The early Qing dynasty
The rise of the Manchu
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 importantly, 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 barbarians, 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.
Panel from an imperial Chinese silk dragon robe embroidered in silk and gold thread, 17th century, early Qing dynasty; in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City.Lee Boltin
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 slaves, under the command of a chieftain. Each banner was identified by a coloured 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, committed suicide. 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.
It took the Manchu several decades to complete their military conquest of China. In 1673 the conquerors confronted a major rebellion led by three generals (among them Wu Sangui), former Ming adherents who had been given control over large parts of southern and southwestern China. That revolt, stimulated by Manchu attempts to cut back on the autonomous power of these generals, was finally suppressed in 1681. In 1683 the Qing finally eliminated the last stronghold of Ming loyalism on Taiwan.
The Qing empire
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 centre 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 aboriginal 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 aboriginal territories and by fighting between different groups of Han Chinese.
Political institutions
The Qing had come to power because of their success at winning Chinese over to their side; in the late 17th century they adroitly pursued similar policies to win the adherence of the Chinese literati. Qing emperors learned Chinese, addressed their subjects using Confucian rhetoric, reinstated the civil service examination system and the Confucian curriculum, and patronized scholarly projects, as had their predecessors. They also continued the Ming custom of adopting reign names, so that Xuanye, for example, is known to history as the Kangxi emperor. The Qing rulers initially used only Manchu and bannermen to fill the most-important positions in the provincial and central governments (half of the powerful governors-general throughout the dynasty were Manchu), but Chinese were able to enter government in greater numbers in the 18th century, and a Manchu-Han dyarchy was in place for the rest of the dynasty.