Qing dynasty

• 1. The Last Dynasty

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  On the 12th of February 1912, Empress Dowager Longyu issued the abdication of the child emperor Puyi. With that order, the Qing dynasty came to an end. It was the last imperial dynasty in Chinese history.

  The Qing were not Han Chinese, who formed the majority of the population. They were Manchus, descended from Jurchen peoples who lived in what are now the provinces of Jilin and Heilongjiang.

  At its height, their empire stretched from the Sea of Japan in the east to the Pamir Mountains in the west. It reached from the Mongolian Plateau in the north to the South China Sea in the south. In 1907 it counted over 426 million citizens, more than any other state of its time.

  How did a small people from the northeastern frontier, who began as vassals of the Ming, come to rule so much? What did they have to promise, borrow and destroy along the way? And why did an empire that large collapse within a few months of one uprising? The answers begin with a chieftain, a feud and an army of banners.

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• 2. Nurhaci and the Banners

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  In 1582, Nurhaci began a feud with neighbouring tribes that grew into a campaign of unification. He led the Aisin-Gioro, a minor Jurchen tribe based at Jianzhou. He was officially a vassal of the Ming emperors, and he saw himself as a guardian of the Ming border.

  Nurhaci may have spent part of his youth in a Han household. He became fluent in Chinese and Mongolian, and he read the novels Romance of the Three Kingdoms and Water Margin. His later policies show a ruler who understood the world beyond his own tribe.

  The Eight Banners were his most lasting creation. The system took shape informally as early as 1601 and was formally established in 1615. It was a military organisation, but it also carried social, economic and political roles. Its ranks mixed Manchu, Han and Mongol elements from the start.

  In 1616 Nurhaci proclaimed himself Khan of the Later Jin dynasty, borrowing the name of an earlier Jurchen-ruled state. Two years later he announced the Seven Grievances and openly renounced Ming overlordship. He then moved his capital from Hetu Ala to Liaoyang in 1621, and to Mukden, now Shenyang, in 1625.

  The Khorchin Mongols became his most useful allies, bringing skill as cavalry archers. Nurhaci sealed the alliance by arranging marriages between Jurchen and Khorchin noble families. Those who resisted met military force. Mongols would assist the Manchus for most of the dynasty's history.

  Nurhaci died in 1626, and his eighth son, Hong Taiji, took over. In 1627 the Jurchens suffered a defeat, partly because the Ming had acquired Portuguese cannons. Hong Taiji answered in 1634 by creating his own artillery corps. It cast cannons in the European design with the help of defecting Chinese metallurgists.

  Hong Taiji also built a rudimentary government on the Ming model. In 1631 he set up six boards to oversee finance, personnel, rites, military affairs, punishments and public works. They had little real role until the eve of the conquest ten years later. He staffed them with many Han Chinese, including newly surrendered Ming officials, but kept an ethnic quota for top posts.

  His approach to Han subjects broke with his father's. After a Han revolt in 1623, Nurhaci had turned on them with discriminatory policies and killings. Hong Taiji argued to reluctant Manchus that the defecting Ming general Hong Chengchou deserved lenient treatment. He made Han into citizens who owed military service.

  In November 1635, Hong Taiji officially adopted the name Manchu for the united Jurchen people. That same year the Mongol allies were fully brought into a separate Banner hierarchy under direct Manchu command. The next step was a new name for the state itself.

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• 3. What China Meant

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  In April 1636, Mongol nobility of Inner Mongolia, Manchu nobility and a Han mandarin recommended that Hong Taiji become emperor. He had just been presented with the imperial seal of the Yuan dynasty, after the defeat of the last Khagan of the Mongols. He renamed his state from Great Jin to Great Qing and raised himself from Khan to Emperor. The step hinted at ambitions far beyond Manchu lands. He then invaded Korea again.

  The meaning of the name Qing is disputed. One theory sees a deliberate contrast with the Ming. The Chinese character for Qing is linked to water in the zodiac system, and the Ming character is linked to fire. The name would then announce the conquest of fire by water. Another reading finds Buddhist overtones of clear sight and enlightenment, and a link to the bodhisattva Manjusri.

