ABSTRACT
Learning and capturing hauteur from aristocrats, Confucian officials sustained it against merchants, and in Sung and Ming, at any rate, they grew as much as the monarchs in self-esteem and substance. If Ming was an age of heightened despotism, a monarchical prerogative, it was also an age of heightened traditionalism, the special care of the culturally conservative Confucianists. If on its political side neo-Confucianism was far from slavishly imperial, metaphysically, too, it was by no means categorically pro-despotic. Perhaps imperial confirmation of the neo-Confucian li-hsueh, this Sung rationalism, as orthodox and mandatory has sometimes been over-interpreted. The allegiance of 'tributary states' to Chinese emperors enhanced the imperial prestige–but in a cautionary Confucian manner. Until that beginning of the post-traditional era, the monarchy, standing for central power, worked against the bureaucracy's private aggrandizement, while Confucian bureaucracy, resisting pressures, interpreted them as the monarch's moves to make the fien-hsia private, and thus to fail in moral concern for the public well-being.
