Colleagues and Protégés: The Fifteenth-Century World of the T’ai-Ho Grand Secretaries

The question of how the people of T’ai-ho County fit themselves into the rest of Ming China must be considered in the light of the lives, thoughts, and often stormy careers of its leading literati—the very men whose writings provide the information that has made it possible to build the preceding series of changing local profiles of landscape, resource management, demography, and genealogy. While landscape evaluation, social and demographic behavior, and bureaucratic recruitment rates changed over the course of the Ming, the wider intellectual and emotional preoccupations of T’ai-ho’s literati changed also. Indeed, there took place a series of