Changing contexts

From late Ming to early Qing

There is no easy consensus on what demarcates the beginning of the late Ming period. The conventional date, as followed in this volume, is the year 1573, the beginning of the Wanli reign. Literary historians eager to synchronize changes in literary trends with the “radicalization” of Wang Yangming’s (1472–1529) philosophy of introspection and intuitive awakening, however, tend to push the beginning of the late Ming to about the mid-sixteenth century. A certain amount of flexibility is built into any attempt at periodization, but how and where to apply the label of “late Ming” is particularly slippery and problematic. From the 1920s on, efforts have been made to trace the genealogy of the “new literature” or of different versions of modernity back to late Ming oppositional stances and the “romantic” and “individualist” concerns of its literary culture. From that perspective, dynastic decline promised new beginnings. In contrast, in the aftermath of the Manchu conquest, retrospection on the late Ming often yielded negative judgments that tended to conjoin political decline with cultural decadence, and the chief concern lay with pinpointing when that decline became inevitable.

The authors discussed in the previous chapter did not think of themselves as “late Ming writers.” There was generally no sense of an ending. Despite forebodings of a deepening crisis, the collapse of the Ming in 1644 caught many by surprise. In any case, dynastic decline did not seem to have undermined the cultural confidence of this period, which was an extraordinarily creative one. The label “late Ming” (Ming ji, Ming mo, or wan Ming) was a Qing invention that was sometimes accompanied by castigations of heterodoxy, frivolity, and excess. At the same time, early Qing literature was profoundly concerned with the Ming–Qing dynastic transition and the implications of the late Ming legacy.