| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Asia

John W. Dardess. Blood and History in China: The Donglin Faction and Its Repression, 1620–1627. Honolulu: University Press of Hawai'i. 2002. Pp. vii, 207. $24.95.

The fall of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) must be comprehended in at least three principal theaters: the rise of Manchu power and defeat of Ming defenses in the far northeastern Liao region; the ravishing of the central and upper Yangzi regions and the North China Plain by ineradicable roving rebel armies; and the extremely trenchant factional conflicts that rent the court even in its rump assemblages after the loss of Beijing. Beginning with Franz Michael's The Origin of Manchu Rule in China (1941), Western scholars have provided monographic, English-language narratives of two of those theaters (see Frederic Wakeman, Jr., The Great Enterprise: The Manchu Reconstruction of Imperial Order in Seventeenth-Century China, vol. 1 [1985], and James Bunyan Parsons, Peasant Rebellions of the Late Ming Dynasty [1970]). With this book, John W. Dardess gives Western readers the central acts of the third theater: a thorough narration, adhering closely to an admirable array of contemporaneous sources, of the most horrendous phase in the late Ming "factional catastrophes," which were exacerbated by the worst case of power abuse by an individual eunuch in Chinese history.

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