European commentators of the 18th and 19th centuries liked to imagine imperial China as a sealed kingdom: in Johann Gottfried Herder's scornful phrase, as "an embalmed mummy, wrapped in silk and painted with hieroglyphics: its internal circulation … that of a dormouse in its winter sleep". The British Museum's new exhibition shows that early Ming China was nothing of the sort. Its emperors, the exhibition reminds us, "exchanged goods, staff and ideas with courts from Kyoto to Mogadishu. Ming China was a multifaith, cosmopolitan society that was alive to the possibilities of global trade." The Ming dalliance with exotica shines through the objects on display. A golden flask is embellished with the Chinese emblem of a dragon, yet cast in a heavy, gourd-like shape inspired by a Middle Eastern design. A hanging silk brocade combines western Asian and Chinese patterns. Ming princes fought with Japanese blades, wore Mongolian-style helmets, sported hat-top ornaments studded with Sri Lankan and Indian gems, and were buried with ingots of African gold.  The rise and decline of the Ming possesses a dramatic symmetry. Founded in 1368 by desperate peasant rebels who had somehow survived the empire-wide plague, famine and civil wars of the mid-14th century, the dynasty fell, again to peasant rebels, in spring 1644. In April of that year, as an exuberant rural rabble breached the walls of Beijing, the last Ming emperor entered the Pavilion of Imperial Longevity just north of the Forbidden City and hanged himself with his sash.  The intervening two and a half centuries were characterised by vaulting imperial ambition and achievement. Ming China was a country wealthy in knowledge and learning; a country whose economy was at the heart of the global luxuries trade, thriving on the New World silver eagerly proffered by Europeans in love with its blue and white porcelain and its soft, embroidered silks.  Yet despite its many spectacular successes, both physically and institutionally the Ming empire is also a study in fractiousness. It was a single state as big as, though more geographically diverse than Europe (its borders enclosed subtropical forests and freezing mountains, paddy fields and desert), that took months to traverse from north to south. It was ruled over by a series of at best eccentric, at worst paranoically violent emperors. The Ming founder, Hongwu, executed his prime minister in 1380, the 12th year of the Ming, beginning a purge in which perhaps 40,000 perished. For its remaining 264 years, the dynasty functioned without an official head of government. It preached genteel, ritual-conscious Confucianism, but tortured, strangled and dismembered those with whom it was dissatisfied, while emperors and empresses burned alive, smothered and poisoned relatives who became political enemies.  It was the regime that in the early 15th century sent fleets of ships to explore distant lands and oceans; and that, within another century, began sealing its northern frontier with the longest, most solid and most continuous border wall in Chinese history. The wealthy of Ming China delighted in beauty – cloudlike silk gauzes, translucent porcelains, ornate lacquerwork, gorgeous filigree – while famine periodically reduced subsistence farmers to eating earth and each other.  Jessica Rawson-Hill and Craig Clunas, the exhibition curators, have chosen to focus on "fifty years that changed China": from 1399 to 1449. The era is demarcated at start and end by military traumas. It begins with the Yongle emperor's usurpation of his nephew Jianwen, the designated heir of Yongle's father Hongwu. In 1402 – at the close of a three-year civil war – Yongle burnt his nephew to death and set about purging his critics with brutal thoroughness. (The deceased emperor's old advisers were dismembered and in one particularly vindictive case relatives to the 10th degree of association were also killed; the death toll ran to tens of thousands.) The era ends with the massive defeat by a Mongol tribe of a half-million-strong Ming army, at Tumu in northwest China, and the Mongol capture of the Zhengtong emperor.  In between these two bloodbaths, however, were 50 years of surprising peace and remarkable accomplishment. Featuring a range of paintings, ceramics and archaeological finds (some of which have never before left China), the exhibition tells a rich and complex historical story of political consolidation, technological creativity, military vitality, expansive commerce and, above all, staggering imperial grandeur. Ming China, Clunas writes, "had a greater land area, bigger cities (and more big cities), bigger armies, bigger ships, bigger palaces, bigger bells, more literate people, more religious professionals; and it produced more books, ceramic dishes, textiles and spears than any other state on earth at that time". The exhibition reminds visitors that, a century before Columbus, Ming China was already enmeshed in intricate networks of commercial and cultural exchange, extending across Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Europe.  The grand visions of Yongle – the ruthless usurper – dominate. It was Yongle who in 1403 ordered the transfer of the capital from Nanjing, in the southeast, to Beijing in the north. In February 1421, after 16 years of construction by more than 200,000 labourers, Yongle inaugurated his new capital in front of an international audience: crowds of ambassadors from Asia and the coasts of the Indian Ocean, all of whom were fabulously banqueted and accommodated and loaded with gifts. Yongle dispatched six fleets of "treasure ships" (laden with Chinese goods and as many as 27,000 soldiers) from southeast China, to Java, Sumatra, India and as far as east Africa. He ordered the construction of the Porcelain Pagoda in Nanjing, an 80-metre-high Buddhist monastery faceted with white, yellow and green tiles, and festooned with lanterns and tinkling bells. Yongle's every public appearance was an epic performance, escorted by 2,000 singers chanting his praises to the accompaniment of drums, cornets, cymbals and bells.  As well as an exhibitionist, he could be a careful systematiser and micromanager. He began to establish standard texts of the Confucian, Buddhist and Daoist traditions and to set down a normative style of calligraphy that remains popular as a software font today. Between 1405 and 1408 Yongle commissioned a team of 2,169 scholars to compile a vast anthology of orthodox literary texts (excising works of which he disapproved from the record in the process). In the course of a single month in 1414, he directed the imperial sacrifices, prepared to leave on campaign and legislated for the school curriculum in deep rural south China.  