Professor Lynn Struve has spent a career carefully reading and skillfully translating primary sources on the transition between the Ming and the Qing dynasties; in this volume she turns her attention to the stuff that dreams were made of in the late Ming. Beginning with a careful discussion of how Chinese conceived of dreams, she argues that the late Ming was a moment in which the recording of dreams was an especially salient practice among intellectuals. She then relates accounts of “crisis dreams,” that occurred as the Ming was falling, and “dreams in the aftermath,” that occurred after the Qing was established. This is an extraordinary book, representing an enormous amount of careful and practiced labor; it is as powerful and moving an account of the trauma and intensity of dynastic change as exists (in English at least), and should be required reading for any student of the period.

This book contributes in at least three ways to an understanding of the experience of dynastic transition. First, it amply documents a subjective turn in the intellectual history of the late Ming. Apparent in the rise of autobiography in the Ming, the thought of Wang Yangming with its emphasis on listening to conscience, the still small voice within, and new religious phenomena, this element must be counted a central trend of the period. Subjectivity did not necessarily produce more dreams, but it did incline those who had interesting dreams to write them down, and it is the repeated occurrence of dream narratives in late Ming corpuses that attracted Struve's attention to the topic. It is a mark of her deep familiarity with the literature of the period that she is able to bring to the attention of the field the emergence of what was in many respects a new genre. It is striking that, on Struve's telling, not dreams perhaps, but written accounts of dreams taper off in the early Qing, with a decline of interest in abstract religiosity, and the growth of interest in the objective examination of text.

Reading and relating these dream accounts are a second contribution to the field, and this was no easy matter. Dream language is never easy to understand, even when the interpreter has at ready hand the full history and knowledge base of the dreamer. How much more difficult must it be when the dreamer and the interpreter are separated by 500 years and speak different tongues! But Struve is nothing but intrepid in her approach to the dreams, checking what must have been countless allusions and references in pursuit of meaning. To a reviewer admittedly unfamiliar with the science—or is it an art?—of dream interpretation, who approached the account with skepticism, she seems to have succeeded remarkable well. Particularly interesting to me were the dreams of Ming loyalists, covert or overt, who “found themselves undead and fraught with many issues of livelihood, cultural political identity, social ethics and existential uncertainty under Ming-Qing rule” (p. 199). Most of the dreams recounted here are suitably explained and made to fit appropriately in their context.

And what stories they contain! Readers of Qing history in English owe their sense of the traumas of the Ming–Qing transition to Professor Struve's precise and dramatic prose, and this volume does not disappoint. Forebodings, concerns over ruptures, mourning, and survivor guilt echo through the dreams related in this volume. Few books in the field carry as much emotional punch as this volume; reading is a haunting and harrowing experience. Don't read this book as you are going to sleep, lest Ming dreams become your dreams.

Professor Struve has long argued that the Ming–Qing transition was a moment rich with significance not only in the political and social, but also in the emotional lives of those who lived through it. She confirms this impression in this rich and rewarding study of the oneirology of the late Ming and early Qing.