1587 a year of no significance essay

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Take Back Your Ming
Ray Huang’s book 1587: A Year of No Significance
1587, A Year of No Significance

Enter your mobile number or email address below and we'll send you a link to download the free Kindle App. Then you can start reading Kindle books on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required. To get the free app, enter your mobile phone number. His story is cleverly constructed and deliberately paradoxical. No other book presents as vividly the atmosphere of traditional Chinese government. Would you like to tell us about a lower price?

Take Back Your Ming

Learn more about the actions Yale University Press is taking. His story is cleverly constructed and deliberately paradoxical. No other book presents as vividly the atmosphere of traditional Chinese government.

Skip to main content. The Ming Dynasty in Decline. Description Reviews Awards. Yet in the seemingly unspectacular events of this ordinary year, Ray Huang finds exemplified the roots of China's perennial inability to adapt to change. With fascinating accounts of the lives of seven prominent officials, he fashions a remarkably vivid portrayal of the court and the ruling class of late imperial China. In revealing the subtle but inexorable forces that brought about the paralysis and final collapse of the Ming dynasty, Huang offers the reader perspective into the problems China has faced through the centuries.

Not all specialists may agree with Huang's conclusion that by the limit for the Ming dynasty had already been reached and the year stands as a 'chronicle of failure,' but there will be widespread agreement on the book's impressive achievement in providing vivid biographical and institutional detail within a highly readable text. Its most remarkable quality is the skill with which is conveys the texture of life, imparting to the reader a sense of having been inside the environment of Chinese politics and of seeing the complexities of another world as immediate and intelligible matters.

Mote, Princeton University. I know of none better. Carrington Goodrich, Columbia University. Informed both by humanistic concern and a broad knowledge of technology and economics.

Farmer, University of Minnesota. It will galvanize our thinking for many years to come. Hayford, Asia Week. This is a book of significance. The author displays great sensitivity in dealing with the tensions and contradictions in late Ming society, and even when one disagrees with his interpretation of certain facts or events, one cannot help but be impressed by the depth of his knowledge and his enviable ability to bring the characters in his story to life.

In places, for example, his description of what it was like to be the Wan-li emperor is nothing short of masterly. Will become required reading for anyone interested in this period of Chinese history.

Atwell, History. Huang's sensitive and well-informed descriptions of administrative life organized in a bold and readable way make [this] book more significant that the year was. It is essential reading for an understanding of late imperial China. Also of Interest. A Patriot Abroad. Anne E. Sydney Giffard.

Franklin E. Huffman and Im Proum. A History. Sam van Schaik. In-depth conversations with experts on topics that matter. Subscribe to hear when New Releases or Catalogs are ready!

Yet in the seemingly unspectacular events of this ordinary year, Ray Huang finds A Year of No Significance: The Ming Dynasty in Decline from both his essays and his private letters, even though he was not a man without courage. , A YEAR OF NO SIGNIFICANCE: THE MING DYNASTY IN DECLINE. By RAY An essay in imaginative reconstruction of personalities and situations.

Until very recently the great expanse of the Ming dynasty, which ruled in China from to , was largely uncharted in Western historiography. His story is cleverly constructed and deliberately paradoxical. It is the year that the court first hears—from far to the north—an account of the political rise of a Jurchen tribesman named Nurhaci. And it is the year that Shen Shih-hsing, convincingly presented by Huang as a weak, scholarly, intelligent compromiser who could not handle the government he was expected to supervise, became the first grand secretary of the realm. For Huang, a historian with an awesome knowledge of Ming politics and economy, is absorbed by the historical significance of failure to act.

First published by Yale University Press in , [1] it examines how a number of seemingly insignificant events [ which?

1587, A Year of No Significance

Though nothing of historical significance occurred during the year , Huang is able to demonstrate the way in which the existing culture and the smaller, more systematic elements of political leadership can be understood within the context of a seemingly unimportant period of time. Chapter 1: The Wan-Li Emperor, begins by explaining the major premise of the work: The concept of looking at a single year in the history of the leadership of China and evaluating the implications for understanding other aspects of history, including the decline of the Ming Dynasty. In this initial chapter, Huang provides an anecdotal history of some of the events that occurred, and includes within it a discussion of the set up of the leadership, the repercussions that occurred in the event of certain actions, including the prospects of an audience with the emperor. Huang reviews these issues as he considers that actions taken by the Wan-li emperor, who was only twenty-four in and who had been a veteran of ceremonial proceedings, and considers his history as an element of understanding the progression of leadership. Huang outlines to reconstruction of the court under Wan-li came into power at the death of his father and the seemingly insignificant actions taken by the emperor, from his marriage to the redecorating of the court. Within the scope of this discourse, Huang is able to disclose the excesses of the emperor, and consider the implications of the bureaucratic system that he devised as an extension of this excess Show More. Popular Essays.