This engaging, deeply informed book provides the first concise history
of one of China's most important eras. Leading scholar John W. Dardess
offers a thematically organized political, social, and economic
exploration of China from 1368 to 1644. He examines how the Ming dynasty
was able to endure for 276 years, illuminating Ming foreign relations
and border control, the lives and careers of its sixteen emperors, its
system of governance and the kinds of people who served it, its great
class of literati, and finally the mass outlawry that, in unhappy
conjunction with the Manchu invasions from outside, ended the
once-mighty dynasty in the mid-seventeenth century. The Ming witnessed
the beginning of China's contact with the West, and its story will
fascinate all readers interested in global as well as Asian history.