Bibliographic notes

Summary

The authors of each chapter and the volume editors provide bibliographic information of a general character here to supplement the limited footnoting of specific points, to inform the reader about the scope of their research, and to acknowledge important scholarly and intellectual debts that have influenced the content of the chapters.

In the preceding chapter, Wolfgang Franke offers an impressive description and seasoned evaluation of historical writing during the Ming, and makes systematic reference to his indispensable work, An introduction to the sources of Ming history (Kuala Lumpur, 1968). A recent publication from China lists 9,400 articles and 600 books on Ming history published everywhere, in Chinese, between 1900 and 1978.' A more selective survey of modern Chinese and Japanese writings on the Ming period published in i960 even then could list over 2,500 articles and books. These bibliographic tools display the vast scope of the field; at the same time, they make the point that the exhaustive documentation expected in monographic studies could not, and indeed need not, be undertaken in the present work. What follows are neither bibliographies nor bibliographic essays, but notes on bibliography conveying the authors' sense of the special problems of scholarship in each of the eleven chapters comprising this narrative of Ming dynasty political history.