Early Modern China 91
of Jingdezhen came in the Ming to employ more than 10,000 workers.
Using a special clay from that area and fi ring pieces at temperatures
exceeding 1,300 degrees Centigrade, they produced elegant blue and
white porcelain wares that have been world famous ever since.
By the late Ming, China was widely seen as the most prosperous coun-
try on earth. Some economic historians have estimated that three-fourths
of all the silver produced in the New World from 1500 to 1800 found its
way to China, because the Chinese economy was the most highly devel-
oped in the world and its products were better and cheaper than those of
any other country.^2 In addition, Portuguese traders had already become
involved in the China trade in the 1540s, when they occupied the small
peninsula of Macao on China’s southeast coast, and in 1619 they estab-
lished a fort and trading post on the southern coast of Taiwan. From the
sixteenth century onward, Chinese merchants began to migrate through-
out Southeast Asia, where by the late nineteenth century they formed a
substantial prosperous minority in almost every country. As prosperity
grew, China’s population more than doubled during the Ming period.^3
Along with unparalleled prosperity in China in the sixteenth century
came many other social and cultural changes. Growing contradictions in
the life of the Chinese literati helped stimulate more creative philosophi-
cal analysis in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries than at any time
since the Neo-Confucian revival of the Song. Every scholar admired
the Confucian ideal of public service, but the only route to offi cialdom
was examination success, which required rote memorization and the
mastery of a deadly dull prose genre called the eight-legged essay. The
good Confucian offi cial was duty bound to criticize the emperor if he
erred, and in Ming times he often did, even though any Ming offi cial
who spoke up was likely to be publicly beaten within an inch of his
life, exiled, or even executed. One response was to avoid public service;
another was to try to rethink the whole Confucian tradition.
The only later Confucian thinker ever to rival the great Zhu Xi
was the Ming scholar-offi cial and visionary Wang Yangming. Even as
a youngster, Wang had the ambition to become a Confucian sage. He
passed the exams and served with distinction in offi cialdom, but that
wasn’t enough for him. In 1506, when he was thirty-four, he wrote a
memorial criticizing the emperor for protecting a corrupt eunuch. The
emperor had Wang beaten with forty strokes of a bamboo rod and exiled
to a remote region of southern China. While in exile, Wang had a break-
through experience much like what the Buddhists called enlightenment.
Wang drew on the idealism of Mencius, who had proclaimed the
goodness of every person, and on the Chan Buddhist teaching that all