  Early European writers used the word Tartar for all the peoples of Northern Eurasia. In the 17th century, Catholic missionary writings narrowed it to the Manchus, and Tartary to the lands they ruled before the Ming-Qing transition.

  After the Manchus conquered China proper, they began calling their state China. In Manchu the word was Dulimbai Gurun. Their emperors applied it to everything they ruled, including present-day Northeast China, Xinjiang, Mongolia and Tibet. They rejected the idea that only Han lands counted as China. Official documents, including the Chinese versions of treaties and world maps, used China and Qing interchangeably.

  The Manchu term for Chinese people covered Han, Manchu and Mongol subjects alike. The court preached that the outer non-Han peoples, such as Mongolians and Tibetans, and the inner Han were joined as one family. Phrases meaning home and abroad as one family carried the message.

  When the Qing conquered Dzungaria in 1759, a Manchu-language memorial declared the new land absorbed into China. Whether that vision held was tested first in Beijing.

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• 4. The Gate at Shanhai

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  In September 1643, Hong Taiji died suddenly. Jurchen leaders were chosen by a council of nobles, so no heir was clear. The main contenders were his oldest son Hooge and his half brother Dorgon. A compromise placed Hong Taiji's five-year-old son Fulin on the throne as the Shunzhi Emperor. Dorgon became regent and the real ruler.

  The Ming were collapsing. In April 1644 a rebel coalition under Li Zicheng, a former minor Ming official, sacked Beijing and founded the short-lived Shun dynasty. The last Ming ruler, the Chongzhen Emperor, killed himself as the city fell.

  Li then marched some 200,000 rebels toward the Ming general Wu Sangui, who held Shanhai Pass on the Great Wall. Wu had to ally with one enemy against the other. The peasant army was twice his size, yet he chose the Manchus. Li had taken Wu's father hostage, and it was said he took Wu's concubine. The Manchus, meanwhile, had a Chinese-style government and promised stability.

  Wu and Dorgon defeated Li Zicheng at the Battle of Shanhai Pass on the 27th of May 1644. Their armies took Beijing on the 6th of June. The Shunzhi Emperor was invested as Son of Heaven on the 30th of October 1644. The Manchus held a formal funeral for the Chongzhen Emperor, presenting themselves as the Ming's political heirs.

  Dorgon made a decision that surprised other Manchu princes. He refused to sack Beijing and instead made it the dynastic capital, reappointing most Ming officials. No major Chinese dynasty had directly taken over its predecessor's capital. Keeping the city and its bureaucracy intact steadied the regime and sped up the conquest.

  The Manchus were a minority even in their own armies. By 1648, only 16 percent of bannermen were ethnic Manchus. Han bannermen made up 75 percent, and Mongols the rest. Han defectors usually served as the vanguard, with Manchu troops saved for quick, decisive strikes. Han bannermen also held most governorships in the early Qing, and three Liaodong officers, Shang Kexi, Geng Zhongming and Kong Youde, governed southern China as viceroys.

  In July 1645, Dorgon issued the Queue Order. Adult Han men had to shave the front of their heads and comb the rest into a queue, on pain of death. A popular saying summed it up: "To keep the hair, you lose the head; To keep your head, you cut the hair." The Manchus treated it as a loyalty test. Many Han found it humiliating. Resistance in Jiangnan was fierce, and some 100,000 Han were slaughtered.

  Dorgon died on the 31st of December 1650. He had gathered so much power that he threatened the throne, and he was first given the posthumous title Emperor Yi. Two months into the Shunzhi Emperor's personal rule, he was stripped of his titles, and his corpse was disinterred and mutilated. His family and associates were purged.

  The conquest was not finished. The last Ming pretender, Prince Gui, fled to Burma, where King Pindale Min handed him to a Qing army under Wu Sangui. He was executed in Yunnan in early 1662.

