The experience of life in China changed remarkably over three centuries of Ming rule. That, at least, is how it seemed to those who lived through the changes and felt obliged to record their surprise and dismay. By the middle of the dynasty, many literate observers were becoming aware that the institutions laid down by the founding Emperor, Hung-wu, were no longer guiding social practices. They credited this lapse variously to the recurrent problems of lax administration, low-level corruption, and a weakening of moral fibre. Writers of the late Ming knew differently. In their view, something more than just dynastic sag had taken hold. Many became obsessed with the extent to which Chinese society had grown away from what they were trained to believe it had originally been: an agrarian realm where superiors knew their responsibilities and inferiors their places. But, they felt, people no longer stayed put: class distinctions had become confusingly fluid; the cultivation of wealth had displaced moral effort as the presiding goal of the age.

The panicked indignation that can be found in writings of the late Ming may not represent the mood that all of that age shared, nor may it speak directly of the actual pressures to which an embattled elite felt vulnerable. But it came close. Some late-Ming writers, for instance, were aware that China was becoming a more crowded place than it had been at the beginning of the Ming, but only the more alarmist insisted that the population had more than doubled between the Hung-wu emperor's reign and the turn of the seventeenth century – as in fact it had. Others were sensitive to the difficulty that cultivators were having in gaining access to enough land to survive, but only a few were aware of the migration that had shifted China's population westward over the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and they tended not to grasp the scale of this movement.