1587, A Year of No Significance
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The Ming Dynasty in Decline
Ray Huang
Winner of the American Book Award for History
In 1587, the Year of the Pig, nothing very special happened in China. Yet in the seemingly unspectacular events of this ordinary year, Ray Huang finds exemplified the roots of China's perennial inability to adapt to change.
Through fascinating accounts of the lives of seven prominent officials, he fashions a remarkably vivid portrayal of the court and the ruling class of late imperial China. In revealing the subtle but inexorable forces that brought about the paralysis and final collapse of the Ming dynasty, Huang offers the reader perspective into the problems China has faced through the centuries.
"Huang shows a mastery of the intricate details of the ritualistic and practical sides of Ming court politics, and an ability to make them comprehensible. His story is cleverly constructed and deliberately paradoxical. If 1587 is, in the long run, a ‘year of no significance,’ it is nevertheless full of incident, and each incident carries promise of future drama."—Jonathan Spence, New York Review of Books
"A distinguished scholar has written a remarkable description of political style in the final decades of the Ming dynasty and placed in perspective the mixed motives of its major characters. . . . No other book presents as vividly the atmosphere of traditional Chinese government."—John Meskill, Asia
"Unusual and thoughtful. . . . Takes the poet’s or the novelist’s joy in turning a commonplace detail to the angle at which it reveals its glint of meaning."—David Lattimore, New York Times Book Review
"This is a superb book, one that answers many questions about the Chinese, past and present."—Srully Blotnick, Forbes Magazine
"1587, A Year of No Significance, for all its scholarship, has the surreal visionary quality of Kafka’s beautiful and frustrating story 'The Great Wall of China.'"—John Updike, The New Yorker
Publication Date: September 10, 1982