Introduction: the late Ming and the history of the book

Over the course of these two volumes, the percentage of written material usually called literature steadily decreases in proportion to the body of extant writing as a whole. Earlier chapters deal with virtually all surviving written material from their respective periods. In this chapter, this percentage plummets, as most of what was written, read, and printed in the late Ming dynasty lies outside the purview of literary history.

For generations, scholars have intuited that the way in which commerce and culture mixed in the late Ming was radically different from preceding periods. Recent scholarly work has been able to quantify some of the enormous changes that printing and books – and consequently literature – experienced at this time, when the commercial print industry began to undergo explosive growth. Everywhere we look, we find evidence of an urban reading public, consuming texts at a prodigious rate. Recent studies have shown that only in the beginning of the sixteenth century did printing become the primary mode of textual circulation, so we might even date the beginning of print culture’s dominance over manuscripts to this moment. (Nevertheless, manuscript culture remained vital throughout the late Ming, and a number of the important literary texts of this period and later were circulated first in manuscript form.)

Even though commercial printing, which had existed for centuries, did not make any major technological advances in the late Ming, it underwent dramatic and sudden growth during this period. Compare the forty-seven years of the Wanli period (1573–1620) with the fifty-one years of the two preceding reigns, the Jiajing and Longqing periods (1521–1572). Two hundred twenty-five imprints that date from those earlier realms survive from Nanjing and Jianyang, the two primary centers of commercial publishing; from the Wanli reign we have a staggering 1,185 commercial imprints.