Video Transcript:

The Ming took over from the Yuan Dynasty, the Dynasty of the Mongols in 1368 and they ruled until 1644, so it was a long-lived Dynasty by Chinese standards and it was a purely Chinese Dynasty. Interestingly enough, the court chose to look back over the previous rule of the Mongols, the foreigners, to another Golden Era in their history the Sung Dynasty of the 11th and 12th centuries and 13th centuries, for their artistic inspiration.

There was a conscious revisionism going on in literature and especially in the pictorial arts. We see this in professional paintings that look very close and are very similar to the larger hanging scrolls of the bird and flower paintings, the realistic paintings of Sung.

Sung landscapes come back into play, in one school in particular, a court sponsored school , looked back at Southern Sung landscape paintings, were often much smaller in scale than the ones they produced for the palace halls at the court in Beijing, but the look was certainly that, one of revival.

It was a period of tremendous prosperity, especially through early and middle Ming, with a large burgeoning middle class. Trade for instance was very, very highly developed. Some of the largest boats in world history had been built by the Chinese government and were being sent now around through Southeast Asia, all the way to Arabia and even the coast of Africa. It's a period then of economic expansion, social prosperity, generally speaking we can see it as kind of a Confucian oriented running of government, or style of government. That isn't new, of course, that had been the case since Han. So the scholarship and examination system come into play. The rise of the Literatist artist begins to peak in the 16th century but it continues right into the early 18th century.