Since the Yuan Dynasty, intellectuals have been suppressed, and the traditional divide between scholars and merchants no longer exists. The viewpoint expressed by the Song people that “scholars, farmers, workers and merchants are all in their respective fields” truly emerged during the Ming Dynasty. In other words, by the Ming Dynasty, the boundary between merchants and intellectuals became increasingly blurred, and the distinction between the elegant and the vulgar in literature and art had already collapsed. The emergence of the “mountain man faction” represented by Chen Jiru (1558–1639) indicated the decline of the status of Ming Dynasty intellectuals and the loosening of the soil for the emergence of entertainment-oriented art consumption driven by changes in political power.