If the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) is the Chinese dynasty best known outside China, it is in large part owing to the work of the historian Craig Clunas. His books (which include Superfluous Things: Material Culture and Social Status in Early Modern China, 1991, a history of objects seen through the lens of 18th-century European writing about luxury) and curation of the British Museum exhibition on the Ming in 2014 have brought a new depth of understanding to the field. His Screen of Kings: Royal Art and Power in Ming China (2013) formed a vital precursor to Sons of Heaven. In the new book he discusses emperors, but ‘kings’ were the spare sons of Ming rulers, scattered around the country in appanages (grants of land to younger members of a royal line) where, for instance, the Hongwu Emperor (Zhu Yuanzhang), founder of the dynasty and father of twenty-six sons, hoped his younger progeny would form ‘a fence and a screen’, protecting the imperial heartland at a welcome distance.

In this fascinating book, Clunas devotes some pages to the question of terminology. His volume is part of a series on dynasties, with works on the Brigantine, Fatimid and Maurya dynasties already published. He explores the complexities that arise from the lack of a single term for dynasty that translates from Chinese into English and back again. In effect, he is dealing with ‘male members of the Zhu lineage who occupied the highest place as rulers’. In a Korean source, the Ming rulers are listed successively as ‘murderous, impractical, grandiose, sickly, licentious, vainglorious, improvident, doltish, hen-pecked, bibulous, self-indulgent, profligate, completely irresponsible, debauched, frivolous, and ineffectual’, but if so they stemmed from a founder who, orphaned early, grew up in such extreme poverty that he was given away to a Buddhist monastery in order that he might survive. 

Zhu’s rise to power through leadership of a bandit army which participated in the expulsion of the Mongol Yuan dynasty, who had ruled China for nearly a hundred years, was extraordinary. As emperor, his ancestry of grinding poverty was forgotten and a new genealogy produced, tracing his forebears back to