A Ming Confucian's World
Lu Rong / Halperin, Mark
The Ming dynasty (1368-1644) was the world's largest, most populous empire of its time, and the fifteenth century marked a time of social stability. On the eve of the sixteenth-century economic transformation and the age of exploration that was to propel China into the modern world, the scholar-official Lu Rong (1436-94) recorded his observations of contemporary society in Miscellaneous Records from the Bean Garden (Shuyuan zaji). Among the to...
