Qing dynasty

The moment of ultimate transition arrived in 1644. As the Ming dynasty collapsed under the weight of fiscal decay and massive peasant rebellions, a rebel army captured Beijing, driving the last Ming emperor to hang himself on a hill overlooking the Forbidden City. Facing the ruin of his world, the Ming general Wu Sangui, stationed at the strategic Shanhai Pass where the Great Wall meets the sea, made a fateful choice. He opened the gates to the waiting Qing armies. Led by the prince regent Dorgon on behalf of the young Shunzhi Emperor, the Manchu forces poured through the pass, swept the rebels from the capital, and claimed the Dragon Throne. Though it would take until 1683 to crush the last remnants of Ming resistance and defeat the rebellious southern warlords in the Revolt of the Three Feudatories, the capture of Beijing marked the true birth of the Qing Empire as the master of China. Under the long, brilliant reign of the Kangxi Emperor, who ruled from 1661 to 1722, this new regime consolidated its grip on the state. Kangxi masterfully balanced his identities: he was at once a Manchu warrior-chief, a devout patron of Tibetan Buddhism, and a classic Confucian scholar-emperor who won over the skeptical southern Han literati by sponsoring massive cultural projects and maintaining low, stable tax rates.

By the eighteenth century, during the reign of the Qianlong Emperor, the Qing reached the absolute zenith of its geopolitical power. Through a series of massive military endeavors known as the Ten Great Campaigns, Qianlong pushed the empire’s borders deep into Inner Asia, conquering the Dzungar Khanate, securing Tibet, and annexing the vast western territories of Xinjiang. This expansion created a gargantuan, multi-ethnic state that stretched from the Pamir Mountains to the Sea of Japan. To govern this mosaic of peoples, the Qing did not demand total assimilation. Instead, they articulated an ideology of universal empire, declaring that the "inner" Han Chinese and the "outer" Mongols, Tibetans, and western Muslims were now "one family" (neiwài yījiā) under the benevolent rule of the Great Qing. In their official correspondence, treaties, and maps, the emperors used the names "Qing" and "China" (Zhōngguó) interchangeably, intentionally redefining "China" not as an exclusive Han domain, but as a vast, multi-ethnic empire. The state managed its foreign relations through a sophisticated adaptation of the ancient tributary system, maintaining its hegemony over neighbors like Joseon Korea and Vietnam while keeping Western merchants confined to highly regulated trade ports.

Yet, the very successes that built the High Qing era sowed the seeds of its eventual dissolution. Decades of internal peace and agricultural prosperity triggered an unprecedented population boom, with the number of subjects swelling to over 400 million by the nineteenth century. However, the empire's administrative machinery and tax revenues remained fixed at eighteenth-century levels, starving the local governments of funds and breeding rampant official corruption. When the British Empire pushed its way into the Chinese market with Indian opium, the Qing found themselves technologically outclassed. Defeat in the Opium Wars forced the dynasty to sign a sequence of "unequal treaties," ceding Hong Kong, opening treaty ports, and granting extraterritoriality to Western powers. This external humiliation triggered catastrophic internal explosions. The Taiping Rebellion, a mid-nineteenth-century civil war led by a Christian convert who sought to overthrow the Manchu "demons," devastated the wealthy southern provinces, while the Muslim Dungan Revolt tore through the west. By the time these rebellions were suppressed, over 20 million people had perished from war, disease, and starvation.

In its final decades, the Qing dynasty existed in a state of permanent crisis, caught between the need for radical modernization and the desire to preserve its imperial traditions. The Self-Strengthening Movement of the late nineteenth century introduced western military technology, factories, and steamships, but these piecemeal reforms could not save the empire from a shattering defeat in the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895, which cost China its suzerainty over Korea and the island of Taiwan. Subsequent attempts at systemic political change, such as the Hundred Days' Reform in 1898, were abruptly crushed by the conservative court faction led by the formidable Empress Dowager Cixi. The turn of the century brought further devastation when the anti-foreign Boxer Rebellion resulted in a brutal invasion by an Eight-Nation Alliance, leaving Beijing occupied and the treasury burdened with a crushing indemnity. Though the court belatedly launched sweeping modernizing reforms in its final years—abolishing the ancient imperial examination system and drafting a new legal code—it was too little, too late.

The end came not with a grand battlefield surrender, but with a sudden unraveling. On October 10, 1911, a mutiny among modernized army units in Wuchang triggered the Xinhai Revolution, as province after province declared independence from the throne. On February 12, 1912, the six-year-old Puyi, reigning as the Xuantong Emperor, formally abdicated, bringing to a close not only the Qing dynasty but two millennia of imperial Chinese history. The Qing had begun as a foreign, northern conquest elite, viewed with suspicion and hostility by the Han majority they ruled. Yet, over the course of nearly three centuries, they did not merely adopt Chinese civilization; they radically expanded its boundaries. By welding the agricultural heartland of the Han to the vast steppes, deserts, and plateaus of Inner Asia, the Manchu emperors assembled the immense, diverse territorial and demographic base that defines modern China today.

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