Zhu Yuanzhang took the name Hong Wu and proclaimed himself first emperor of the Ming dynasty , with Nanjing as his capital. Zhu's influences on China's history were far-reaching. Aside from his extreme despotism, which saw two appalling purges in which thousands of civil servants and literati died, he also initiated a course of isolationism from the outside world which lasted throughout the Ming and Qing eras. Consequently, Chinese culture became inward-looking, and the benefits of trade and connections with foreign powers were lost. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the Ming construction of the current Great Wall, a grandiose but futile attempt to stem the invasion of northern tribes into China, built once military might and diplomacy began to break down in the fifteenth century.

Yet the period also produced fine artistic accomplishments, particularly porcelain from the imperial kilns at Jingdezhen, which became famous worldwide. Nor were the Ming rulers entirely isolationist. During the reign of Yongle , Zhu's 26th son, the imperial navy (commanded by the Muslim eunuch, Admiral Zheng He ) ranged right across the Indian Ocean as far as the east coast of Africa on a fact-finding mission. But stagnation set in after Yongle's death in 1424, and the maritime missions were cancelled as being incompatible with Confucian values, which held a strong contempt for foreigners. Thus initiative for world trade and explorations passed into the hands of the Europeans, with the great period of world voyages by Columbus, Magellan and Vasco da Gama. In 1514, Portuguese vessels appeared in the Pearl River at the southern port of Guangzhou (Canton), and though they were swiftly expelled from here, Portugal was allowed to colonize nearby Macao in 1557. Though all dealings with foreigners were officially despised by the imperial court, trade flourished, as Chinese merchants and officials were eager to milk the profit from it.

In later years, the Ming produced a succession of less able rulers who allowed power to slip into the hands of the seventy thousand inner court officials where it was used, not to run the empire, but for intriguing amongst the "eunuch bureaucracy". By the early seventeenth century, frontier defences had fallen into decay, and the Manchu tribes in the north were already across the Great Wall. A series of peasant and military uprisings against the Ming began in 1627, and when the rebel Li Zicheng 's forces managed to break into the capital in 1644, the last Ming emperor fled from his palace and hanged himself - an ignoble end to a three-hundred-year-old dynasty.