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The Qing dynasty (/ tʃɪŋ / ching), officially the Great Qing, [d] was a Manchu -led imperial dynasty of China and the last imperial dynasty in Chinese history. The dynasty, proclaimed in Shenyang in 1636, [8] seized control of Beijing in 1644, which is considered the start of the dynasty's rule. [2][1][9][10][11][12] The dynasty lasted until ...
Mar 15, 2010 · Available in one or two volumes, this accessible, yet rigorous, introduction to the political, social, and cultural history of China provides a balanced and thoughtful account of the development of Chinese civilization from its beginnings to the present day.Each volume includes ample illustrations, a full complement of maps, a chronological table, extensive notes, recommendations for further ...
Apr 7, 2022 · The defeat of the Ming Empire (1368–1644) by the Qing Empire (1644–1912) created new territorial practices during its consolidation and expansion. By the mid-18th century, the Qing Empire had more than doubled the landmass of Ming-era China and bought into the empire diverse ecologies and peoples (Bello, 2016; Rowe, 2009: 73). The vast ...
- Overview
- The rise of the Manchu
- The Qing empire
- Qing society
The Manchu, who ruled China from 1644 to 1911/12, were descendants of the Juchen (Nüzhen) tribes who had ruled northern China as the Jin dynasty in the 12th century. From the 15th century they had paid tribute to the Ming and were organized under the commandery system, so they had long had extensive and regular contact with the Chinese state and, more important, with the Chinese military officers stationed in the Ming frontier garrisons. By the 16th century these officers had become a hereditary regional military group in southern Manchuria, the Manchu homeland. Transformed by their long residence on the frontier, the Chinese soldiers mingled with the outside tribes, adopting Manchu names and tribal customs. Still other Chinese were in the area as enslaved “bond servants” who worked the land or helped manage the trade in ginseng root, precious stones, and furs with China and Korea. Later, after the conquest of China, many of these bond servants became powerful officials who were sent on confidential missions by the emperor and who staffed the powerful Imperial Household Department.
Under Nurhachi and his son Abahai, the Aisin Gioro clan of the Jianzhou tribe won hegemony among the rival Juchen tribes of the northeast, then through warfare and alliances extended its control into Inner Mongolia and Korea. Nurhachi created large, permanent civil-military units called “banners” to replace the small hunting groups used in his early campaigns. A banner was composed of smaller companies; it included some 7,500 warriors and their households, including enslaved people, under the command of a chieftain. Each banner was identified by a colored flag that was yellow, white, blue, or red, either plain or with a border design. Originally there were four, then eight, Manchu banners; new banners were created as the Manchu conquered new regions, and eventually there were Manchu, Mongol, and Chinese banners, eight for each ethnic group. By 1648 less than one-sixth of the bannermen were actually of Manchu ancestry. The Manchu conquest was thus achieved with a multiethnic army led by Manchu nobles and Han Chinese generals. Han Chinese soldiers were organized into the Army of the Green Standard, which became a sort of imperial constabulary force posted throughout China and on the frontiers.
Modern scholarship on the rise of the Manchu emphasizes the contributions of Chinese collaborators to the Manchu cause. The Manchu offered rewards and high positions to these Chinese, who not only brought military skills and technical knowledge with them but also encouraged the adoption of Chinese institutional models. From Chinese and Korean artisans the Manchu learned iron-smelting technology and acquired the advanced European artillery of the Ming. They created a replica of the Ming central government apparatus in their new capital, Mukden (present-day Shenyang), established in 1625. Whereas Nurhachi had initially based his claim to legitimacy on the tribal model, proclaiming himself khan in 1607, he later adopted the Chinese political language of the Tianming (“Mandate of Heaven”) as his reign title and in 1616 proclaimed the Hou (Later) Jin dynasty. Abahai continued to manipulate the political symbols of both worlds by acquiring the great seal of the Mongol khan in 1635, and thus the succession to the Yuan dynasty, and by taking on a Chinese dynastic name, Qing, for his own dynasty the following year.
The downfall of the Ming house was the product of factors that extended far beyond China’s borders. In the 1630s and ’40s China’s most-commercialized regions, the Yangtze River delta and the southeast coast, suffered an acute economic depression brought on by a sharp break in the flow of silver entering ports through foreign trade from Acapulco (Mexico), Malacca, and Japan. The depression was exacerbated by harvest shortfalls resulting from unusually bad weather during 1626–40. The enervated government administration failed to respond adequately to the crisis, and bandits in the northwest expanded their forces and began invading north and southwest China. One of these bandit leaders, Li Zicheng, marched into Beijing in 1644 unopposed, and the emperor, forsaken by his officials and generals, killed himself. A Ming general, Wu Sangui, sought Manchu assistance against Li Zicheng. Dorgon, the regent and uncle of Abahai’s infant son (who became the first Qing emperor), defeated Li and took Beijing, where he declared the Manchu dynasty.
