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The fifteenth century witnessed Ming China expanding its interactions with areas to the south—areas which we today refer to as Southeast Asia. This involved overland political expansion, the gradual incorporation of Tai polities, as well as their economic exploitation. The twenty-year incorporation of the Dai Viêt policy was also part of this process. In the maritime realm, following the early fifteenth-century sending of massive armadas in an attempt to achieve a pax Ming in the region, the Ming court made efforts to ban maritime commerce by non-state players. This paper examines the effects that these various Ming policies had on Southeast Asia in the political, economic, technological, and cultural spheres. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By 1800 cotton cloth was China's most important domestic trade commodity after grain. This paper reviews the history of cotton textile production in the Jiangnan region (or Lower Yangzi River area) where it thrived from 1300 to 1830, and discusses the factors contributing to its commercialization. It reveals the impact of the Ming and Qing governments in its institutionalization, and how the social organization of the industry was framed around the household economy and women's labor. This essay also documents the problems that cotton production and marketing encountered by the end of the eighteenth century, and demonstrates how the recent debates about the 'great divergence' and the nature of the Chinese political economy resonate in the history of China's cotton textile enter-prise. Finally, it shows how in the first decades of the nineteenth century, empire-wide demographic and environmental constraints brought economic stasis to Jiangnan's cotton industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I began my graduate studies at Harvard in September 1958. In the summer and fall of 1959, I started groping for ways to think about China in the seventeenth century, discovered that there had been some very interesting European eyewitnesses of the Ming-Qing wars, and wrote my first seminar paper for John King Fairbank on the first Dutch embassy, 1655.1657. The rest, shall we say, is history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This case study analyses religious and technological changes that occurred during the last seventy years of the Ming dynasty (1574-1644) around the Hedong Salt Lake, situated south of Yuncheng City in southern Shanxi province. Based on a close reading of inscriptions found on stone steles at the Temple of the God of the Salt Lake and of different kinds of gazetteers, the article documents the processes and analyses the factors that shaped the expanding pantheon of local salt-production-related deities during this period. I argue that these religious changes need to be understood in the context of a wider sociotechnical system around the Salt Lake, especially the emergence of new salt production methods that were introduced at this time under the increasingly affirmative leadership of local salt merchants, as well as the changing conditions of local labour management. The larger methodological point the article makes is about the necessity to take stone steles themselves in their spatial and material dimensions as evidence of historical processes: this will allow us to see that by means of these steles and their inscriptions the temple became an architectural discursive space that facilitated new forms of social participation and of administrative intervention, while offering simultaneously a nexus between the sphere of human intervention and the relevant 'natural' factors of the salt production at the Salt Lake. Accordingly, the article proposes novel ways to understand the role of religious institutions such as temples in their relation to 'natural' and 'technological' processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This article traces the first generation of writers of songs and drama in Nanjing who emerged from the anonymous context of early Ming court entertainment and established their name and reputation in the second half of the fifteenth century. These writers--Shi Zhong (1437-after 1516), Chen Duo (1454?-1507?), and Xu Lin (1462-1538)--represented a different mode of writing songs and drama. For them it was no longer a professional occupation, as in the case of the court performers, but became part of their cultural and social life. The extent to which our knowledge of these first-generation qu writers depends on local sources and on acts of remembrance by later Nanjing authors is also examined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of T'oung Pao is the property of Brill Academic Publishers and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Discusses the decline of the Ming dynasty in China. Principal contributors to the decline; Background on the idea of dynastic succession; Abolition of the prime ministership in the dynasty.

Discusses the decline of the Ming dynasty in China. Principal contributors to the decline; Background on the idea of dynastic succession; Abolition of the prime ministership in the dynasty.