Qing Dynasty

11 Key excerpts on "Qing Dynasty"

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  The Board of Rites and the Making of Qing China

  • Macabe Keliher(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • University of California Press

    (Publisher)

  A small bureaucracy was created and exami- nations administered; a tax-office state oversaw conquered territory and extracted agricultural surpluses. This furthered military conquest, enabling the expansion of territory, the subjugation of Mongol tribes, and the invasion of Korea, where the Chosŏn king was forced to recognize the Manchu rulers over the Ming dynasty. Introduction 5 Simultaneously, Han Chinese political and military subjects were absorbed, and Qing armies went on to capture Beijing and then take all of China proper, eventu- ally becoming one of the largest land-based empires in the early modern world. In many ways, the coronation ceremony confirmed the state-making enterprise and initiated what was to be nearly three centuries of Qing rule over China and parts of Inner Asia. The significance of the Qing empire in Chinese history cannot be overstated. Like their early modern counterparts, Qing state-makers consolidated foreign kingdoms, developed new forms of imperial rule, incorporated different ethnic groups, and embraced various cultural practices. In governing, much like their contemporaries in the Ottoman, Mughal, and Russian empires, Qing statesmen further centralized power and focused greater authority in the sovereign; they built up a robust administrative apparatus and staffed it with multiethnic person- nel, enabling effective responses to new challenges; they created a sophisticated communications and reporting system and extended far-reaching control throughout their realm. In addition to shaping the early modern world, the Qing also bestowed a legacy upon modern and contemporary China. As the last impe- rial dynasty to rule China, the Qing court abdicated in the early twentieth century only after losing the support of the gentry and military, and even then negotiated favorable terms for the imperial family.

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  The Military in the Early Modern World

  A Comparative Approach

  • Markus Meumann, Andrea Pühringer, Markus Meumann, Andrea Pühringer(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • V&R Unipress

    (Publisher)

  © 2020, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen ISBN Print: 9783847110132 – ISBN E-Book: 9783847010135 Kiyohiko Sugiyama A Chinese Dynasty or a Manchu Khanate? The Qing (Ch’ing) Empire and its Military Force * The Qing (Ch’ing) Dynasty was the last master of the Forbidden City in Beijing (Peking). For this reason, it is usually considered to be China’s last imperial dynasty, and the period of its rule is regarded as the time when China’s imperial administration was brought to its full maturity. In this context, the structure of Qing rule has generally been understood as follows: the emperor was a Chinese emperor, and had inherited the position of the Ming Emperor; he regarded himself as a Confucian monarch, appointed Chinese officials, and in the eigh- teenth century created a monarchic autocracy. The bureaucracy was virtually a replica of the Ming institutions that it superseded, with the addition of certain new institutions such as the Grand Council. With the Ming régime serving as a point of reference, any elements that do not fit into this framework are either treated as “elements added during the Qing period” or dismissed as “aspects of a dynasty of conquest”. As a whole, the Qing Dynasty has been explained as “the last Chinese dynasty”. Therefore, its military forces are generally seen as repre- sentative of a traditional and typical Chinese army. However, we should note that the Qing rulers were not Han Chinese, but Manchus, who were conquerors from northeast Asia, or Manchuria. The Jesuit missionaries who visited the Qing court also clearly differentiated between Han Chinese and Manchus. From a different viewpoint, the Qing Empire could be seen as primarily the fruit of military conquest by the Manchus, so the Qing military system must have been characterized by the Manchu tradition and customs from Inner Asia.

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  Chinese City And Urbanism: Evolution And Development

  Evolution and Development

  • Victor F S Sit(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • World Scientific

    (Publisher)

  The significance of the Qing in China’s urban history lies with the fact that the early Qing emperors had brought neo-Confucianism to a new height and reinforced its key elements of orthodoxy, i.e. reign of moral order, indoctrination, submission and autocracy (Gernet, 1985). Included in the list should also be the element of centralization of power in the emperor, his chief missions in pacifying the peasantry through projects to increase the farm acreage, water conservancy and flood control, and attendance to critical rituals to induce the blessing Qing Urbanization: From Neo-Confucian Orthodoxy to Semi-Colonialism 215 of Heaven and the imperial ancestors, i.e. all dynastic responsibilities that had been established since the Tang Dynasty. In such matters, the Qing had followed meticulously practices of former dynasties. One example is the preservation of Beijing almost intact as the national capital, as Qing emperors slept in the same chamber and used the same audience hall as Ming emperors. In consequence, the change of dynasty had brought little change in terms of major military upheavals and socio-economic policies. In the long reign of the Qing, there had been 135 years of peace and economic prosperity from the 2nd to the 4th emperors (Table 11.1). With a pro-agriculture policy, a despotic, though efficient, vigorous and honest government, the new crops introduced, and the medical and health advancement since late Ming, there had been raised life expectancy and standard of living of the ordinary people and unprecedented upsurge in agriculture, manufacture and commerce. China was then ranked the top nation of the world in terms of production, wealth and international trade. It also attained the largest geographical territory in history, i.e. 11.5 million km 2 Fig. 11.1. Extent of Qing Dynasty in Early 17th Century.

