Literature and scholarship
As was the case with much of the painting, Ming poetry and belles lettres were deliberately composed “after the fashion of” earlier masters, and groups of writers and critics earnestly argued about the merits of different Tang and Song exemplars. No Ming practitioner of traditional poetry has won special esteem, though Ming literati churned out poetry in prodigious quantities. The historians Song Lian and Wang Shizhen and the philosopher-statesman Wang Yangming were among the dynasty’s most noted prose stylists, producing expository writings of exemplary lucidity and straightforwardness. Perhaps the most admired master was Gui Youguang, whose most famous writings are simple essays and anecdotes about everyday life—often rather loose and formless but with a quietly pleasing charm, evoking character and mood with artless-seeming delicacy. The iconoclasm of the final Ming decades was mirrored in a literary movement of total individual freedom, championed notably by Yuan Zhongdao, but writings produced during this period were later denigrated as insincere, coarse, frivolous, and so strange and eccentric as to make impossible demands on the readers.
The late Ming iconoclasm did successfully call attention to popular fiction in colloquial style. In retrospect, this must be reckoned the most significant literary work of the late Yuan and Ming periods, even though it was disdained by the educated elite of the time. The late Yuan–early Ming novels Sanguozhi yanyi (Romance of the Three Kingdoms) and Shuihuzhuan (The Water Margin, also published as All Men Are Brothers) became the universally acclaimed masterpieces of the historical and picaresque genres, respectively. Sequels to each were produced throughout the Ming period. Wu Cheng’en, a 16th-century local official, produced Xiyouji (Journey to the West, also partially translated as Monkey), which became China’s most-treasured novel of the supernatural. Late in the 16th century an unidentifiable writer produced Jinpingmei (Golden Lotus), a realistically Rabelaisian account of life and love among the bourgeoisie, which established yet another genre for the novel. By the end of the Ming period, iconoclasts such as Li Zhi and Jin Shengtan, both of whom published editions of Shuihuzhuan, made the then-astonishing assertion that this and other works of popular literature should rank alongside the greatest poetry and literary prose as treasures of China’s cultural heritage. Colloquial short stories also proliferated in Ming times, and collecting anthologies of them became a fad of the last Ming century. The master writer and editor in this realm was Feng Menglong, whose creations and influence dominate the best-known anthology, Jingu qiguan (“Wonders Old and New”), published in Suzhou in 1624.
Operatic drama, which had emerged as a major new art form in Yuan times, was popular throughout the Ming dynasty, and Yuan masterpieces in the tightly disciplined four-act zaju style were regularly performed. Ming contributors to the dramatic literature were most creative in a more-rambling, multiple-act form known as “southern drama” or chuanqi" class="md-crosslink">chuanqi. Members of the imperial clan and respected scholars and officials such as Wang Shizhen and particularly Tang Xianzu wrote for the stage. A new southern opera aria form called kunqu" class="md-crosslink">kunqu, originating in Suzhou, became particularly popular and provided the repertoire of women singers throughout the country. Sentimental romanticism was a notable characteristic of Ming dramas.
Perhaps the most representative of all Ming literary activities, however, are voluminous works of sober scholarship in many realms. Ming literati were avid bibliophiles, both collectors and publishers. They founded many great private libraries, such as the famed Tianyige collection of the Fan family at Ningbo. They also began producing huge anthologies (congshu) of rare or otherwise interesting books and thus preserved many works from extinction. The example was set in this regard by an imperially sponsored classified anthology of all the esteemed writings of the whole Chinese heritage completed in 1407 under the title Yongle dadian" class="md-crosslink">Yongle dadian (“Great Canon of the Yongle Era”). Its more than 11,000 volumes being too numerous for even the imperial government to consider printing, it was preserved only in manuscript copies; only a fraction of the volumes have survived. Private scholars also produced great illustrated encyclopaedias, including Bencao gangmu (late 16th century; “Index of Native Herbs”), a monumental materia medica listing 1,892 herbal concoctions and their applications; Sancai tuhui (1607–09; “Assembled Pictures of the Three Realms”), a work on subjects such as architecture, tools, costumes, ceremonies, animals, and amusements; Wubeizhi (1621; “Treatise on Military Preparedness”), on weapons, fortifications, defense organization, and war tactics; and Tiangong kaiwu (1637; “Creations of Heaven and Human Labour”), on industrial technology. Ming scholars also produced numerous valuable geographical treatises and historical studies. Among the creative milestones of Ming scholarship, which pointed the way for the development of modern critical scholarship in early Qing times, were the following: a work by Mei Zu questioning the authenticity of sections of the ancient Shujing (“Classic of History”); a phonological analysis by Chen Di of the ancient Shijing (“Classic of Poetry”); and a dictionary by Mei Yingzuo that for the first time classified Chinese ideograms (characters) under 214 components (radicals) and subclassified them by number of brushstrokes—an arrangement still used by most standard dictionaries.
One of the great all-around literati of Ming times, representative in many ways of the dynamic and wide-ranging activities of the Ming scholar-official at his best, was Yang Shen. Yang won first place in the metropolitan examination of 1511, remonstrated vigorously against the caprices of the Zhengde and Jiajing emperors, and was finally beaten, imprisoned, removed from his post in the Hanlin Academy, and sent into exile as a common soldier in Yunnan. However, throughout his life he produced poetry and belles lettres in huge quantities, as well as a study of bronze and stone inscriptions across history, a dictionary of obsolete characters, suggestions about the phonology of ancient Chinese, and a classification of fishes found in Chinese waters. Charles O. Hucker