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• 5. Three Long Reigns

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  The Kangxi Emperor came to the throne at seven, and his reign of 61 years was the longest of any Chinese emperor. His father had named four regents with no claim to the throne, hoping to avoid another Dorgon. The most junior, Oboi, grew dominant anyway. In 1669 the fifteen-year-old Kangxi tricked and imprisoned him.

  The Revolt of the Three Feudatories lasted eight years, led by Ming generals who had been rewarded with southern governorships. By 1681, Kangxi's forces had regained control of a ravaged south that needed decades to recover.

  In 1683, Zheng Keshuang surrendered Taiwan. His grandfather Koxinga had seized the island from Dutch colonists as a base against the Qing. The victory freed troops for the fight over Albazin, an eastern outpost of Russia. The resulting Treaty of Nerchinsk in 1689 was China's first formal treaty with a European power, and it kept the border peaceful for most of two centuries.

  Kangxi also led campaigns against the Dzungars in Outer Mongolia and expelled Galdan's invading forces. After Galdan was killed, his followers tried to influence the choice of the next Dalai Lama. Kangxi sent two armies to Lhasa and installed one sympathetic to the Qing. At home he backed the Kangxi Dictionary, and his Sacred Edict of 1670 promoted Confucian family values.

  In the winter of 1722, Kangxi died and his fourth son became the Yongzheng Emperor. One historian called him "severe, suspicious, and jealous, but extremely capable and resourceful." In 1723 he outlawed Christianity and expelled most missionaries. He expanded Palace Memorials, which carried frank local reports straight to the throne, bypassing the bureaucracy.

  Yongzheng also enforced the land tax, setting aside the extra revenue as "money to nourish honesty" among local officials and for irrigation, schools, roads and charity. The reform worked in the north. In the south, commissioners met falsified land registers, coded account books and even violence. In 1727 the Treaty of Kyakhta, drawn up by an all-Manchu team, settled terms with Russia and left the Qing a free hand in Mongolia.

  The Qianlong Emperor took the throne in 1735 and led the Ten Great Campaigns. They pushed military control into present-day Xinjiang and Mongolia, and strengthened the grip on Tibet. He also sponsored the Siku Quanshu, the largest collection of books in Chinese history. Yet he used the literary inquisition to silence opposition.

  Heshen, the emperor's handsome young favourite, grew into one of the most corrupt officials in the dynasty's history. Qianlong's son, the Jiaqing Emperor, eventually forced Heshen to commit suicide. The historian Jonathan Spence described the empire at the end of Qianlong's reign as "like the sun at midday".

  The 18th century saw the population balloon from 100 million to 300 million. New crops from the Americas, such as the potato and peanut, improved nutrition. Qianlong himself remarked, "The population continues to grow, but the land does not."

  In 1796 the White Lotus Society rose in open rebellion, declaring that "the officials have forced the people to rebel". The fighting dragged on until 1804, when brutal and corrupt campaigns finally ended it.

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• 6. Rule and Rank

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  Under the Qing, every position in the central government had two holders: a Manchu and a Han Chinese. The Han appointee did the substantive work. The Manchu was there to ensure Han loyalty. Six Boards stood below the emperor, each with two presidents and four vice presidents, and appointments were split between Manchu noblemen and Han examination graduates.

  The Forbidden City itself mirrored this split. The "Outer Court" in the south, inherited from the Ming, handled routine matters. The "Inner Court" in the north, dominated by the imperial family and Manchu nobility, decided what mattered. Its core was the Grand Council, which began in the 1720s to run campaigns against the Mongols and soon took over wider duties.

  The Imperial Household Department was unique to the Qing. It matured after 1661 and largely replaced eunuchs in managing the inner palace. It also traded in jade, ginseng, salt and furs, ran textile factories in Jiangnan, and published books. Its staff were booi, bondservants from the Upper Three Banners, and by the 19th century it oversaw at least 56 subagencies.

