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 largely as a cheap substitute of real
paintings. The new urbanites wanted to have paintings of the masters and
found in the wood-cut which soon became a multi-colour print a cheap
mass medium. Block printing in colours, developed in the Yangtze valley,
was adopted by Japan and found its highest refinement there. But the
Ming are also famous for their monumental architecture which largely
followed Mongol patterns. Among the most famous examples is the famous
Great Wall which had been in dilapidation and was rebuilt; the great
city walls of Peking; and large parts of the palaces of Peking, begun in
the Mongol epoch. It was at this time that the official style which we
may observe to this day in North China was developed, the style employed
everywhere, until in the age of concrete it lost its justification.

In the Ming epoch the porcelain with blue decoration on a white ground
became general; the first examples, from the famous kilns in
Ching-te-chen, in the province of Kiangsi, were relatively coarse, but
in the fifteenth century the production was much finer. In the sixteenth
century the quality deteriorated, owing to the disuse of the cobalt from
the Middle East (perhaps from Persia) in favour of Sumatra cobalt, which
did not yield the same brilliant colour. In the Ming epoch there also
appeared the first brilliant red colour, a product of iron, and a start
was then made with three-colour porcelain (with lead glaze) or
five-colour (enamel). The many porcelains exported to western Asia and
Europe first influenced European ceramics (Delft), and then were
imitated in Europe (Boettger); the early European porcelains long showed
Chinese influence (the so-called onion pattern, blue on a white ground).
In addition to the porcelain of the Ming epoch, of which the finest
specimens are in the palace at Istanbul, especially famous are the
lacquers (carved lacquer, lacquer painting, gold lacquer) of the Ming
epoch and the cloisonne work of the same period. These are closely
associated with the contemporary work in Japan.

8 _Politics at court_

After the founding of the dynasty by Chu Yuean-chang, important questions
had to be dealt with apart from the socia