| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Asia

Sarah Schneewind. Community Schools and the State in Ming China. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 2006. Pp. xiv, 298. $55.00

In this meticulously researched and eloquently written book, Sarah Schneewind unravels the myths concerning the institution of the Chinese community school (shexue) launched in the first decades of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644). According to an imperial edict issued in 1375, every village in the empire was to build a school that any boy might attend to acquire basic literacy and moral improvement. The emperor responsible for the decree was the Ming founder Zhu Yuanzhang, considered by both contemporaries and later historians a despot, but also known as "an effective architect of state and society." It is this latter portrayal that the author convincingly demonstrates could not be "more questionable" (p. 8).

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