Fifty crucial years in Chinese – and world – history

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The superbly illustrated catalogue of the BM’s ‘Ming’ exhibition stands as a fitting companion to a beautiful show

Ming: 50 Years that Changed China, catalogue edited by Craig Clunas and Jessica Harrison-Hall

There are many myths about China: the Great Wall, which alas cannot be seen from space; the Grand Canal, which doesn't run without break for 1000 km; and even the Giant Panda, which is not only far from extinction but also a top export earner for the People's Republic. The other is the Ming Dynasty, the one that most people have heard of. Lasting far longer than any British Royal house, it did much more culturally and artistically than produce fancy porcelain. The exhibition currently running at the British Museum ‘Ming; 50 Years that Changed China’, with its lucrative sponsorship by BP, has brought together as good a selection of art from the world's biggest country as could be imagined and much more than the clichéd Ming vase.

The task of the curators, who wrote the accompanying catalogue, neither of whom has a Chinese heritage, was to examine what is seen as a turning point not only in the Ming dynasty itself, which ran from 1368 to 1644, but also in the long history of China. Their focus is more or less the first five decades of the 15th century, when China began to look beyond its troubled borders and, for better or for worse, made more and more contact with its neighbours in south East Asia and further afield in the Indian sub-continent and as far away as Africa.

None of this, apart from an ill-conceived foray into Vietnam, was for reasons of conquest. In fact, the seven voyages of Zheng He were part of a fruitless search for a lost relative of the Xongle emperor. But the consequent trade relations brought about the proliferation of a material culture at once Chinese but now under the influence of foreign trends. The objects discussed here aim to evidence this contact, which on the whole they do, while opening up to the public the variety of art in China and the skill and expertise of Chinese artists.

Sir Neil McGregor's bold statement in the hefty catalogue, that it is more important to understand China's history today than at any other time, was surely written with his sponsors in mind, as BP has a great interest in the rich and undiscovered oil reserves scattered about this enormous land mass. The truth is, however, that Chinese history and its art have remained largely unknown to all but a few specialists in the West. Its art, in particular, has been undervalued and unappreciated, reduced in status to decorative arts or displayed as artefacts in ethnographic museums rather than among national art collections.

As the imperial household moved from Nanjing to Beijing, where the capital has remained up to today, it acquired an amazing multitude of objects, including many ceramics. Among them are the most exquisite carved red lacquer dishes and the massive multicoloured Cloisonné jar which has become the motif for the whole exhibition and to be found adorning the advertising posters seen in every tube and railway station in London. This choice is a shame for the undoubted stars of the show are the scrolls and paintings that lie at the centre of the exhibition space. Measuring some 9 metres in length is Spring Rain on the Xiang River, a breathtaking bamboo painting by Xia Chang, a scholar artist who painted for his friends while working as a calligrapher in the palace; and Plum Blossoms and Moonlight by Chen Lu, who, with no known imperial connections, shows that artistic talent was not restricted to the Forbidden City. While on a smaller scale is the Prince Zhuang of Liang's jade belt, incredibly worked into medallions representing dragons playing among the clouds. Regrettably these fine and beautiful trinkets are very much part of the lives of an elite who exploited skilled labour for its own ends: not like previous dynasties to honour the dead but to define their dynastic right and to shore up the position and power of their own class. Few of the items discussed come from the lower orders, such as the rusty and bruised hand tools of the Longjiang shipyard, and the copper coinage widely circulated in the 15th-century capital, all which tell of the vast difference between the super-rich and abjectly poor.

The catalogue is divided into sections dealing with court life, war and peace, and commerce and so on. The section on religion allows us to experience a shared culture, part of which came from beyond the borders of the empire. Buddhism was long established throughout the state and the Flower Garland sutra would have been widely distributed, along with Daoist texts such as the extraordinary Scripture of the Jade Pivot. This woodblock print contains not only liturgical instructions to the faithful but also scenes from everyday life such as the work of carpenters and butchers, with images of childbirth and death rites. And the final image seen is also a religious one and a foreign too, not the golden Qur'an from Beijing's Great Mosque, but a curiously innocent oil painting by Andrea Mantegna, ostensibly showing the influence of Ming culture on the West. For the Adoration of the Magi depicts Caspar gifting his gold in a cobalt-blue and white bowl, yet it hints at another story. One where greedy Western eyes look eastward not simply for porcelain but also for ultimate control of the eastern trading ports.

The Ming Empire would soon be eclipsed by invaders from the north whose own Qing dynasty would ultimately decay and be China’s last.
The exhibition is a rare chance to see objects that rarely stray from Chinese museums and other foreign collections. For those who cannot get to the British Museum, however, the catalogue, with the quality of the text and in particular the images, is to be recommended.

Ming: 50 Years that Changed China, catalogue edited by Craig Clunas and Jessica Harrison-Hall, is published by the British Museum, 2014. 312pp., 135 colour illus, £50.00 (hbk), £25 (ppb) but see also the Amazon link to the right of this article.