Ming and Qing Dynasties
Overview
Ming and Qing Dynasties
The Ming and Qing Dynasties presided over China during the early modern period in human history. Each witnessed economic development and growth, accompanying population growth, technological, financial, and organizational innovations, as well as the arrival of Europeans. These dynasties also witnessed the eclipse of China as a leading power in the world by a number of European powers.
Learning Objective
Explain the origins, course, accomplishments, decline, and downfall of the Ming and the Qing Dynasties.
Key Terms / Key Concepts
calligraphy: a visual art related to writing; the design and execution of lettering with a broad-tip brush, among other writing instruments
Forbidden City: the Chinese imperial palace from the Ming dynasty to the end of the Qing dynasty—the years 1420 to 1912—in Beijing.
Manchu: a Chinese ethnic minority, formerly the Jurchen people, who founded the Qing dynasty
Qing dynasty: the last imperial dynasty of China, ruling from 1644 to 1912 with a brief, abortive restoration in 1917 (It was preceded by the Ming dynasty and succeeded by the Republic of China. Its multi-cultural empire lasted almost three centuries and formed the territorial base for the modern Chinese state.)
The Ming Dynasty
The Ming dynasty (January 23, 1368 – April 25, 1644), officially the Great Ming, was an imperial dynasty of China founded by the peasant rebel leader Zhu Yuanzhang (known posthumously as Emperor Taizu). It succeeded the Yuan dynasty and preceded the short-lived Shun dynasty, which was in turn succeeded by the Qing dynasty. At its height, the Ming dynasty had a population of at least 160 million people, but some assert that the population could actually have been as large as 200 million.
Ming rule saw the construction of a vast navy and a standing army of one million troops. Although private maritime trade and official tribute missions from China had taken place in previous dynasties, in the 15th century the size of the tributary fleet under the Muslim eunuch admiral Zheng He surpassed all others in grandeur. There were enormous construction projects, including the restoration of the Grand Canal, the restoration of the Great Wall as it is seen today, and the establishment of the Forbidden City in Beijing during the first quarter of the 15th century. The Ming dynasty is, for many reasons, generally known as a period of stable, effective government. It is seen as the most secure and unchallenged ruling house that China had known up until that time. Its institutions were generally preserved by the following Qing dynasty. Civil service dominated government to an unprecedented degree at this time. During the Ming dynasty, the territory of China expanded (and in some cases also retracted) greatly. For a brief period during the dynasty northern Vietnam was included in Ming territory. Other important developments included the moving of the capital from Nanjing to Beijing.
Founding of the Ming Dynasty
The Mongol-led Yuan dynasty (1279 – 1368) ruled before the establishment of the Ming dynasty. Alongside institutionalized ethnic discrimination against Han Chinese that stirred resentment and rebellion, other explanations for the Yuan’s demise included overtaxing areas hard-hit by crop failure and inflation, as well as massive flooding of the Yellow River caused by abandonment of irrigation projects. Consequently, agriculture and the economy were in shambles, and rebellion broke out among the hundreds of thousands of peasants called upon to work on repairing the dikes of the Yellow River.
A number of Han Chinese groups revolted, including the Red Turbans in 1351. Zhu Yuanzhang was a penniless peasant and Buddhist monk who joined the Red Turbans in 1352, but he soon gained a reputation after marrying the foster daughter of a rebel commander.
Zhu was a born into a desperately poor tenant farmer family in Zhongli Village in the Huai River plain, which is in present-day Fengyang, Anhui Province. When he was sixteen, the Huai River broke its banks and flooded the lands where his family lived. Subsequently, a plague killed his entire family, except one of his brothers. He buried them by wrapping them in white clothes. Destitute, Zhu accepted a suggestion to take up a pledge made by his late father and became a novice monk at the Huangjue Temple, a local Buddhist monastery. He did not remain there for long, as the monastery ran short of funds, forcing him to leave. For the next few years, Zhu led the life of a wandering beggar and personally experienced and saw the hardships of the common people. After about three years, he returned to the monastery and stayed there until he was around twenty-four years old. He learned to read and write during the time he spent with the Buddhist monks.
The monastery where Zhu lived was eventually destroyed by an army that was suppressing a local rebellion. In 1352, Zhu joined one of the many insurgent forces that had risen in rebellion against the Mongol-led Yuan dynasty. He rose rapidly through the ranks and became a commander. His rebel force later joined the Red Turbans, a millenarian sect related to the White Lotus Society, and one that followed cultural and religious traditions of Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, and other religions. Widely seen as a defender of Confucianism and neo-Confucianism among the predominantly Han Chinese population in China, Zhu emerged as a leader of the rebels that were struggling to overthrow the Yuan dynasty.
In 1356 Zhu’s rebel force captured the city of Nanjing, which he would later establish as the capital of the Ming dynasty. Zhu enlisted the aid of many able advisors, including the artillery specialists Jiao Yu and Liu Bowen.
In the Battle of Lake Poyang in 1363, Zhu cemented his power in the south by eliminating his archrival, rebel leader Chen Youliang. This battle was—in terms of personnel—one of the largest naval battles in history. After the dynastic head of the Red Turbans suspiciously died in 1367 while a guest of Zhu, Zhu made his imperial ambitions known by sending an army toward the Yuan capital in 1368. The last Yuan emperor fled north into Mongolia and Zhu declared the founding of the Ming dynasty after razing the Yuan palaces in Dadu (present-day Beijing) to the ground.
