeyn Taylor, and Ann Waltner (eds.), Ming History: An Introductory Guide to Research (1994); Wolfgang Franke, An Introduction to the Sources of Ming History (1968); and L. Carrington Goodrich and Chao-ying Fang (eds.), Dictionary of Ming Biography, 2 vol. (1976). Reviews and articles regularly appear in the journal Ming Studies (semiannual).

The early Ming years are described in Edward L. Dreyer, Early Ming China: A Political History, 1355–1435 (1982); and Charles O. Hucker, The Ming Dynasty: Its Origins and Evolving Institutions (1978). Additional light is shed on early Ming life, thought, and institutions in Edward L. Farmer, Early Ming Government: The Evolution of Dual Capitals (1976); Frederick W. Mote, The Poet Kao Ch’i (1962); and John W. Dardess, Confucianism and Autocracy: Professional Elites in the Founding of the Ming Dynasty (1983). Early Ming overseas expeditions and foreign relations are dealt with in Edward L. Dreyer, Zheng He: China and the Oceans in the Early Ming Dynasty, 1405–1433 (2007); J.J.L. Duyvendak, China’s Discovery of Africa (1949); and Yi-t’ung Wang, Official Relations Between China and Japan, 1368–1549 (1953).

Specialized studies of mature Ming include Leo K. Shin, The Making of the Chinese State: Ethnicity and Expansion on the Ming Borderlands (2006); Charles O. Hucker, The Traditional Chinese State in Ming Times (1961), and The Censorial System of Ming China (1966); Charles O. Hucker (ed.), Chinese Government in Ming Times: Seven Studies (1969); Ray Huang, Taxation and Governmental Finance in Sixteenth-Century Ming China (1974); Kwan-wai So, Japanese Piracy in Ming China During the 16th Century (1975); Ping-ti Ho, Studies on the Population of China, 1368–1953 (1959, reprinted 1967), and The Ladder of Success in Imperial China: Aspects of Social Mobility, 1368–1911 (1962, reprinted 1976); and Ayao Hoshi, The Ming Tribute Grain System, trans. from the Chinese by Mark Elvin (1969). Ray Huang, 1587, a Year of No Significance: The Ming Dynasty in Decline (1981), is a wide-ranging critical discussion of Ming governance and the ruling class; a somewhat more approving view of Ming China of the same period is China in the Sixteenth Century: The Journals of Matthew Ricci, 1583–1610, trans. from the Latin by Louis J. Gallagher (1953). Modern studies of China’s contacts with Europeans in Ming times notably include Charles R. Boxer (ed. and trans.), South China in the Sixteenth Century (1953, reissued 2004); and George H. Dunne, Generations of Giants: The Story of the Jesuits in China in the Last Decades of the Ming Dynasty (1962).

The last Ming years and the struggles of post-Ming loyalists are discussed in James B. Parsons, The Peasant Rebellions of the Late Ming Dynasty (1970); Lynn A. Struve, The Southern Ming, 1644–1662 (1984); and Jonathan D. Spence and John E. Wills, Jr. (eds.), From Ming to Ch’ing: Conquest, Region, and Continuity in Seventeenth-Century China (1979). Studies in Ming intellectual and religious history are found in Wm. Theodore De Bary et al., Self and Society in Ming Thought (1970), and The Unfolding of Neo-Confucianism (1975). Charles O. Hucker Benjamin Elman Lynn White