  The empire at its greatest extent covered approximately 13 million square kilometres. China proper had eighteen provinces at first, and the number later rose to 22. Each province had a governor and a military commander. Below them came prefectures, subprefectures and counties run by magistrates. Eight regional viceroys oversaw the provinces, and the Viceroy of Zhili, near Beijing, was considered the most powerful.

  The outer regions worked differently. The Lifan Yuan supervised Mongolia and Tibet, with imperial commissioners and garrisons. The emperor acted as Mongol khan, patron of Tibetan Buddhism and protector of Muslims. Manchuria stayed closed to Han settlers behind the Inner Willow Palisade, a ditch and embankment planted with willows. The Qing made Xinjiang a province in 1884, after Yakub Beg invaded from Central Asia and was defeated.

  Society was divided by statute into relatively closed estates. Most people were liangmin, meaning good people, who included scholars, farmers, artisans and merchants. At the bottom were jianmin, the mean people, such as bondservants, entertainers and tattooed criminals. They could not sit the imperial examination and often had to bow to show their low status.

  The gentry sat between officials and commoners. Passing the first level of the civil service examinations gave a man gentry robes and the right to speak to officials as equals. Merchant families could buy degrees, and many who passed never found office. Officials' salaries bought less as the years went by, so many relied on irregular payments called "squeeze".

  Kinship was the building block of society. Families compiled genealogies, kept in an ancestral hall, and gave each generation a shared character in the given names of its men. When a lineage member became wealthy, he might creatively choose a prestigious figure as the "founding ancestor".

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• 7. Opium and Rebellion

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  In 1756 the Qing established the Canton System, which restricted maritime trade to Guangzhou and gave monopoly rights to private Chinese merchants. It worked for a time. The British East India Company and the Dutch East India Company held similar monopolies from their own governments.

  In 1793 Lord Macartney led a British mission to open trade on a basis of equality. The Qianlong Emperor told him that "the kings of the myriad nations come by land and sea with all sorts of precious things", and "consequently there is nothing we lack...". The court saw trade as secondary. The British saw it as the key to their economy.

  China had little demand for European goods, so Europe paid in silver, which worried the governments of Britain and France. Growing Chinese demand for opium offered a remedy, and the British East India Company greatly expanded production in Bengal.

  The Daoguang Emperor, alarmed by the silver outflow and the harm of opium smoking, ordered Lin Zexu to end the trade. In 1839 Lin confiscated the opium stocks without compensation. Britain sent an expedition the next year. The Qing navy of wooden sailing junks was outclassed by the Royal Navy, and British soldiers with advanced muskets and artillery outgunned Qing ground forces.

  The Qing surrendered in 1842. The Treaty of Nanjing, the first of the unequal treaties, demanded reparations. It opened the treaty ports of Canton, Amoy, Fuzhou, Ningbo and Shanghai to Western trade and missionaries, and ceded Hong Kong Island to Britain.

  Hong Xiuquan was a disappointed civil service examination candidate, born in 1814. After reading the Old Testament in translation, he had visions and announced himself the son of God and younger brother of Jesus Christ. In 1851 he launched an uprising in Guizhou and founded the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom.

  The Taiping banned slavery, concubinage, arranged marriage, opium smoking, footbinding, judicial torture and idol worship. Success then bred feuds, defections and corruption. The rebels still marched within miles of Beijing in 1853. The Qing court had to let Han governors-general such as Zeng Guofan raise regional armies, and this signalled the end of Manchu dominance of the military. Zeng crushed the Taiping in 1864, after between 20 and 30 million people had died.

  Meanwhile, in 1856 Qing authorities boarded the ship Arrow while searching for a pirate. Britain claimed it flew the British flag, and the incident triggered the Second Opium War. In 1858 the Xianfeng Emperor signed the Treaty of Tientsin, which required all official Chinese documents to be written in English and gave British warships unlimited access to navigable rivers.

  When hostilities resumed, Anglo-French forces marched on Beijing in 1860. The emperor and court fled to the imperial hunting lodge at Rehe. The invaders looted and burned the Old Summer Palace. Prince Gong, left as his brother's proxy, was forced to sign the Convention of Beijing, and the humiliated emperor died the following year at Rehe.

