1587 a Year of No Significance How do we perceive our surroundings, our world? I think we’ve all been taught how things generally were. Thence we began to use our senses to perceive and understand the world, we’ll find a lot of stimuli, both positive and negative toward our preconceived opinion, hence strengthen or weaken our worldly view. Back in 2011, when i found myself very hard to reconcile with the world, i found this book, 1587, a Year of No Significance, with a subtitle The Ming Dynasty in Decline, by an Chinese-American author Ray Huang. It’s a history book, stride between academic and popular genre, because of this when Huang first came up with the manuscript, no american press was interested, then he translated his work into Chinese and sent to a Chinese press, the time was 1979, the second year after China decided to open up. The cultural climate was bleak. The book was a big hit, Huang frames his discussion through biographical essays on six important persons in the late-Ming period. Through the narration discussed the illness of the contemporary society, and the point he’s trying to make is that since the former Chinese influence apogee: Tang Dynasty, the Chinese socio-political and economical character were becoming more and more inward looking. The culminating point is opium war but Huang think the turning point is the period this book covers. The author was not trying to blame any single one of those character described in the book for the downfall of the Chinese empire, rather he was trying to show a big picture, through which we can tell the eventual convergence of China and the modern world, though not without experiment and failure.