The Ming Dynasty

The founder of the Ming, Zhu Yuanzhang, was born in 1328 into a poor farming family. After his parents died in the famine and epidemic of 1344, he spent years as a novice at a Buddhist monastery and as a wandering monk begging for alms. That life ended when troops suppressing a rebellion burned the monastery down.

In 1352 he joined a rebel army linked to the Red Turbans and the White Lotus movement. He rose quickly through its ranks, took Nanjing in 1356 and made it the base for his campaigns against rival warlords. In 1368 he proclaimed the Ming dynasty, and later that year his armies took the Yuan capital, Dadu (modern Beijing), driving the Mongol court north. He reigned as the Hongwu Emperor.

Hongwu governed through strict discipline and deep suspicion. Officials could be beaten in open court, and his palace guard became a secret police charged with rooting out conspiracy. After the alleged plot of the chancellor Hu Weiyong in 1380 he abolished the chancellorship altogether. That case and later purges, among them that of the general Lan Yu in 1393, are said to have cost tens of thousands of lives.

Hongwu's son, the Yongle Emperor, seized the throne from his nephew in 1402 and pursued an ambitious foreign policy. His armies invaded northern Vietnam in 1406, but the occupation met determined resistance and the Ming withdrew in 1427. Between 1405 and 1433 the eunuch admiral Zheng He led seven great fleets across the Indian Ocean, as far as the Persian Gulf and East Africa, collecting tribute and displaying Ming power.

The Mongols remained the chief threat. In 1449, at Tumu, they defeated a Ming army and captured the Zhengtong Emperor. The court put his half-brother on the throne as the Jingtai Emperor. The captive was released the following year and in 1457 took the throne again, reigning as Tianshun. After Tumu the Ming relied increasingly on fixed defences, and most of the brick and stone wall that visitors see near Beijing today was built in the sixteenth century.

The coasts were troubled too. Raiders known as wokou, Japanese and Chinese alike, attacked coastal towns through the sixteenth century. In the 1590s the Ming sent armies to Korea to help repel the Japanese invasions ordered by Toyotomi Hideyoshi, a long and costly campaign.

Yongle moved the capital from Nanjing to Beijing, his former power base, and it formally became the capital in 1421. The Forbidden City, built between 1406 and 1420, stood at the centre of the new capital. The Temple of Heaven, where the emperor offered sacrifices for good harvests, was built in the same years.

The city kept growing. In the sixteenth century a new outer wall enclosed the southern suburbs, and the imperial compounds gained workshops, warehouses and quarters for the thousands who served the court. By the end of the dynasty Beijing may have had a population of around a million.

Agriculture recovered after the wars that ended Mongol rule, and new crops from the Americas, among them maize, sweet potatoes and peanuts, reached China in the sixteenth century. Craft industries grew quickly, above all silk weaving around Suzhou and porcelain making at Jingdezhen.

For much of the dynasty private overseas trade was officially banned. The ban was relaxed in 1567, and silver flowed in from Japan and, through Manila, from the Spanish mines of the Americas, paying for Chinese silk and porcelain. Silver became the currency of taxation. In the 1570s and early 1580s the grand secretary Zhang Juzheng extended the Single Whip reform, which converted many taxes and labour duties into payments in silver.

A growing merchant class, cheap printing and busy cities created a lively urban culture. Publishers produced primers, examination guides, religious tracts and fiction in large numbers for readers well beyond the scholar class.

Fiction written in the vernacular flourished. Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Water Margin and Journey to the West reworked stories that storytellers had told for centuries. The Jin Ping Mei ("The Plum in the Golden Vase"), written under the pen name Lanling Xiaoxiao Sheng, took the novel into the households of the rich. Feng Menglong's collections of short stories sold widely, and Tang Xianzu's The Peony Pavilion (1598) is the best known play of the age. Book illustration cut on woodblocks reached a high standard and helped publishers set their editions apart.

The philosopher Wang Yangming (1472–1529) challenged orthodox Confucian learning by teaching that moral knowledge is innate and must be expressed in action. Religious life combined the Three Teachings of Confucianism, Buddhism and Daoism with many forms of folk religion. The early Ming emperors favoured Daoism, and Muslims, Zheng He among them, served the state in high positions.

Late Ming scholars compiled major works of practical learning: Li Shizhen's Compendium of Materia Medica, Xu Guangqi's Complete Treatise on Agriculture, the travel diaries of Xu Xiake and Song Yingxing's Tiangong Kaiwu (1637), a survey of crafts that includes porcelain making. Jesuit missionaries led by Matteo Ricci, who reached Beijing in 1601, brought European mathematics, astronomy and maps to the court.

Porcelain is the Ming art most collectors know first. The imperial kilns at Jingdezhen, in Jiangxi province, made wares for the court from early in the dynasty, while many private kilns in the same town supplied the home market and the export trade.

Underglaze blue, painted in cobalt on the unfired body and then glazed, dominates. Hongwu wares often have a greyish blue, and copper red was used widely alongside it. Under Yongle and Xuande, imported cobalt gave a deep, intense blue with dark spots where the pigment gathered. Chenghua potters used a softer, paler blue and perfected doucai, in which enamels fill outlines drawn in underglaze blue. Jiajing and Wanli wares show a strong purplish blue, and wucai, "five colours", adds bright overglaze enamels to underglaze blue.

Monochrome glazes had their own moments, such as the copper red of Xuande and the yellow of Hongzhi. From the later sixteenth century Jingdezhen made thin, panelled blue and white for Portuguese and Dutch traders, known in Europe as kraak porcelain. Beyond Jingdezhen, the stoneware of Yixing in Jiangsu was exported to Europe in the seventeenth century, where it was known as boccaro ware and soon copied. Our Ming dynasty porcelain collection shows many of these wares.

A reign mark is where dating begins, not where it ends. Most Ming imperial marks read Da Ming, the reign name and nian zhi, "made in the reign of", usually in six characters written in underglaze blue. The marks of admired reigns, above all Xuande and Chenghua, were copied in the later Ming, throughout the Qing and ever since, so a mark must agree with everything else about the piece.

Specialists look first at shape and potting: the profile and finish of the foot, the thickness of the walls and the treatment of the base. Where the body is left bare, at the foot ring or on an unglazed base, Jingdezhen porcelain commonly fires to an orange or reddish tint. Next comes the blue itself, its tone and the way it sits in the glaze, then the texture of the glaze and the style of the painting, which changed from reign to reign.

Wear, staining and other signs of age complete the picture. Our guide to signs of age in antique porcelain explains what to look for. The commonest deceptions are covered in detecting fakes.

The decline of the Ming is usually traced to the long reign of the Wanli Emperor (r. 1572–1620). His early years, guided by Zhang Juzheng, were prosperous and well governed. After Zhang died in 1582, however, the emperor withdrew from government for long periods, leaving posts unfilled and factions to fight at court, while wars in Korea and on the frontiers drained the treasury.

In 1619 Nurhaci, the Jurchen ruler of the Later Jin, crushed a Ming army at Sarhu, and from then on the Ming were on the defensive in the north-east. Famine, disease, corruption and unpaid troops fuelled rebellions in northern Shaanxi from the late 1620s. One rebel leader, Li Zicheng, proclaimed his own Shun dynasty at Xi'an early in 1644 and took Beijing that spring. The Chongzhen Emperor hanged himself on Jingshan, the hill behind the palace.

Within weeks the Ming general Wu Sangui opened the Shanhai Pass to the Manchu armies, which drove Li Zicheng from Beijing and founded the Qing dynasty. Ming princes held out in the south for nearly two decades. That period is covered on our page on the Southern Ming.