In this vigorously argued and profusely illustrated volume, Craig Clunas challenges views of the Ming dynasty as an era of cultural insularity and rigidity that legitimized Europe's claim to modernist superiority. Clunas introduces an impressive range of visual and material culture as proof of Ming dynamism and diversity, countering any belief that modernity was an exclusively Western phenomenon. But his deeper purpose is to enrich and complicate our understanding of the Ming, and he undermines attempts to reduce its profusion to generalizations that are convenient for “world history” projects.

The book's eight chapters are based on Clunas's 2004 Slade Lectures on Fine Art at Oxford University, where he teaches. Organized topically, they treat visual arts, materials, and practices in a variety of social, political, economic, and intellectual contexts. Clunas draws on a wide range of recent scholarship on China as well as theoretical writings in anthropology and postcolonial studies. Illustrations of most objects mentioned and explanatory sidebars to supplement the main text help adapt his discussions for a more general readership.

The book opens with an experiment guaranteed to pique even the casual browser's interest. Employing terms that are normally applied to early modern Europe, Clunas describes the Ming as a great age of global exploration, social and economic transformation, religious reform, and cultural vitality. Although he does not assert that China should replace Western Europe as the birthplace of modernity, his characterization of the Ming as China's Renaissance is persuasive. For Clunas, the Ming possessed an intensely “visual” culture, as well as a “material” one, in which all social classes used objects and images to further their purposes. His goal is “to make a point about some very important Ming ways of thinking about the variety, diversity and complex interrelatedness of the world of pictures and things” (p. 17). Subsequent chapters brim with ideas and material that will be new even to specialists, as well as fresh insights about familiar works.

Chapter 1 examines the new ways that time and space “could be handled and seen” (p. 32) in the Ming, when “things and images were important parts of the ways in which claims to power were made and sustained and challenged” (p. 50). Visible markers of elite status and political power proliferated in the forms of rank badges, commemorative arches, and family temples, while “mere” wealth also gained unprecedented visibility. Commodities identified with specific places and times gave rise to the concept of transient “fashion” (shi yang), perceived by some as a threat to the social order. Chapter 2 explores ideas and artifacts associated with various forms of spatial positioning and movement, from rituals enacting social relationships or expressing power, to the elite pastime of roaming (you). Clunas connects rituals of parting, “part of a cultural cycle that sustained the male elite sense of self” (p. 65), to the construction of elaborate doorways as well as to the hoary category of farewell paintings. The material presence of writing is the subject of chapter 3. Displays of text in public spaces conveyed meaning to viewers, regardless of whether they could read the characters, and many writings reinforced the authority of the state. As for woodblock printing, which boomed in the late Ming, commercial publications extended cultural forms to a wider populace and challenged elitist exclusivity in areas such as connoisseurship.

Chapter 4 segues into Ming classification schemes, encyclopedias, the propensity for ranking things, and the profusion of numerical groups to structure knowledge. In chapter 5, Clunas examines terms that refer to pleasure, specifically le (serious pleasure), wan (amusement), qingwan (high-minded amusement), and xi (play). In subsequent chapters, Clunas treats the Ming military and the general culture of violence. Even archetypal literati such as Wen Zhengming (1470–1559) valued military forebears, and a martial spirit took forms as diverse as knight-errant fiction and parades of prostitutes on festival days. Nonetheless, official sources rarely condoned a military “style” in court culture. The final chapter views the survival of the Ming as a cultural phenomenon after the dynasty's fall. Clunas discusses the Ming imperial tombs, particularly that of the founding emperor outside Nanjing, which was a potent symbol not only for Ming loyalists but also for Republican leaders; eighteenth-century “orthodox” calligraphy and painting, based on the ideas of Dong Qichang (1555–1636), which “froze” the canon in the late Ming; and the roles of popular visual media such as plays, opera, comics, film, and television in ensuring an ongoing awareness of the Ming as the “most Chinese of dynastic formations” (p. 226) and as a “reservoir of Chinese cultural capital” (p. 229).

The one disappointment is that too many of the 199 reproductions are inadequate to discern the point that Clunas intends the work to illustrate, with poor black-and-white figures often provided to support observations concerning color. That being said, this book is brilliant (pun intended).