Over twenty-seven meters long, the Ordination Scroll of Empress Zhang (1493) is an important Ming Dynasty Daoist artifact from the San Diego Museum of Art's collection. It is a record of the imperial ordination of Empress Zhang (1470-1541), consort of the Ming Dynasty Hongzhi emperor (r. 1488-1505), by Zhang Xuanqing (d. 1509), the forty-seventh Heavenly Master of the Zhengyi institution. This book builds a history of imperial ordinations through a detailed examination of the scroll's transcriptions and meticulously painted images of celestial beings, and it examines the influences of...

This ground-breaking, beautifully illustrated publication is the outcome of the conference 'Ming: Courts and Contacts 1400-1450' that accompanied the British Museum's major exhibition Ming: 50 years that changed China (September 2014-January 2015). The scope of the exhibition and conference focused on Ming dynasty China in the years 1400 to 1450, a time when China was the largest (and one of the most prosperous) states in the world, ruled by a single family through a network of imperial and regional courts. During this period, many cultural, social and political themes that were to dominate...