A Tale of Two Melons - by Sarah Schneewind

A Tale of Two Melons - by Sarah Schneewind

When Jonathan Spence first published The Death of Woman Wang (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1978), did he imagine it would still be on many undergraduate reading lists nearly thirty years later? A Tale of Two Melons is a very different book, but it, too, should still appear on syllabi thirty years from now. At the heart of this elegant study lies a single story: On July 28, 1372, the emperor, Ming Taizu, was interrupted by a group of high officials who presented him with a pair of ripe melons. Unusually, the melons had grown on a single stem and were joined at the stalk. In the insightful analysis of their story, Schneewind uncovers the meanings assigned to this pair of melons by those who were in attendance when the fruits were presented to the emperor and by those who wrote about them afterward. Her close reading of the many texts that together form this historical “collage picture” (p. xi) brings to life aspects of Ming Chinese civilization, such as the intricate relationships at play within the imperial court or the roles of women and concubines, while at the same time shedding light on major historiographical questions, such as the intertwining of locality and center in Ming China or the nature of the relationship between the pictures created by historians and the elusive events themselves.

There is no doubt that this is a useful book for undergraduate teaching. It is written in an easygoing, lively style in which the emperor is described as “not understand[ing] what was up” (p. 1) or as “the johnny-jump-up grandson of an impoverished Jurong gold panner” (p. 91). It weaves clear explanations of complexities such as auspicious omens or the civil ...