The Confusions of Pleasure

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Recommended: Ancient Chinese social hierarchy

Timothy Brook’s book, The Confusions of Pleasure: Commerce and Culture in Ming China is a detailed account of the three centuries of the Ming Dynasty in China. The book allows an opportunity to view this prominent time period of Chinese history. Confusions of Pleasure not only chronicles the economic development during the Ming dynasty, but also the resulting cultural and social changes that transform the gentry and merchant class. Brook’s insights highlight the divide between the Ming dynasty’s idealized beliefs, and the realities of its economic expansion and its effects. Brook describes this gap through the use of several first hand accounts of individuals with various social statuses.

Traditionally, the Confucian model of society was organized with the gentry at the very top, and the merchant as a class on the bottom (Brook, p. 134).

Examination system. This exact system is what allowed one man named Zhang Tao to gain a position within the gentry.

Zhang Tao would become a mid-level bureaucrat during the later-Ming period. Written about only once, Zhang Tao is considered to be a minor figure in Ming Dynasty history (Brook, p. 6). Nevertheless, Brook uses Zhang Tao as the hindsight for the nearly three centuries of dynasty before him. However, as a moralist, Zhang Tao romanticized the early Ming period. His commentary is gathered from his writings in the Sheh county gazetteer (Brook, p. 87). Borrowing this format from Zhang Tao, Brook uses the seasons to divide various periods of the Ming Dynasty.

The first segment, Winter, archives the earliest years of the Ming dynasty between 1368 and 1450. The social hierarchy of early Ming was based upon the ownership of land (Brook, p. 79). One way to describe the increasing power ...

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...ok, p. 251). Brook also uses characters from various stories in Li Le’s commonplace book, Miscellaneous Notes on Things Seen and Heard to contrast the wistful remembrances of Zhang Tao and Gu Yanwu (Brook, p. 254). What Brook determines from Li Le’s account is crucial, “…However thoroughly commerce had replaced paternalism and deference with wage relationship, or however well some individuals managed to step over social barriers and move up the social ladder…the class system of overlordship and deference that held the Chinese world together at the beginning of the Ming was still there at the end” (Brook, p. 260). This ultimately produces Brook’s analysis, “Without commercial networks, many gentry would not have survived the dynastic transition” (Brook, p. 262). This conclusion reveals the ultimate disparity between the ideology of the Ming gentry and the reality.

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