Jonathan Spence: Writes biography of 17th century Chinese historian

Many years after the traumatic events that cut his long life in two — and which left, as he put it, his “country destroyed, family routed, no home left to go to” — the 17th-century Chinese historian and essayist Zhang Dai had a dream. As Jonathan D. Spence writes in his beautiful new book, dreams of the “accidental discovery of a previously secret and hidden world” had long “lain at the very center of Chinese sensibility.” But Zhang’s imaginary wonderland was not a realm of peace and eternal peach-blossom spring; it was, instead, a secret library concealed in “a hermitage of rock”: “Shelves full of books are all around me. Opening the different volumes I take a look, and find the pages covered with writings in unknown scripts — tadpole traces, bird feet markings, twisted branches. And in my dream I am able to read them all, to make sense of everything despite its difficulty.”

The puzzling traces that Zhang, as a wide-awake historian, tried to decipher turned on one central question: What noxious combination of internal rot and external threat had led to the fall of the Ming dynasty after more than two centuries of relative stability? Like other famous “before and after” dates — 1066, 1789, “on or about December 1910” — 1644 loomed in retrospect as historically inevitable. And yet, at the time, no one predicted the collapse of such a durable regime, least of all Zhang and his well-placed family, who had served for generations in the upper levels of the government bureaucracy.