Danwei has a great post on why the Ming (1368-1644) is so hot these days. (And they’re not talking about the hobbled Yao, either.) Joel Martinson asks, “Has the Qing been mined to exhaustion as a source for popular culture, or have people simply grown tired of historical teledramas featuring costumed characters wearing queues?”
One of the books mentioned in the Danwei post is the Ray Huang classic, 1587: A Year of No Significance. It has its flaws (not the least of which is the translation of the Ming court diaries used in the English title) and the anti-CCP subtext is hard to ignore. (Huang belongs to that school of historians that views history as an effective tool with which to whip contemporary governments into shape. Sima Qian is somewhere smiling.) All that said, it is one of the most accessible books on Chinese history for the non-historian, well-written and full of information about a fascinating period: the end of the Ming. The division of the book into biographical sketches (another homage to the historians of China’s past) also makes it a great book on a plane or train.
I feel the Ming gets overlooked a little bit by historians