April 1981

Until very recently the great expanse of the Ming dynasty, which ruled in China from 1368 to 1644, was largely uncharted in Western historiography. The dynasty was seen either as having come at the end of a great tradition that had been dominated by the artistic force of the T’ang and Sung, or as being a little too early for “modern” Chinese history, which could be seen to pick up momentum in the eighteenth century, or even the seventeenth, but certainly not earlier.