Useful Work: State Demands and Craftsmen's Social Mobility in Fifteenth-Century China

This article examines the relationship between practical expertise, political power, and social mobility in fifteenth-century China. Practices and concepts from that period have been reinterpreted in recent debates on Useful and Reliable Knowledge (URK), showing that elite intellectuals and politicians were concerned with the role of crafts and technology, that is, their usefulness for the imperial state. In this article I show how a rhetoric of useful work contributed to the disappearance of practitioners in state politics and their growing invisibility in historical records by the mid-Ming period.