摘要
During the late Ming dynasty, conspicuous consumption based on global commerce vicariously impacted on literati life and elite taste in gardens, paintings, books, and antiquities. The expanding literati appetite for consumption carried over to the eighteenth century. The patrons of the late Ming（1368-1644） and early Qing（1644-1911） garden estates, for example, lived in a world where silver from the New World was exchanged to pay for Chinese commodities, principally silk, porcelain, tea, and jade. The Ming economy was further transformed by an agrarian revolution in which cotton displaced rice production in southern coastal provinces and the influx of Japanese silver heightened the monetarization of the sixteenth century economy in unprecedented ways. Ming Chinese unwittingly faced a global marketplace. Their arts and letters would never be the same again.
