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By Kayla Allen
The Ming Dynasty was the ruling dynasty of China from 1368 to 1644 and responsible for some of China's best known achievements even today.
Great Wall of China
Though the much repeated myth that you can see the Great Wall of China from space (the moon or mars) is not in fact true it still remains one of the seven wonders of the world as well as the longest man made structure on the earth.
While many a wall had been made in China before the Ming Dynasty came along, however they had never been so well constructed and so ambitious in their scope. The walls that went before it have long since disappeared into the earth while the Great Wall with it's strong stonework and towering lookouts looks like it'll be around for years to come.
Porcelain
Porcelain production and diversification occurred. Blue and white porcelain became the normal form, but experimentation in two color and even three-color porcelain began. Everyone has heard of the beauty and priceless ness of the Ming vase; still sought after today.
Other forms of artwork started being popularized within the people and not solely the nobility including wood and block prints. As people began moving from the farms and country into the city, the market and demand for goods and art became larger.
The Novel
A great cultural development of the Ming Dynasty was that of the novel. Ming Dynasty novels developed from the oral tradition of storytelling. As a result, they were written in the people's language, not the language of the nobility. Their origins as oral stories made natural pauses in the narrative where the teller would have asked for, or accepted money; these pauses, in the written form became chapters. Some of these stories, first set in moveable type during the Ming Dynasty are still read today.
As the written word became more accessible and moveable type made it possible to create multiple identical copies, encyclopedias were written containing important information from a variety of fields, such as geography, music and medicine. Dictionaries were also written; including the most influential, written in 1615 A.D., which reduced the number of signs for Chinese characters to 214, as opposed to the 540 plus signs of previous dictionaries.
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