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  Making China Modern

  From the Great Qing to Xi Jinping

  • Klaus Mühlhahn(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Belknap Press

    (Publisher)

  The Qing empire employed a particular mechanism of governance over “a domain in parts.”39 Conse-quently, statements, edicts, and official documents of the Qing empire were deliberately designed as imperial communications in more than one lan-guage. Typically these were in Manchu and Chinese, and very commonly in Manchu, Chinese, and Mongolian. After the mid-eighteenth century, they were frequently in Manchu, Chinese, Mongolian, Tibetan, and the Arabic script of many Central Asian Muslims, often called “Uighur.” The goal was the simultaneous expression of imperial policies in multiple languages, within multiple cultural frames, and to multiple ethnic audiences.40 Age of Glory: 1644–1800 ( 55 ) The Qing rulers of the later part of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries were particularly capable of deploying this particular mode of multi-ethnic governance, which demanded cultural sensibility and constant me-diation among different cultural spaces and ethnic constituencies, as well as the articulation of a unifying imperial vision of universal sovereignty and ter-ritorial expansion. Foremost among them was the energetic and hard- working Kangxi emperor (r. 1661–1722) who reorganized the court to adopt Chinese institutions, giving it stability and legitimacy that it could not gain by conquest alone. The other emperors governed under the titles of Yong-zheng (r. 1722–1735) and Qianlong. The early Qing period was also one of remarkable stability and continuity as Kangxi (1654–1722) and Qianlong (1711–1799) ruled for sixty years each. During their time on the throne, the empire went through a period celebrated in Chinese historiography as the “prosperous age” (shengshi). 41 In 1736, the Qing undertook a major institu-tional innovation by creating the Grand Council. It was a small committee placed on top of the regular bureaucracy, featuring its own personnel, archives, research groups, rapid communications networks, and effective modes of command and control.

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  Contemporary Studies on Modern Chinese History

  • Zeng Yeying(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  No one particularly has yet discussed the distinc-tion between late Qing Dynasty history and modern Chinese history, and no administrative department has ever expressed views on it. This is a natural course of discipline growth. The research object of modern Chinese history has experienced a process of evolution. For a long time, most scholars regarded Chinese history from 1840 to 1919 as modern Chinese history. In the past 20 years, most scholars regarded Chinese history from 1840 to 1949 as the modern history of China. No matter how the research object of modern Chinese history evolves, the late Qing history from the Opium Wars to the overthrow of the Qing emperor is included in the scope of modern Chinese history. In other words, the history of the late Qing Dynasty belongs to the modern history of China. Observing the history of the late Qing Dynasty from the perspective of modern Chinese history, from the beginning of the Opium Wars in 1840 China witnessed a turbulent change that had not been seen for thousands of years, namely the invasion by Western forces, the eastward spread of Western thought, the decline of Confucianism, the change in social nature, the unset-tling of thought among all personages from the grassroots to high-ranking officials, and a society seriously disturbed. Along with foreign aggression, there were incessant foreign and domestic wars.

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  The Making of the Modern Chinese State

  1600–1950

  • Huaiyin Li(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  For long, historians have tended to interpret the conquest dynasties in Chinese history from a Han-centered perspective, assuming a shared sense of superiority among the Han people in their relations with those of different ethnic origins, and underscoring their abilities to assimilate the conquerors that were inferior to the Han economically and culturally. John K. Fairbank described this dominant attitude among the ruling elites of Chinese dynasties as a form of culturalism, to distinguish it from nationalism that is premised on competition and equality among all nation-states in the modern world. It was this assumption of cultural superiority that undergirded the Qing Dynasty’s regulation of foreign trade under the tributary system (Fairbank 1969; Hamashita 2008: 29–32). When explaining the Qing’s striking longevity in relation to other “alien” dynasties in Chinese history and its success in ruling a vast, multiethnic land, a prevailing view up to the 1980s was to emphasize its policies of Sinicization: the Manchus who founded the dynasty and conquered China not only inherited from the preceding Ming the entire administrative system at all levels as well as the Confucian ideology that accompanied the system, but they also embraced Chinese culture and language to such an extent that by the early nineteenth century few Manchus were able to speak their own language. The Qing was able to rule China for more than two and a half centuries, according to this thesis, in large part because of its institutional adaptation (Fairbank and Goldman 2006: 147) or Sinicization (Ho 1967, 1998) that allowed the Confucian elites of the Han people to develop identity and loyalty with the conquest dynasty.