Impatient western stereotypes of the 19th century dismissed imperial China as effeminately scholastic; not so the muscular early Ming. Yongle led by example, riding out into the steppe in five military campaigns against Mongol tribes. He literally worshipped war, in the form of Zhenwu ("perfected warrior"), the god of war, whom the emperor promoted to a state cult. As well as fighting major campaigns in Mongolia and in Vietnam, the million-strong Ming army was a ubiquitous presence throughout China, providing labour for building and transportation projects, as well as supervising trade over land and maritime borders.  Despite his veneration of violence, Yongle sought to defang certain parts of Ming society. His father, Hongwu, had set his 24 sons up as "princes of the realm", to defend far-flung parts of the empire with their own armies of up to 15,000 men. Yongle had only been able to instigate and win a civil war against his nephew through his command of garrisons personally loyal to him. Little wonder, then, that he set about disarming his relatives in the provinces. And his descendants did not necessarily inherit his martial talents. After the 1449 debacle at Tumu – when an incompetent emperor was captured on a military adventure – Ming emperors would never personally risk leading their troops into battle again.  Although Yongle neutered the fighting power of the crown princes, they retained great cultural prestige as patrons of music, dance, painting, calligraphy and antique collecting. Their households bulged with art, jewellery and furniture given to them by the imperial court, and the exhibition features some of these beautiful objects, excavated from tombs of Ming princes in north, west and central China. One pair of hairpins is mounted with golden filigree phoenixes that would have glinted and bobbed on top of their aristocratic wearer's chignon as she walked. Nearby sits a Ming prince's crown, one of only two that survive: a kind of leather and bamboo mesh mortarboard, festooned with strings of jade beads and secured to the hair with a heavy gold nail. Elsewhere, there is a saddle inlaid with lapis lazuli and blue and green turquoise, its panels swarming with gold, serpentine dragons. Two cabinets display 11-metre-long scroll paintings of delicate bamboo and plum blossom (normally, you'd be lucky to see one metre at a time). The intricate profusion of material culture during this half-century was driven by technical innovation: the development of new glazes created glossier, more delicate ceramics of an extraordinary variety of shapes and colour schemes.  Early Ming China was vibrant with foreign, multifaith influences: with weapons experts from southeast Asia, Mongol officers, Korean cooks (who produced the rice-cakes that Yongle relished) and imperial concubines. The chief architect of the Forbidden City was from Vietnam. Yongle kept in his service Mongol, central Asian, Jurchen, Vietnamese and Korean eunuchs. Zheng He, the admiral who led his fleets across the seas, was a Muslim who, according to the requirements of the situation, was prepared to make offerings to Buddhism and Hinduism, and who acknowledged the emperor as heaven's representative on earth.  Chinese culture and objects also scattered outwards in the first half of the 15th century. On display are a Japanese manual for versifying in classical Chinese, Japanese and Korean editions of the Confucian classics and Vietnamese and Thai imitations of Ming ceramics. Persian publishers used gold-flecked Ming paper, while fashionable Egyptians favoured tunics cut from Chinese patterned silks. At the end of the 15th century, the Italian court painter Andrea Mantegna depicted one of the three magi presenting Christ with gold inside a delicate antique blue and white porcelain Ming bowl – testimony to European reverence for Chinese objects.  Early Ming China's interest in things foreign was not a form of multiculturalism in any real sense: its emperors were too concerned with power projection for the concept to fit. Perhaps coercive cosmopolitanism is a more appropriate term. Yongle, for example, was obsessed with winning diplomatic recognition in the interests of legitimising his power-grab. Zheng He's voyages between Asia and Africa were a key part of this enterprise: the admiral was tasked with extracting declarations of loyalty to Yongle and exotic tribute gifts from rulers in Asia, the Middle East and Africa, to shore up the ruler's authority at home. One of the most celebrated of these offerings was a giraffe sent to Beijing in 1414 by a ruler of Bengal. On its arrival in the capital, Yongle's advisors opportunistically identified it as a mythical qilin – an animal that, Confucius explained, would only make an appearance during the reign of a sage emperor. The exhibition includes a scroll painting of the animal, glossed by a propaganda poem: "Your majesty's virtue equals that of heaven; its merciful blessings have spread far and wide so that its harmonious vapours have emanated a qilin, as an endless bliss to the state for a myriad, myriad years."  The exhibition concentrates on the material culture of the Ming aristocracy; regrettably few artefacts from the bottom rungs of the social ladder survive. But where they can, the curators have included images that illuminate the predicament of ordinary citizens. For Yongle's monumental projects – the building of Beijing, the repair of the Grand Canal, the campaigns into the Mongol steppe and Zhenghe's fleets of ships – put the general populace under appalling pressure to produce exceptional levies of taxation and labour. After Yongle died, his successor offered a tax remission to relieve the economic oppression of the previous reign, observing that many fathers had sold their daughters, and husbands their wives, to pay their taxes. Alongside the exhibition's glittering objects of worship (golden Buddhas, bronze bodhisattvas, damascened ritual sceptres) hangs a moving mid-century set of temple paintings commissioned to commemorate the miseries of the common people. In one image, smartly dressed merchants count their money after buying and selling ragged, tethered slave girls.  For decades, the Ming has perhaps been more likely to make the average western reader think Flash Gordon than 300 years of varied and surprising Chinese history. This exhibition will help to change that. It describes in complex, compelling terms the process by which the Ming dynasty became one of the largest, most successful states in the world, and enables us to visualise the lives of exquisite opulence enjoyed by its elites.  • Ming: 50 Years That Changed China is at the British Museum, London WC1B until 5 January. britishmuseum.org.
A million-strong army, exquisite opulence and paranoically violent rulers – as a new show opens at the British Museum, Julia Lovell explains how the Ming dynasty put China at the centre of the world