Ming is one of the world’s great cultural brands. Name a Chinese dynasty? It’s got to be Ming. Found some dusty old blue-and-white porcelain in granny’s attic? You joke that it’s Ming and hope that it is. No marketing department could ask for more.
Like more modern brands, it was carefully chosen. When the one-time peasant Zhu Yuanzhang took Nanjing, then China’s capital, in 1368 and declared himself the Hongwu (“vast military might”) emperor, he gave his new dynasty an upbeat name: “Ming” means “brightness”. Diffidence does not an emperor make. For the next 300 years, it ruled a territory with borders much the same as present-day China, excluding the sparsely populated far western provinces.
This autumn, the British Museum is hoping to reflect some of that brilliance in an exhibition devoted to a key period in the dynasty’s early years, 1400-50. Five years in the making, the show will bring together artefacts from museums around the world, including 10 in China alone. For its first month it will overlap with the National Museum of Scotland’s Ming: The Golden Empire, a survey of the dynasty as a whole comprising loans from Nanjing.