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INTRODUCTION: REFLECTIONS ON DECADENCE IN THE LATE MING DYNASTY

The lateMing dynasty continues to fascinate, for its strange combination of prosperity and catastrophe.While it may indeed be a certain morbidity in our historical hindsight that compels us to relate wealth and ruin so causally, it is by now a well-established truth that observers from within the late Ming era themselves believed their time to be too bounteous for its own good, that dynamism in the economy and society was a bane, not a blessing. The resulting diagnosis — that these leading thinkers, and perhaps their dynasty as well, were allergic to good fortune — seems to follow naturally from their oft-expressed despair. However, the issue is certainly serious enough to warrant a second, third, and fourth opinion. The following three essays, by Kenneth Hammond, Peter Ditmanson, and Katharine Burnett, represent just such an effort, as we seek to understand the phenomenon of late Ming decadence. Hammond’s selection focuses onWang Shizhen (1526–1590), whose cries of decadence in the late sixteenth century rang especially loud and clear. In three areas explored by Hammond — Wang’s general attitude, his alleged connection to the novel Jinpingmei, and his criticism of the Taizhou school of philosophy — Wang emerges as a literary archaist who was “clearly conscious of the shifting terrain of social, economic, and cultural life taking place in the century, [which] he saw... as a bad thing” (15). Using the metaphor of the “decadent chalice” (literally, the chalice that stops being a chalice, about which Hammond has written before), Wang complained that in his turbulent age, “So many things have become like a chalice that is not a proper chalice that no one can know or explain it all... .In the end... there are none which do not cause me to sigh and mourn” (14). The cause of the chalice’s warping, of course, was wealth, particularly new wealth. One interesting way in which Wang called attention to the social disarrangement symbolized by the deformed chalice was to rank the elite families of Jiangnan and Shanxi by income level, suggesting a perversion of the ideal social order, in which one’s position in society was based on moral and cultural evolution. Not only was money providing the means for the nouveau riche to enter the upper echelons, but it was also corrupting the traditional literati elite, who now “used their wealth merely to amuse themselves, just like rich merchants of Jiangnan” (15). In Hammond’s summation, Wang mourned that “the proper order of society, based on the hegemonic power of the literati elite, enshrined in their monopoly of political power and long-held position as the arbiters of cultural values, was under attack from the theoretically lowest level of the social hierarchy, the rising merchant class” (20). Perhaps most alarmingly, no sooner had the wielders of new money infiltrated the top reaches of society heretofore reserved for Confucian scholars, than they began Ming Studies, 71, 5–9, May 2015