MING TAIZU EX MACHINA

Abstract

My comments relate to Richard von Glahn's chapter “Towns and Temples: Urban Growth and Decline in the Yangzi Delta, 1100–1400” in a recent publication edited by von Glahn and Paul Jakov Smith. The Song-Yuan-Ming Transition in Chinese History is an ambitious and intriguing volume, one that presents the Song-Yuan- Ming transition as a coherent period of growth and transformation, thereby finally laying to rest in world historiography the Elvin paradigm of Song precocity, Mongol devastation, and Ming-Qing stagnation (68), as well as leading China historians to rethink the relationship between this earlier period and the flourishing post- 1500 “late imperial” or “early modern” China (70). In this endeavor, the region of Jiangnan is important to the volume's editors, because Jiangnan's high population and intense development are “perhaps the most salient identifying feature of the Song-Yuan-Ming transition period” (8; also 69). Thus the editors and contibutors raise the highly significant questions: was there or was there not a mid- 14th century depression in economic and related cultural activity in Jiangnan? If there was, why? How do we balance “the dynamics of long-term change in Chinese government, economy,” etc. (69) against the impact of specific policies? In arguing for long-term development, Richard von Glahn wishes to vindicate the “muchmaligned Mongols” (211) from the charge that they oversaw “a castrophic arrest in the long-term evolution of Chinese society and economy” (69). But he finds another powerful villain who caused mid-14th century decline. As usual, whether the effects of his policies are “precipitous” or “cumulative” or both, Zhu Yuanzhang (Ming Taizu, r. as the Hongwu emperor 1368–1398) serves nicely as an explanation.