A Ming Society: T'ai-ho County, Kiangsi, in the Fourteenth to Seventeenth Centuries.

• Author: Taylor, Romeyn
• Position: Review

By JOHN W. DARDESS. Berkeley and Los Angeles: UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS, 1996. Pp. 316 + maps, tables. $45.

This book is ostensibly about social change over three centuries in T'ai-ho county, but its most important theme, unstated in the title, may be the author's subtle and carefully constructed part-whole interpretation of the history of one county as encompassed by the history of the imperial social whole.

The county's elite families participated in the life of the empire by guiding their sons into the civil service. Most of the administrative officials had had a common education in the county and prefectural schools, had been recruited by competitive examination, and were posted to offices that might be anywhere in the empire, including the imperial capital. Together they constituted an imperial ruling class. Within this institutional context, which was both perduring and mutable, the author finds a profound change in the sixteenth century in the lives of T'ai-ho people at home and in government service. This change appeared in T'ai-ho literature, which was generally optimistic in early Ming (i.e., until c. 1460). Here there was a profound enjoyment of the local landscape in the company of friends, and in detailed and affectionate descriptions of livelihoods and domestic life. In late Ming, however, writing of this sort had largely disappeared from T'ai-ho, and with it any expressed attachment to the place and its people.

The author takes up the challenge of discovering the concomitants, if not the causes, of this change in mood and sensibility. This he does in chapters on T'ai-ho: "The Land: Its Settlement, Use, and Appreciation"; "Managing the Local Wealth"; "The Demography of Family and Class"; "Pattilineal Groups and their Transformation"; and "Pathways to Ming Government." The last three chapters follow the T'ai-ho men to the imperial capital: "Colleagues and Proteges: The Fifteenth-Century World of the T'ai-Ho Grand Secretaries"; "Cutting Loose: The Provocative Style of Yin Chih (1427-1511)"; and "Philosophical Furors."

In his discussion of livelihood, the author distinguishes a dominant "elite," who were the owners and managers of land and of other forms of wealth, and other groups that were subject to elite domination and/or protection. Since "elite" conventionally refers more to status than to wealth, its use here permits the author to accommodate the degree-holding gentry status-group within it. Early Ming T'ai-ho...