  More recent studies since the 1990s have challenged this interpretation in two important ways. Instead of viewing the Qing as another Chinese dynasty in China’s long series of “dynastic cycles,” they present a new image of the emperors of the Qing at the peak of its influence in the eighteenth century as cosmopolitan rulers seeking to embody in their rulership the religious authorities and cultural values of different subject peoples on their territory (Rawski 1996). A Qing ruler arguably acted as a sagely, benevolent emperor, a khan, and a cakravartin

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  Transforming History 中國歷史

  The Making of a Modern Academic Discipline in Twentieth-Century China

  • MOLOUGHNEY, Brian and ZARROW, Peter (eds.)(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • The Chinese University of Hong Kong

    (Publisher)

  The recent period (“modern,” xiandai 現代 ): from the beginning to the end of the Qing, when the Manchu ruled and Western powers came to the East 5. The present (“contemporary history,” dangdai 當代 ): from the founding of the Republic in 1912 onwards; a time of unity of the five nationalities and of Eastern and Western interaction 37 Creating Academic Qing History · 221 By organizing Chinese history around the experiences of the Han people, Xiao essentially developed a new historical subject for his narrative. The Han collective became the owner and subject of this history. This history of the Qing is one in which the Manchu invaded central China and ruled the Han Chinese; and it is also one of nationalist revolutions by the Han Chinese. In Xiao’s own words, “What I narrate here is the history of the Qing state ( Qing guo 清國 ) which means Chinese history during the Qing Dynasty, but not a history of the Qing Dynasty or the Qing court.” 38 He prioritizes Han national revolutions, and gives detailed descriptions and mostly positive evaluations of secret societies, such as Sandian hui 三點會 , Tiandi hui 天地會 , and Hongmen hui 洪門會 , that were related to nation-alist revolutions. If the historians before him were first enticed by the idea of creating a national historical narrative, Xiao was the one who practiced it. This is the most fundamental difference between Xiao’s history and those before him: national history demanded a particularly coherent narrative, and Xiao was creating one. The disagreements between Xiao and Chen, and between Xiao and the National Heritage Movement, focused on what constituted an accept-able archive and its proper use by modern historians, or, in other words, different understandings of China’s historiographic past and the relation-ship between various forms of historiographical formats. What was really at stake, however, was the issue of what a truth claim is, or what a higher truth is, in writing history.

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  Rising China and Its Postmodern Fate

  Memories of Empire in a New Global Context

  • Charles Horner, Gary Bertsch, Howard Wiarda(Authors)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • University of Georgia Press

    (Publisher)

  By replacing the traditional leadership of local Qing Dynasty and the Pax Manjurica 79 elders with a system legitimized by the vote of the people in local elections, reformers believed they were taking the first step toward creating a more stable political order. 35 The stark distinction between Dengist success and Maoist failure is of the sort with which we introduced this book. And because both we and China’s leaders have before us the evidence provided by our own eyes, both we and they will not be able to avoid committing the sin of present-mindedness by imposing today’s outcome on our reading of yesterday’s Late Qing era. For, until very recently, the study of modern China could not help but be in-formed by a master narrative whose climax was the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. All roads seemed to lead to Beijing’s famous Tiananmen Square and Mao Zedong’s proclamation of China’s new order. How else could the historian tell that story? As everyone knows, this is how China’s political struggles during the first half of the twentieth century resolved themselves. But today’s China has not turned out to be what it was assumed to be or projected to be even twenty-five years ago. What then is it? Where did it come from, and how did it get here? These are the questions that lie beneath another ongoing revolution in the academic study of modern China—the evaluation of the last years of the Qing. That era, once a dead end, is now being transformed into a quite lively beginning, with advances in politics, commerce, and culture that prefigure the China and the Greater China—Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore—we see today. If the High Qing bequeathed a vision of empire that can inspire China’s present leaders by its eighteenth-century imperial sway, the Late Qing has left to them a set of blueprints for the recovery of that grandeur in the twenty-first century.