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• 8. Reform and Fall

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  In 1861 the five-year-old Tongzhi Emperor took the throne, and the Qing began to recover. Han officials such as Zuo Zongtang organised provincial troops. Zeng Guofan and Prince Gong promoted younger officials, including Li Hongzhang, who set up the Self-Strengthening Movement. It bought Western military technology to defend Confucian values. Its results included the Zongli Yamen, China's first unified foreign ministry, the Imperial Maritime Customs Service, the Beiyang Army, and shipyards such as the Jiangnan Arsenal and Foochow Arsenal.

  The Qing navy became the largest in East Asia, but organisation, officer training and logistics were poor, and corruption was widespread. In the First Sino-Japanese War of 1895, the Beiyang Fleet was virtually destroyed. The Treaty of Shimonoseki recognised Korean independence and ceded Taiwan and the Pescadores to Japan. A Japanese citizen had wounded Li Hongzhang in an attack, and the international outcry softened the terms. Russia, Germany and France in the Triple Intervention pressured Japan out of the Liaodong Peninsula.

  Empress Dowager Cixi dominated these decades. She entered the palace in the 1850s as a concubine of the Xianfeng Emperor and became mother of the Tongzhi Emperor. With Empress Dowager Ci'an and Prince Gong, she staged a coup against several regents. When the Tongzhi Emperor died in 1875, she placed her nephew, the Guangxu Emperor, on the throne. Ci'an died suddenly in spring 1881, leaving Cixi sole regent.

  In 1897 two German missionaries were murdered in Shandong, in the Juye Incident. Germany used it to occupy Jiaozhou Bay, which set off the Scramble for China in 1898. Germany, Russia, Britain and France leased Jiaozhou Bay, Liaodong, the New Territories of Hong Kong and Guangzhouwan.

  The Guangxu Emperor answered with the Hundred Days' Reform of 1898, giving radical advisers such as Kang Youwei influence. Opposition from the bureaucracy was immediate. Cixi called the reforms off, arrested and executed several reformers, and took over daily policy.

  In 1900, drought in North China and foreign pressure fed the Boxer movement. The Boxers killed missionaries and many Chinese Christians, then besieged the Foreign Legation Quarter in Beijing. The Eight-Nation Alliance invaded without diplomatic notice. Cixi declared war on all of them and lost Beijing after a short, hard campaign, then fled to Xi'an. The Boxer Protocol forced compensation and the execution of complicit officials.

  Cixi launched the Late Qing reforms in 1901. They restructured education, law and finance, and in 1905 the imperial examination system was abolished. A constitution was drafted, and provincial elections were held, the first in Chinese history. Sun Yat-sen's revolutionaries debated reformers such as Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao over how to turn the empire into a modern Han state.

  The Guangxu Emperor died on the 14th of November 1908, and Cixi died the next day. Two-year-old Puyi was chosen as successor, with his father Zaifeng as regent. Zaifeng forced out Yuan Shikai. On the 8th of May 1911 he formed a "responsible cabinet" led by Prince Qing, but it was called the "royal cabinet" because five of its thirteen members were royal relatives.

  The Wuchang Uprising on the 10th of October 1911 set off a chain of revolts. By November, 14 of 22 provinces had rejected Qing rule. Sun Yat-sen became provisional head of the Republic of China, proclaimed at Nanjing on the 1st of January 1912. The court recalled Yuan Shikai, whose Beiyang Army beat the revolutionaries at Yangxia. Yet he chose to cooperate with them, and the abdication followed under his army's pressure.

  The story did not stop there. In July 1917 Zhang Xun attempted a Qing restoration, and it failed. Puyi stayed in the Forbidden City until 1924, then moved to the Japanese concession in Tianjin. In 1932 Japan invaded Northeast China and founded Manchukuo with Puyi as emperor, and the state fell in 1945.

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