The Manchu, who ruled China from 1644 to 1911/12, were descendants of the Juchen (Nüzhen) tribes who had ruled northern China as the Jin dynasty in the 12th century. From the 15th century they had paid tribute to the Ming and were organized under the commandery system, so they had long had extensive and regular contact with the Chinese state and, more important, with the Chinese military officers stationed in the Ming frontier garrisons. By the 16th century these officers had become a hereditary regional military group in southern Manchuria, the Manchu homeland. Transformed by their long residence on the frontier, the Chinese soldiers mingled with the outside tribes, adopting Manchu names and tribal customs. Still other Chinese were in the area as enslaved “bond servants” who worked the land or helped manage the trade in ginseng root, precious stones, and furs with China and Korea. Later, after the conquest of China, many of these bond servants became powerful officials who were sent on confidential missions by the emperor and who staffed the powerful Imperial Household Department.
Under Nurhachi and his son Abahai, the Aisin Gioro clan of the Jianzhou tribe won hegemony among the rival Juchen tribes of the northeast, then through warfare and alliances extended its control into Inner Mongolia and Korea. Nurhachi created large, permanent civil-military units called “banners” to replace the small hunting groups used in his early campaigns. A banner was composed of smaller companies; it included some 7,500 warriors and their households, including enslaved people, under the command of a chieftain. Each banner was identified by a colored flag that was yellow, white, blue, or red, either plain or with a border design. Originally there were four, then eight, Manchu banners; new banners were created as the Manchu conquered new regions, and eventually there were Manchu, Mongol, and Chinese banners, eight for each ethnic group. By 1648 less than one-sixth of the bannermen were actually of Manchu ancestry. The Manchu conquest was thus achieved with a multiethnic army led by Manchu nobles and Han Chinese generals. Han Chinese soldiers were organized into the Army of the Green Standard, which became a sort of imperial constabulary force posted throughout China and on the frontiers.
Modern scholarship on the rise of the Manchu emphasizes the contributions of Chinese collaborators to the Manchu cause. The Manchu offered rewards and high positions to these Chinese, who not only brought military skills and technical knowledge with them but also encouraged the adoption of Chinese institutional models. From Chinese and Korean artisans the Manchu learned iron-smelting technology and acquired the advanced European artillery of the Ming. They created a replica of the Ming central government apparatus in their new capital, Mukden (present-day Shenyang), established in 1625. Whereas Nurhachi had initially based his claim to legitimacy on the tribal model, proclaiming himself khan in 1607, he later adopted the Chinese political language of the Tianming (“Mandate of Heaven”) as his reign title and in 1616 proclaimed the Hou (Later) Jin dynasty. Abahai continued to manipulate the political symbols of both worlds by acquiring the great seal of the Mongol khan in 1635, and thus the succession to the Yuan dynasty, and by taking on a Chinese dynastic name, Qing, for his own dynasty the following year.
The downfall of the Ming house was the product of factors that extended far beyond China’s borders. In the 1630s and ’40s China’s most-commercialized regions, the Yangtze River delta and the southeast coast, suffered an acute economic depression brought on by a sharp break in the flow of silver entering ports through foreign trade from Acapulco (Mexico), Malacca, and Japan. The depression was exacerbated by harvest shortfalls resulting from unusually bad weather during 1626–40. The enervated government administration failed to respond adequately to the crisis, and bandits in the northwest expanded their forces and began invading north and southwest China. One of these bandit leaders, Li Zicheng, marched into Beijing in 1644 unopposed, and the emperor, forsaken by his officials and generals, killed himself. A Ming general, Wu Sangui, sought Manchu assistance against Li Zicheng. Dorgon, the regent and uncle of Abahai’s infant son (who became the first Qing emperor), defeated Li and took Beijing, where he declared the Manchu dynasty.
After 1683 the Qing rulers turned their attention to consolidating control over their frontiers. Taiwan became part of the empire, and military expeditions against perceived threats in north and west Asia created the largest empire China has ever known. From the late 17th to the early 18th century, Qing armies destroyed the Oirat empire based in Dzungaria and incorporated into the empire the region around the Koko Nor (Qinghai Hu, “Blue Lake”) in Central Asia. In order to check Mongol power, a Chinese garrison and a resident official were posted in Lhasa, the center of the Dge-lugs-pa (Yellow Hat) sect of Buddhism that was influential among Mongols as well as Tibetans. By the mid-18th century the land on both sides of the Tien Shan range as far west as Lake Balkhash had been annexed and renamed Xinjiang (“New Dominion”).
