Chinese History · Chronicle VIII of X
清 · Qing
The Manchu empire at its height, the Opium Wars, and the fall of imperial China.
The Manchu ConquestPolitical
The Manchu Qing enter Beijing and begin the conquest of China, imposing the queue as a sign of submission.
A people from beyond the Great Wall, the Manchus numbered only a fraction of the Chinese they came to rule. They conquered through discipline, banner armies and Chinese collaborators, and demanded that all men shave their foreheads and wear the queue on pain of death — a daily reminder of who now held the Mandate of Heaven.
The Kangxi EmperorPolitical
The Kangxi Emperor consolidates Qing rule in a reign of sixty-one years, one of the longest in world history.
Coming to the throne as a boy, Kangxi grew into one of China's ablest rulers. He suppressed the revolt of the southern feudatories, annexed Taiwan, held back Russia on the Amur, and patronized scholarship and the arts. Under him the Qing became a stable, prosperous empire that would dominate East Asia.
The Qianlong EmperorPolitical
The Qianlong Emperor expands China to its greatest extent, ruling a third of humanity at the empire's height.
Under Qianlong the Qing conquered Xinjiang and dominated Tibet and Mongolia, doubling the empire's size and fixing much of China's modern frontier. His court was fabulously wealthy and his cultural projects immense, but late in his long reign corruption spread and population pressure mounted, sowing troubles his heirs would reap.
The Opium WarsMilitary
Britain wages war to force the opium trade on China, and the defeated Qing cede Hong Kong and open the treaty ports.
When Commissioner Lin Zexu destroyed British opium at Canton, Britain sent gunboats. The Qing, their armies no match for modern warships, were crushed. The Treaty of Nanjing of 1842 ceded Hong Kong, opened five ports and imposed indemnities — the first of the 'unequal treaties' that opened a century of humiliation for China.
.jpg?width=1024)
The Taiping RebellionMilitary
A visionary who believed himself Christ's brother leads a rebellion that may have cost twenty million lives.
Hong Xiuquan, having failed the examinations and read Christian tracts, proclaimed a Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace and seized Nanjing. For fourteen years the Taiping controlled much of the south. The civil war that crushed them was among the deadliest in human history, and it left the Qing hollowed out and dependent on provincial armies.
The Late QingMilitary
An anti-foreign uprising besieges the Beijing legations, and an eight-nation army sacks the capital in reprisal.
The Boxers, a movement of martial-arts societies, rose against foreign missionaries and imperialism and besieged the legation quarter, backed by the Empress Dowager Cixi. An eight-nation expedition relieved the siege and imposed a crushing indemnity. The debacle exposed the Qing's helplessness and hastened calls for revolution.
The Fall of the QingPolitical
The Xinhai Revolution ends the empire; the child emperor Puyi abdicates and two thousand years of monarchy are over.
The revolution that began at Wuchang in October 1911 spread province by province until the dynasty collapsed. In February 1912 the six-year-old Puyi, the last emperor, formally abdicated. The imperial system that had governed China since Qin Shi Huang was gone, replaced by a fragile new republic.
