The tools they created were nonetheless excellent through their refinement and kept their value through time. The sixteenth and seventeenth century however brought great losses to Chinese society because design started to be appreciated more than utility. Even with the fact that design should indeed be welcomed, people gradually began to lose perspective on elegance and were left with virtually no ability to distinguish between rudeness and stylishness. If design made utensils impossible to use in daily life it meant that they had no purpose and were thus ridiculous.

It is perfectly normal for a society to evolve through time and for design and technology to evolve concomitantly with it. But when design is prominent in the process of evolution the respective society is affected and is prevented from developing normally. This is the case of China in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, when the number of consumers interested in luxury experienced a rapid rise. Matters were not very different in Europe, given that capitalism can largely be considered to be an indirect product of materialism, which made people become more interested in cultural and material values than they were in effectiveness.

The Chinese society during the late Ming dynasty had troubles determining when a particular object had been elegant and when it had been vulgar. For some, vulgar meant that it could be associated with the masses and thus lost any material value, in view of the fact that it had been common.

Material values could best be described through agreeing on whether a particular object provided people with utility or whether it provided them with visual pleasure....

Even though they too expressed interest in material values represented by beauty and elegance, they did not appear to relate these values to one's social status, as a person's social class was more likely to be determined by their background, instead of being a result of the respective individual's personal possessions.
The Chinese from the late Ming Dynasty period developed complex techniques of discovering a certain object's elegance. While there were numerous individuals who claimed to be experts in attributing a material value to a thing, only those who had a thorough expertise in doing such an act were considered worthy of determining worth.

The Ming dynasty put across great excellence in its early years, as it is responsible for paving the road for Chinese culture and economic development. However, because of the fact that later emperors in the dynasty did not share the initial interest regarding development in accordance to international relationships, matters quickly became critical and most individuals in the country were left with developing cultural values through exploiting art.

Works cited:

1. Clunas, Craig. Superfluous things: material culture and social status in early modern China, (University of Hawaii Press, 2004).