Military expansion was matched by the internal migration of Chinese settlers into parts of China that were dominated by Indigenous or non-Han ethnic groups. The evacuation of the south and southeast coast during the 1660s spurred a westward migration of an ethnic minority, the Hakka, who moved from the hills of southwest Fujian, northern Guangdong, and southern Jiangxi. Although the Qing dynasty tried to forbid migration into its homeland, Manchuria, in the 18th and 19th centuries Chinese settlers flowed into the fertile Liao River basin. Government policies encouraged Han movement into the southwest during the early 18th century, while Chinese traders and assimilated Chinese Muslims moved into Xinjiang and the other newly acquired territories. This period was punctuated by ethnic conflict stimulated by the Han Chinese takeover of former Indigenous territories and by fighting between different groups of Han Chinese.
Chinese society continued to be highly stratified during the early Qing. Hereditary status groups ranged from the descendants of the imperial line down to the “mean people” at the bottom of the social ladder. Many professions were hereditary: bannermen, brewers, dyers, doctors, navigators, and Daoist priests usually passed on their occupations to at least one son in each generation. The mean people included remnants of Indigenous groups who had survived Chinese expansion and settlement and certain occupational groups, including prostitutes, musicians, actors, and local government underlings (e.g., jailers and gatekeepers). Qing laws forbade intermarriage between respectable commoners (“good people”) and the mean people, who were also barred from sitting for the civil service examinations. Despite attempts in the 1720s to return some of these mean people to ordinary commoner status, the social stigma persisted throughout the dynasty.
Servitude was commonplace in Qing society. The Manchu had enslaved prisoners of war, and in China persons could be sold by their families. Many well-to-do households owned some domestic servants. Servants were grouped with the mean people in Qing law, but some of them nonetheless achieved considerable power and authority. Bond servants of the imperial house ran the powerful Imperial Household Department and themselves owned enslaved people. Servile tenants of the wealthy Huizhou merchants were sometimes raised as companions to the master’s son and trusted to help run the long-distance trade on which Huizhou fortunes were based. Servitude in some cases was thus an important avenue for social advancement.
Social mobility increased during the early Qing, supported by a pervasive belief that it was possible for a common boy to become the first scholar in the land. An ethic that stressed education and hard work motivated many households to invest their surplus in the arduous preparation of sons for the civil service examinations. Although the most prestigious career in Qing society remained that of the scholar-official, the sharpened competition for degrees in the prosperous 18th century significantly expanded socially acceptable forms of achievement. At one pole, alienated literati deliberately eschewed the morally ambiguous role of official to devote their energies to scholarship, painting, poetry, and the other arts. Others turned to managing their localities and assumed leadership in public welfare, mediation of disputes, and local defense. Families with a long tradition of success in examinations and official service were increasingly preoccupied with strategies for ensuring the perpetuation of their elite status and countering the inexorable division of family estates stemming from the Chinese practice of partible inheritance. Downward mobility was a more general phenomenon than upward mobility in Qing society; those at the bottom of the social scale did not marry and have children, while the wealthy practiced polygyny and tended to have large families.
In China’s long-settled and densely populated regions, degree holders who confronted the prospect of downward mobility for their sons were profoundly disturbed by the circumstances that permitted wealthy merchants to mimic their way of life. The money economy and its impersonal values penetrated more deeply into Chinese society than ever before, challenging former indicators of status for preeminence. Alarmed, the Chinese elite joined the Qing state in trying to propagate traditional values and behavior. Morality books, published in increasing quantities from the late 16th century onward, tied virtuous behavior to concrete rewards in the form of educational success, high office, and sons. The Qing bestowed titles, gifts, and imperial calligraphy on virtuous widows and encouraged the construction of memorial arches and shrines in their honor to reinforce this female role. Rural lectures (xiangyue) were public ceremonies staged for citizens that combined religious elements with reciting the sacred edict promulgated by the emperor.
The Qing dynasty (1644–1911) was the last imperial dynasty in China. It was founded not by Han Chinese, who constitute the majority of the Chinese population, but by a sedentary farming people known as the Jurchen. What would become the Manchu state was founded by Nurhaci, the chieftain of a minor Jurchen tribe known as Aisin Gioro in ...
2 days ago · Guangzhou - Trade, Pearl River, Canton: The earliest known inhabitants of the Guangzhou area were the Baiyue, a Tai, or Shan, people. During the Xi (Western) Zhou dynasty (1146–771 bce), the local Baiyue people pledged allegiance to the feudal state of Chu to the northeast, giving rise to the name of Chuting for the area. Later, a walled town known as Nanwu Cheng, in the northern section of ...
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Oct 13, 2024 · The Qing dynasty, the last imperial dynasty of China, was established by the Manchus in 1636 and ruled China until its fall in 1912 following the Xinhai Revolution. Founded in Shenyang and expanding to Beijing in 1644, the Qing dynasty eventually assembled the territorial base for modern China, becoming the largest empire in Chinese history by ...
