Qing dynasty: A Visual History

The Qing dynasty was founded by the Manchus in 1636 and ruled China from 1644 to 1912. At its height under the Kangxi, Yongzheng and Qianlong emperors it controlled about 13 million km2, including Manchuria, Mongolia, Xinjiang, Tibet and Taiwan, and its population tripled to over 400 million. The nineteenth century brought the Opium Wars, the catastrophic Taiping Rebellion and defeat by Japan; the Xinhai Revolution ended the empire and 2,000 years of imperial rule in 1912.

When it existed: the era ribbon

The bold bar is Qing dynasty. The lighter bars are empires and wars from the same era and the same part of the world. Click any bar to jump to its page.

Population of Qing China

Estimates from official registers and modern reconstructions; the mid-century collapse reflects the Taiping and other rebellions and famine.

Timeline of the Qing dynasty

1. 1616
   Nurhaci founds the Later JinThe Jurchen state that will become the Qing.
2. 1636
   Qing proclaimedHong Taiji renames the dynasty and his people.
3. 1644
   Beijing takenThe Ming falls; the Shunzhi Emperor is enthroned in the Forbidden City.
4. 1683
   Taiwan conqueredThe last Ming loyalists surrender.
5. 1689
   Treaty of NerchinskThe first treaty between China and a European power fixes the Russian border.
6. 1759
   Xinjiang conqueredThe Dzungars are annihilated; the empire reaches its greatest extent.
7. 1842
   Treaty of NankingThe First Opium War ends; Hong Kong ceded.
8. 1864
   Taiping Rebellion crushedAfter some 20 to 30 million deaths.
9. 1895
   Defeat by JapanTaiwan ceded; the shock triggers reform movements.
10. 1912
    AbdicationPuyi abdicates on 12 February; the Republic of China begins.

From Jurchen tribes to the Dragon Throne

Nurhaci united the Jurchen tribes of Manchuria under the Eight Banners system and rebelled against the Ming in 1618. His son Hong Taiji renamed his people the Manchus and proclaimed the Qing (pure) dynasty in 1636. When the rebel Li Zicheng took Beijing in 1644 and the last Ming emperor hanged himself, the Ming general Wu Sangui opened the Great Wall to the Manchus, who took the capital and spent four decades conquering the rest of China, finishing with Taiwan in 1683.

Manchus were a tiny minority ruling a vast Chinese population. They kept their own language, banned intermarriage, forced Chinese men to wear the queue hairstyle on pain of death, but ran the state through the Confucian bureaucracy and examinations inherited from the Ming.

The High Qing

Three emperors, Kangxi (1661-1722), Yongzheng (1722-1735) and Qianlong (1735-1796), presided over one of the most prosperous periods in Chinese history. The Dzungar Mongols were destroyed, Xinjiang and Tibet were brought under control, and treaties with Russia fixed the northern border. New World crops like maize and sweet potatoes let the population soar, and Chinese tea, silk and porcelain drew silver from across the world.

By Qianlong's death the empire had grown to its greatest extent, but corruption, population pressure and a rigid refusal to engage with the outside world (Qianlong famously told a British embassy in 1793 that China had no need of foreign goods) were storing up trouble.

The century of humiliation

Britain's victory in the First Opium War (1839-1842) forced open treaty ports and ceded Hong Kong. Between 1850 and 1873 the Taiping, Nian, Panthay and Dungan rebellions killed tens of millions and nearly toppled the dynasty. Further defeats by Britain and France (1860), France (1885) and Japan (1895) followed, and the Boxer Uprising ended with foreign troops in Beijing in 1900.

Late reforms came too little, too late. The Empress Dowager Cixi dominated the court for nearly half a century, blocking change and then adopting it. After her death in 1908 the throne passed to the two-year-old Puyi. The Wuchang Uprising of October 1911 spread across the provinces, and Puyi abdicated on 12 February 1912.

Related empires and wars

Chosen automatically by overlap in time and geography, plus a few hand picked connections.

Empires of the same era and region

• Ming dynasty (1368 to 1644)
• Dzungar Khanate (1634 to 1758)
• Russian Empire (1721 to 1917)
• Empire of Japan (1868 to 1947)
• British Empire (1583 to 1997)
• Mughal Empire (1526 to 1857)

Wars of the same era and region

• Manchu conquest of China (1618 to 1683)
• Taiping Rebellion (1850 to 1864)
• Panthay Rebellion (1856 to 1873)
• Russo-Japanese War (1904 to 1905)
• Chinese Civil War (1927 to 1949)
• Russian Civil War (1917 to 1922)

9 surprising things about the Qing dynasty

1. The Manchu queue (shaved forehead, long braid) was imposed on all Chinese men in 1645 under the slogan 'keep your hair and lose your head, or lose your hair and keep your head'.
2. The Kangxi Emperor's 61-year reign was only beaten by his grandson Qianlong, who abdicated after 60 years so as not to outdo him, then ruled from behind the throne anyway.
3. The Qianlong Emperor wrote around 40,000 poems, more than the entire surviving corpus of the Tang dynasty, and almost none are considered any good.
4. The Qing conquest of Xinjiang in the 1750s ended in the near-total extermination of the Dzungar people.
5. In 1793 the Qianlong Emperor told Britain's Macartney embassy that China 'possesses all things' and had no use for their manufactures.
6. China's population roughly tripled under the Qing, largely thanks to maize, sweet potatoes and peanuts from the Americas.
7. The Empress Dowager Cixi entered the palace as a low-ranking concubine and controlled China for 47 years.
8. The last emperor Puyi later worked as a gardener in Communist Beijing and died in 1967.
9. The Qing had two capitals: Beijing and, ceremonially, Mukden (Shenyang), and the Manchu homeland was closed to Chinese settlement for most of the dynasty.

Sources

• Qing dynasty Encyclopaedia Britannica
• Qing dynasty Wikipedia
• Qing Dynasty World History Encyclopedia
• William T. Rowe, China's Last Empire: The Great Qing (2009) Harvard University Press

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