Almost half a century ago, the historian of China Ray Huang wrote a profound, eccentric book called 1587: A Year of No Significance. Studying the emperor and half a dozen of his top administrators as they went about their routine duties, Huang made vivid a Ming dynasty being drawn into terminal decline by problems too small and a process too gradual for contemporaries to take note of: budget shortfalls, the corruption of the court by eunuchs, poorly managed trade relations with Portugal, occasional Japanese piracy, and so on. Two generations later, in the 1640s, the dynasty would meet its end in plague and insurrection.
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