Urban Culture And The Aesthetic: In The Late Ming Nanjing Scholars

The incomplete transformation of Chinese traditional culture to its modern one expericend a rich and frontal state of culture, which was typically embodied by the urban culture of Nanjing in the middle and late period of Ming Dynasty, due to its inherent characteristics of traditional culture and particular modern opportunities. At that time scholars shared certain cultural potentiality, introduced and carried by this urban culture, rooted in the contradictory cultural attribute of their individualism and Confucian is stimulated by the development of commodity economy and modern living style and the decline of feudal governing, and materialized in both cultural natures of inner individualism and outer Confucianism. Those scholars had relationship of performance and appreciation with the ordinary people, fictitious relationship with recreational girls and collective one among themselves. Their aesthetic taste mainly lied in reflecting on ancient events and sentiment.The connotation of former is the expansion of individual imagination on historical level. And the connotation of the latter is those scholars' facing the world and gening at themselves in emptiness.