llection
_Chin-ku ch'i-kuan_ ("Strange Stories of New Times and Old"), compiled
by Feng Meng-lung, is the best-known of these collections in vernacular
Chinese.

Little original work was done in the Ming epoch in the fields generally
regarded as "literature" by educated Chinese, those of poetry and the
essay. There are some admirable essays, but these are only isolated
examples out of thousands. So also with poetry: the poets of the gentry,
united in "clubs", chose the poets of the Sung epoch as their models to
emulate.

The Chinese drama made further progress in the Ming epoch. Many of the
finest Chinese dramas were written under the Ming; they are still
produced again and again to this day. The most famous dramatists of the
Ming epoch are Wang Shih-chen (1526-1590) and T'ang Hsien-tsu
(1556-1617). T'ang wrote the well-known drama _Mu-tan-ting_ ("The Peony
Pavilion"), one of the finest love-stories of Chinese literature, full
of romance and remote from all reality. This is true also of the other
dramas by T'ang, especially his "Four Dreams", a series of four plays.
In them a man lives in dream through many years of his future life, with
the result that he realizes the worthlessness of life and decides to
become a monk.

Together with the development of the drama (or, rather, the opera) in
the Ming epoch went an important endeavour in the modernization of
music, the attempt to create a "well-tempered scale" made in 1584 by Chu
Tsai-yue. This solved in China a problem which was not tackled till later
in Europe. The first Chinese theorists of music who occupied themselves
with this problem were Ching Fang (77-37 B.C.) and Ho Ch'eng-t'ien (A.D.
370-447).

In the Mongol epoch, most of the Chinese painters had lived in central
China; this remained so in the Ming epoch. Of the many painters of the
Ming epoch, all held in high esteem in China, mention must be made
especially of Ch'in Ying (_c_. 1525), T'ang Yin (1470-1523), and Tung
Ch'i-ch'ang (1555-1636). Ch'in Ying painted in the Academic Style,
indicating every detail, however small, and showing preference for a
turquoise-green ground. T'ang Yin was the painter of elegant women; Tung
became famous especially as a calligraphist and a theoretician of the
art of painting; a textbook of the art was written by him.

Just as puppet plays and shadow theatre are the "opera of the common
man" and took a new development in Ming time, the wood-cut and
block-printing developed