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  Mirroring the Past

  The Writing and Use of History in Imperial China

  • On-cho Ng, Q. Edward Wang(Authors)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • University of Hawaii Press

    (Publisher)

  In dealing with people, it should bestow humanity and love to the highest degree. Whether in the government of Yao and Shun, in the Three Dynasties, or [in the period] from the Qin and Han down to the present, in no case can these principles not be extended and ap-plied’’ (W. Chan 1963, 701; modified transliteration). Similarly, Gu Yanwu enjoined rulers to uphold the timeless Four Bonds ( siwei ): the cardinal virtues of propriety ( li ), rightness ( yi ), integrity ( lian ), and the sense of shame ( chi ). History was full of changes, but the pattern of the rise and full of dynasties revealed perennial values; expedient sociopolitical reformu-lations perforce unfolded within the constant Confucian moral order (Ng 1993b, 572). The early Qing scholars did not radically historicize and thereby rela-tivize values; it was not their avowed goal to do so. Nonetheless, their ap-peal to the universal and the transhistorical was soberly counterbalanced by their earnest desire to implement timely measures relevant to current needs, and these they identified through their deep knowledge of the con-tingent changes in history. The Qing 239 Official Historiography and the Confucianized Manchu Monarchs While the literati in their private historiography conceived of the past in terms of the dynamic growth of cultures and institutions, the Manchu rulers assumed the time-honored tasks of compiling the history of their own dynasty and that of the preceding one.Through these enterprises they would, like other dynasties, try to acquire the imprimatur of political legiti-macy. But the projects would prove to be fraught with complications and delays. Compilation of the Ming History was a protracted affair, taking a total of ninety years.

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  China Marches West

  The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia

  • Peter C. Perdue, Peter C Perdue(Authors)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Belknap Press

    (Publisher)

  7 China’s increasing ecological and polit-ical difficulties in the early nineteenth century included floods and famine, peasant uprisings on the frontiers, and opium smuggling, in addition to the foreign pressure for trade privileges which culminated in the Opium War. The bureaucracy still had its share of energetic officials, who looked back to Chen Hongmou as a model, but they could not reverse the trend of de-cline. Wei Yuan, the great historian and advocate of military reform, drew his inspiration for resistance to the West from the eighteenth-century fron-tier wars of expansion, the “savage wars of peace” that had defined the em-pire’s limits. If only the vigorous spirit of that time could be revived, he felt, frontier expansion in the qing 551 China could ward off the foreign threat. Thus, even after its conclusion, the period of expansion inspired visions of restoration and recovery of the em-pire’s former greatness. Four processes connected to the frontier conquests played a decisive role in the decline of the Qing empire in the nineteenth century: the accidents of timing of geopolitical relations, the misapplication of northwestern policies to southern environments, the power balance with localities of the Qing “negotiated state,” and the impact of commercialization on social solidar-ity. A combination of logically independent elements, casually but not nec-essarily causally connected, brought down China’s last dynasty. These are, of course, not the whole story of the Qing collapse, but they may help us develop new perspectives on the empire’s critical last century. My explanation for the decline of China and the rise of Europe in the nineteenth century is based first on contingent timing: the British happened to arrive on the South China coast with their demands to expand the opium trade after the 1780s, shortly after Qing troops had achieved their great victories in the northwest and welcomed back the Torghuts.

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  Reorienting the Manchus

  A Study of Sinicization, 1583–1795

  • Pei Huang(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Cornell East Asia Series

    (Publisher)

  The other building blocks, archery and horsemanship, were inherent in the Eight Banner system because every banner warrior was trained to be a skilled archer and fine horseman. The term “Manchu,” which Hong Taiji gave his people in 1635, meant not merely a new designation, but the rise of a new ethnic identity in Chinese history. 60 Dorgon played a dominant role in the third phase because he shaped Qing policy and Manchu destiny. Under his regency the Man- chus moved to Peking, suppressed bandits, defeated anti-Qing forces, and established Manchu rule over all China. He clipped the wings of many princes and their associates. Weakening them contributed to the political centralization of the early Qing. He appointed Chinese scholars to high office and borrowed Ming political institutions, which naturally hastened the sinicization of the Manchus. His leadership re- sulted in a central, bureaucratic empire that lasted more than two and a half centuries. One may liken the founding of the Qing to the journey from Man- churia to Peking. With these three guides it took the Manchus sixty- one years (1583–1644). Nurhaci began the journey with a small group of people and carefully navigated many rugged roads. Under the guid- ance of Hong Taiji, a man with clearer ideas about the destination, the journey continued and attracted Mongols and Chinese adherents. Fortune favored Dorgon, a farsighted guide. With the new situation in Peking helping to smooth the way, he reached the destination and completed the dynastic transition from the Ming to the Qing. Notes 1. For the lineage from Menggetimur to Nurhaci, see the Daicing gurun i manju yargiyan kooli (Manchu Veritable Record) for the reign of Taizu, 10–21. But a recent study argues that this lineage was falsified; see Xue Hong, “Nuer-hachi di xing-shih he jiashi,” Qingshi yanjiu tongxin, 4 (1989): 1–5. For a succinct survey of Nurhaci, see Frederic Wakeman, Jr., The Fall of Imperial China (New York: The Free Press, 1975), 75–78.

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