With his Screen of Kings: Royal Art and Power in Ming China, Craig Clunas provides another example of his illuminating scholarship on Ming-dynasty material culture. It deserves a permanent place on the bookshelves of scholars in the fields of Chinese art history, material culture, Ming history, and religious studies.
The book has three main strengths. First, it defines the cultural projects of Ming kings broadly, “to encompass work in the field of calligraphy and painting, as well as things like the building projects . . . and the vast assemblages of material culture which went into . . . tombs” (p. 23). This broad scope extends the research beyond the conventional objects and sources of art history, and even of material culture. This breadth of knowledge gives Clunas's work its distinctive quality and value. Second, the book focuses on Shanxi and Hubei, rather than on well-known political and cultural centers such as Beijing or Jiangnan, to demonstrate that “the Ming empire had many such centres” (p. 16). Third, the book actively pursues comparisons with royal courts in premodern Europe and India.
Chapter 1 explains the Ming imperial aristocracy, an institution much neglected in academic studies. Clunas provocatively chooses to translate the Ming title of wang as “king,” rather than using the more common translation “prince.” This preference for the title of “king” effectively draws attention to the multiple centers of the empire and to the ritual power of imperial kinsmen, which exceeded that of the degree-holding bureaucratic elite, though it also risks distracting readers from the limitations to the power of Ming imperial clan members, as laid down in the severe “restrictions on kings” (fanjin) of Ming law. Chapter 7 reiterates the importance of a history of things and representations, as opposed to “government” or “power,” and describes the collective memories of Ming kings in local history.
The five central chapters examine the Ming kings as sustainers, if not necessarily creators, of common culture. Chapter 2 gives an overview of the geographic and figurative landscape of Ming kingship, including the royal palaces, royal gravesites, and royally sponsored temples. The author convincingly argues that such sites were familiar to ordinary Ming people in large sections of the empire. Chapter 3 treats kingly calligraphy, especially collections of calligraphic rubbings. Clunas demonstrates the prominent role of kings in Ming literati culture by showing that royal calligraphy collections predated the creation of similar collections by the literati elite of the Lower Yangzi region. Chapter 4 discusses kingly collections of paintings, including the kingly palaces that served as the sites for the production, assemblage, and dissemination of paintings.
Chapter 5 is rich with the discussion of jewels, gold, and silver excavated from kingly tombs. Clunas's survey of the structures and layouts of these tombs displays the diverse personal choices informing their design. The contents of tombs also allow Clunas to discuss the role of women in kingly palaces, in the imperial clan, in ties with local elite lineages, and in kingly successions. Women mattered especially in the art of hairpins, a genre marginalized by the bias of historical records and scholarship. Chapter 6 examines kingly involvement in book printing, the design of musical instruments, and the manufacture of archaic bronze vessels. According to Clunas, it was in their roles as publishers and as patrons of scholars that kings exerted their greatest influence on the reproduction of culture in the Ming.
This brief review can address only a few of Clunas's many fascinating ideas. First, Clunas notices a peculiar analogy between kingly biological reproduction and kingly cultural reproduction. This keen observation deserves further exploration. Second, Clunas argues time and again (against the presumption of most historians) that kings shared a common culture with the degree-holding elite, but he also admits that some kings preferred an aesthetics that ran counter to literati taste. How do we reconcile these two findings? Did kings share the common culture more closely with the literati elite during certain periods of the Ming dynasty, while deliberately differentiating themselves from degree-holders in other periods? Royal courts created the two earliest calligraphy collections without help from southern literati, for example, but later kingly calligraphy projects depended on the cultural skills of the Jiangnan elite. Finally, Clunas explains the discrepancy between actual kingly art production and the textual evidence by the use of kingly objects as gifts and by the destruction of many royal palaces at the fall of the Ming. But Qing censorship could be another cause. In my own study of Ming kings, I discovered that the Qing regime's systematic massacre of Ming imperial kin caused surviving kin to migrate and to change their surname. Early in its reign, the Qing systematically suppressed all mention of the Ming imperial clan and its members in local gazetteers. May such censorship have applied to Ming kingly artworks also?
Craig Clunas's Screen of Kings is rich in detail and comprehensive in its treatment of larger issues and themes in art history, material culture, and Ming history. The book is extremely successful in inspiring intellectual curiosity and in providing a basis for further research on the issues mentioned above.
