Interview with Ming Scholars

Abstract

This is obviously something I’ve often been asked, so I wish I had a better answer. My education at school was focused on languages — including ancient ones — and history, and at some point in my teens these interests coalesced around China; I can recall entering a school art essay prize with a piece on the Song Huizong “Five-Coloured Parakeet” painting in the MFA Boston, which of course I had only seen in reproduction (I didn’t win). I was, perhaps somewhat weirdly, keen on “antiques” as a teenager and Chinese porcelain gripped me from early on, though this was a fairly indiscriminate interest and not particularly Ming-focused. I can however pinpoint the first book I read on the Ming in my teens, it was Vincent Cronin’s hagiography of Matteo Ricci, The Wise Man from the West, published in 1955. Studying Chinese at Cambridge as an undergraduate from 1972, neither the Ming nor art history were particularly present in my course. There was a minimal presence of art history near the beginning of my student years, in the form of lectures from the archaeologist Cheng Te-k’un 鄭德坤 (1908–2001), which I’m sorry to say I failed to find very engaging. Huang Zongxi 黃宗羲, Ming yi dai fang lu 明夷待訪錄 was one of our “set texts,” and I wrote my dissertation (a sort of “senior thesis”) based on a classic piece of 1960s Chinese scholarship; this was Wang Yuquan 王毓铨, Mingdai de juntun 明代的军屯, but this did not reflect a particular interest in the Ming. The topic was handed to me by Denis Twitchett (1925– 2006), the great historian of the Tang who was professor at Cambridge then; I think he just wanted a précis of a book he thought might be interesting to him, which is more or less all I did. The opportunity to study in Beijing in 1974–5 give me exposure to some Ming sites, particularly the Ming tombs, but at that time all sites like temples were closed to visitors, even if the first postCultural Revolution stirrings of intellectual life were just visible, and I bought then the copy of the Zhonghua shuju Ming shi which I still have. If anything, it was probably the Qing that really engaged me as a student, and my doctoral work was on a novel by the 19th century Mongol novelist Inǰannasi (1837– 1892). I had at that point ambitions to be a scholar of Chinese literature, of premodern fiction primarily. I was delighted (and very lucky) to join the curatorial staff of the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1979, but I seized on this more as a way of being paid to be interested in China, and if other opportunities had come good then my life would have been rather different. Ming Studies, 83, 67–80, May 2021