Mighty Ming

FROM its early years the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) was famous in the West for the magnificent—and inimitable—blue-and-white porcelain made in the imperial factories at Jingdezhen. European collectors discovered it while on pilgrimage to the Holy Land, took it home and mounted it in gold, believing it had magical qualities and could detect poison. As early as 1495 Andrea Mantegna, an Italian artist, painted an “Adoration of the Magi” in which one of the three kings is seen offering the Christ child just such a cup filled with gold coins, the first time that a Ming work of art appears in a European painting.

China’s recent rise, however, has prompted a wave of new archaeological discoveries and fresh scholarship on the Ming period that show how narrow this Eurocentric view has been. Now an exhibition at the British Museum (BM), based on unprecedented loans from Chinese museums and works borrowed from five other countries, offers a richer and more complex view of how China, as it is today, began to be formed in the early 15th century.

In 1402 the ambitious Yongle emperor, Zhu Di, ascended the throne. Over the next 50 years or so, successive Ming rulers, like China’s leaders today, undertook expansion on a grand scale. Compared with the Timurids, who ruled western and Central Asia, or other 15th-century contemporaries, they had “bigger cities (and more big cities), bigger armies, bigger ships, bigger palaces”, says Craig Clunas, the show’s co-curator (along with Jessica Harrison-Hall).

Under the Yongle emperor the Chinese capital moved from Nanjing and became established in Beijing, an undertaking that took several decades and armies of slave labour. Work began on the vast Forbidden City. As peace reigned (mostly) throughout the country, Chinese bureaucrats gradually became more important than generals and culture began to play a vital role. China was producing “more books, ceramic dishes, textiles and spears than any other state on earth”, says Mr Clunas.

At the same time as it was making these internal transformations, China also began reaching out to the rest of the world on an unprecedented scale, especially in Asia and the Indian Ocean. Zheng He, a Muslim-born eunuch, commanded a series of voyages that fostered Chinese trade with the Middle East and Africa at least a century before Christopher Columbus landed in the West Indies or Vasco da Gama rounded the Cape of Good Hope. A gold ingot on view is stamped with the words, “Purchased from the Western ocean and other places”.

Visitors enter the show through a huge rectangular arch, a symbol of the monumentality that characterises the early Ming period. It begins with the imperial court and moves gradually outward to the princely courts, the armed forces and then the bureaucracy, and further into China with a section on spiritual belief. It ends with trade and diplomacy, showing Ming China’s engagement with the rest of the world.

The treasures include some of the painted horses and 400 figurines buried in the tomb of Prince Huang of Lu in Shandong, ready for the afterlife. Among the finest paintings of the period is an 11-metre scroll of plum blossom in moonlight. It lives in Berlin, and is normally only seen in small sections. Here, though, it is laid out flat, showing every detail: from the pale new moon, edged in powdered gold and lacquer, down to the last leafy branch.

The curators have been careful to select pieces that highlight the connections between the regional courts and the centre, and between China and the outside world. Some of these connections had a lasting influence, but the pattern is uneven. Lacquerware, for example, even when made for Japanese consumption, seems impervious to foreign design, as do classical 15th-century paintings in the style of the earlier, Song period. In other areas Chinese craftsmen seemed happy to absorb ideas from abroad. The folding paper fan, which today is regarded as an essentially Chinese object, was introduced from Korea and Japan, and enthusiastically taken up. Chinese paintings began to show, as they had never done before, the emperor playing sports: foreign games such as polo, football and mini-golf with two sticks and a Chinese one of pitching arrows into a pot.

Negotiating the loans for this show has taken several years. China’s leadership, which sets great store by culture as a way of exercising soft power, will be watching carefully how it is received. It will doubtless know that, for political reasons, the British government was unable to offer Taiwan’s Palace Museum the same indemnity against seizure that it offered lenders from mainland China and elsewhere. As a result, the BM was unable to borrow the only contemporary portrait of the Yongle emperor, which remains in Taipei.

Shortly after the show opens, the BM will host a three-day conference that will bring together Ming scholars from all over the world. Chinese officials are hoping that the meeting—and the exhibition—will encourage more scholars working on archaeological sites and in regional museums throughout the country to publish their work, thus helping to put Chinese history ever more firmly on the world map.

^{“Ming: 50 Years that Made China” is at the British Museum from September 18th until January 5th 2015. Tickets are available at www.britishmuseum.org}