Official interpretation of Confucian classics is a scholarly document that interprets Confucian classics in the form of official interpretation. During the Ming Dynasty, the central government was highly centralized, the compilation background, connotation, and ideological characteristics of the Ming Dynasty’s official interpretation of the classics reflect the cultural choices and political orientation of a dynasty. The official interpretation of Confucian classics and documents in the Ming Dynasty is not only an important source of information for explaining the policies of Confucian studies, but also an important witness to the inheritance and limitations of the official interpretation of Confucian classics in the Ming Dynasty. The issuance of official interpretations of Confucian classics during the Ming Dynasty led to the dominance of Cheng Zhu Neo Confucianism in the study of classics. The promotion of popularization and accessibility in the official interpretation of classics objectively promoted the dissemination of Confucian classics and the popularization of Confucian education. The official interpretation of Confucian literature represents the characteristics of cultural integration and ideological limitations in the Ming Dynasty, which had a significant impact in the field of Confucian studies, reflecting the highly centralized central government’s intervention in Confucian scholarship and control over the ideological sphere. The official Confucian classics of the Ming Dynasty reflected the academic orientation of respecting Cheng Zhu Neo Confucianism, as well as the political demand to consolidate rule and maintain people’s hearts, while the official Confucian classics of the Ming Dynasty embodied the inheritance of the spirit of applying the classics to the world since the Song and Yuan dynasties. The private writings on Confucian classics in the mid to late Ming Dynasty had both academic and governing functions, and were also the inheritance of Confucian scholarship and the practice of Confucian scholarship in governing. They highlighted the cultural significance of the transformation of Confucian classics under the influence of official Confucian scholars in the Ming Dynasty, vividly reflecting the interactive relationship and balance between the academic study of the classics and the imperial examination system. The inheritance and limitations of the Ming Dynasty’s official interpretation of the Confucian classics objectively influenced the direction and process of the development of Confucian classics, and also served as the deep root of the reactionary views of scholars towards Song studies in the mid to late Ming Dynasty and evolution of Confucian classics studies. More discourse on Confucian classics was integrated into annotations and reconciliations based on literature, thus expanding new perspectives on Confucian studies. A reexamination of the academic atmosphere of the Ming Dynasty reveals the important dimensions of the inheritance and limitations of the Ming Dynasty’s official interpretation of the Confucian classics, which conveys the new academic changes in the process of the rise and fall of academic atmosphere, and is beneficial for deepening the research on the Ming Dynasty’s official Confucian classics.