Channels: Asian ArtChinese ArtExhibitions
Senior Curator of Asian Art Michael Knight, (Asian Art Museum) gives an introduction to the complexity of the Ming Dynasty bureaucratic structure.
A groundbreaking exhibition, Power and Glory was the first exhibition to focus on the full range of Ming dynasty (1368-1644) court arts. More than 200 treasures were on view, including gold and jade, paintings and porcelains, from China’s greatest museums, many never before seen outside of China. The works illustrated how this ancient dynasty surpassed the technology of its time to become a global leader in maritime power, mass production and artistic accomplishment.
Organized by the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, the Palace Museum, the Nanjing Municipal Museum and the Shanghai Museum.
It's a fairly complicated bureaucratic structure during the Ming. There was the emperor and the court, as kind of one part, and then there was the civil bureaucracy.
So the court was hereditary, emperor-to-emperor-to-emperor and aristocracy, and then the Eunuchs which kind of made up of the court and that support system. So that was kind of the military,
the central government. But the broader bureaucracy, the civilian bureaucracy, was run by people who were meritocracy and who were educated elite.
They went through an education system and exam system and were selected from that. And they basically ran the country at large, the economic parts of the governorships and other various provinces and so on.
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