David Robinson's edited conference volume vividly portrays the Ming court as a cosmopolitan space for competition and cooperation among emperors and their families; palace women and eunuchs; Daoist, Buddhist, Tibetan, Muslim, and European-Christian clergy; Chinese and Korean scholar-officials; artists and entertainers; military men, often Mongols; and foreign envoys. Allying and fighting to further their practical, ideological, and cultural interests, these players shaped and reshaped the Ming court culture, which was neither fixed by the founder nor isolated from Chinese or Eurasian society. The Ming court style links, rather than divides, the Yuan and Qing.
Comparing the Ming with other courts, Robinson suggests that a focus on the court as a whole provides a middle ground between the historiographic poles of early Ming despotism and late Ming imperial passivity: emperors acted and innovated within tradition, facing resistance from courtiers and commoners. To counterbalance texts by scholar-officials who misrepresented or omitted their rivals, the volume also relies on material culture to revise many established views.
Kenneth Swope argues that the famously passive Wanli emperor acted decisively in military matters. Scarlett Jang writes that hundreds of the supposedly illiterate and corrupt palace eunuchs were taught the classics by Hanlin scholars; their 200 fine publications, including the imperial calendar, didactic texts by royalty, and the classics and other Confucian and government texts, were used to teach inner courtiers, as master texts for offices and exam takers empire-wide, and as gifts to foreign rulers. But she still characterizes eunuch power as illegitimate. In Hung-lam Chu's treatment of the Classics Mat lectures, fixed hierarchy gives way to flexible, personal interactions between the ruler/student and ministers/teachers. Picture books supplemented text-based moral teaching, Julia Murray shows, and when intra-official jealousies kept privately created books from the emperor, the market gladly picked up the discards. Music was shaped by many courtiers and by currents from outside the palace, Joseph Lam argues, but he still assigns a central role, active or passive, to the emperors. Dora Ching shows that later imperial portraits for ancestral worship copied Tibetan icons. Robinson argues that Tibetan Buddhism was one of several ways Ming monarchs positioned themselves as heirs to the Mongol khaghans, even as cakravartin kings, despite Han-chauvinist rhetoric.
Overall, the Ming court looks different when one sees religious and secular objects, didactic and entertaining texts, artists, artisans, and clergy, and styles of music and drama circulating in and out of the palace and empire. Civil scholar-officials are only one fractured group struggling for the emperor's attention and a semblance of control over court life. But the monarchs are still familiar: Taizu authoritatively decrees rules that are quickly overturned (no classical education for eunuchs, key roles for palace women in court music, a naturalistic portrait style, rigorous ethical education for princes, and entertainment clubs for officials); Yongle fights for legitimacy by extending the imperial reach (through eunuch agencies, through publishing his own propaganda, to Tibetan clergy, and through the Zhenwu cult); admittedly now more than a fractious teenager, Zhengde still flouts Confucian control (gathering international and regional musical styles, living in the Leopard quarter, and favoring soldiers); Jiajing claims educated authority and fights with officials (over the Classics Mat, over a didactic picture album, to reform court music, and to portray his father as an emperor); Wanli prefers culture to work (happily studying a picture book, shifting educated eunuch attention from publishing to birthday parties, and ignoring court music to patronize opera).
The use of evidence is sometimes troubling, as in Swope's chapter, where Mei Guozhen's accounts are used in a number of different ways simultaneously (pp. 82–84). There are some odd errors, and sometimes arguments are a bit out of focus. One question that is raised is whether an emperor who duly inherited the throne needed to prove his legitimacy or not, and to whom. Jang writes that the emperor “had to prove his virtue” (p. 166); Murray writes that proper heirs to the throne “did not have to prove their legitimacy” (p. 234). As the introduction addresses the power and limits of autocracy, a group verdict on the relation of these cultural findings to politics would be welcome: Were the objects and texts that passed from court to society intended to validate the court or players within it? Was court adoption of cultural styles and religious beliefs personal, or was it canny politics? If the revision of court music was “expected” of a good emperor (p. 306), was patronage of opera styles popular among gentry and commoners also political?
