The Ming Project and Ming Thought

In 1960, when the Ming Biographical History Project of the Association for Asian Studies was first being organized, the study of Ming thought hardly existed in the West. This is true of many other aspects of Ming studies, of course, and one of the major reasons for undertaking the project was the belief that a major reference work of this kind would prove a stimulus and an aid to the development of studies in many aspects of this neglected period, just as Eminent Chinese of the Ch'ing Period had opened up Ch'ing studies in the late 1940's and 50's. Indeed my own interest in Huang Tsung-hsi had been partly inspired, and was certainly powerfully assisted, by the biographies of Huang and his contemporaries in Eminent Chinese, and Huang's accounts of individual Ming thinkers naturally led me to the biographical approach as an appropriate means of getting at the vast subject of Ming thought

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