Instead of following the traditional way of naming a dynasty after the first ruler’s home district, Zhu Yuanzhang’s choice of “Ming,” or “Brilliant,” for his dynasty followed a Mongol precedent of choosing an uplifting title. Zhu Yuanzhang also took “Hongwu,” or “Vastly Martial,” as his reign title. Although the White Lotus had instigated his rise to power, the emperor later denied that he had ever been a member of the organization, and he suppressed the religious movement after he became emperor.
Zhu Yuanzhang drew on both past institutions and new approaches in order to create jiaohua (civilization) as an organic Chinese governing process. This included building schools at all levels and increasing study of the classics, as well as books on morality. There was also a distribution of Neo-Confucian ritual manuals and a new civil service examination system for recruitment into the bureaucracy.
The Ming Dynasty is regarded as one of China’s three golden ages (the other two being the Han and Song periods). The period was marked by the increasing political influence of the merchants, the gradual weakening of imperial rule, and technological advances.
The Economy under the Ming Dynasty
The economy of the Ming dynasty (1368 – 1644) of China was the largest in the world during that period. It was characterized by extreme inflation, the return to silver bullion, and the rise of large agricultural markets.
Currency during the Ming Dynasty
The early Ming dynasty attempted to use paper currency, with outflows of bullion limited by its ban on private foreign commerce. Like its forebearers, paper currency experienced massive counterfeiting and hyperinflation. In 1425, Ming notes were trading at about 0.014% of their original value under the Hongwu Emperor. The notes remained in circulation as late as 1573, but their printing ceased in 1450. Minor coins were minted in base metals, but trade mostly occurred using silver ingots. As their purity and exact weight varied, they were treated as bullion and measured in tael. These privately made “sycee” first came into use in Guangdong. Spreading to the lower Yangtze sometime before 1423, sycee became acceptable for payment of tax obligations.
In the mid-15th century, interruptions in the circulation of silver resulted in contractions in the money supply that led to an extensive reversion to barter. The silver shortage was solved in part through smuggling, then by way of the legal importation of Japanese silver, mostly through the Portuguese and Dutch, and Spanish silver from Potosí carried on the Manila galleons. In succession, China required silver for the payment of provincial taxes in 1465, the salt tax in 1475, and corvée exemptions in 1485. By the late Ming, the amount of silver being used was extraordinary. At a time when English traders considered tens of thousands of pounds an exceptional fortune, the Zheng clan of merchants regularly engaged in transactions valued at millions of taels. However, a second silver contraction occurred in the mid-17th century when King Philip IV of Spain began enforcing laws limiting direct trade between Spanish South America and China at about the same time the new Tokugawa shogunate in Japan restricted most of its foreign exports, cutting off Dutch and Portuguese access to its silver. The dramatic spike in silver’s value in China made payment of taxes nearly impossible for most provinces. The government even resumed use of paper currency amid Li Zicheng’s rebellion.
Agriculture during the Ming Dynasty
In order to recover from the rule of the Mongols and the wars that followed, the Hongwu Emperor enacted pro-agricultural policies. The state invested extensively in agricultural canals and reduced taxes on agriculture to 3.3% of the output, and later to 1.5%. Ming farmers also introduced many innovations and new methods, such as water-powered plows and crop rotation. This led to a massive agricultural surplus that became the basis of a market economy.
The Ming saw the rise of commercial plantations suitable to their regions. Tea, fruit, paint, and other goods were produced on a massive scale by these agricultural plantations. Regional patterns of production established during this period continued into the Qing dynasty. The Columbian exchange brought crops such as corn. Still, large numbers of peasants abandoned the land to become artisans. The population of the Ming boomed; estimates for the population of the Ming range from 160 to 200 million.
Agriculture during the Ming changed significantly. Firstly, gigantic areas devoted to cash crops sprung up, and there was demand for the crops in the new market economy. Secondly, agricultural tools and carts, some water powered, help to create a large agricultural surplus that formed the basis of the rural economy. Besides rice, other crops were grown on a large scale.
Although images of autarkic farmers who had no connection to the rest of China may have some merit for the earlier Han and Tang dynasties, this was certainly not the case for the Ming dynasty. During the Ming dynasty, the increase in population and the decrease in quality land made it necessary for farmers to make a living off cash crops. Markets for these crops appeared in the rural countryside, where goods were exchanged and bartered.
A second type of market that developed in China was the urban-rural type, in which rural goods were sold to urban dwellers. This was common when landlords decided to reside in the cities and use income from rural land holdings to facilitate exchange in those urban areas. Professional merchants used this type of market to buy rural goods in large quantities.
The third type of market was the “national market,” which was developed during the Song dynasty but particularly enhanced during the Ming. This market involved not only the exchanges described above but also products produced directly for the market. Unlike earlier dynasties, many Ming peasants were no longer generating only products they needed; many of them produced goods for the market, which they then sold at a profit.
Land Reform
Because the Hongwu Emperor came from a peasant family, he was aware of how peasants used to suffer under the oppression of the scholar-bureaucrats and the wealthy. Many of the latter, relying on their connections with government officials, encroached unscrupulously on peasants’ lands and bribed the officials to transfer the burden of taxation to the poor. To prevent such abuse, the Hongwu Emperor instituted two systems: Yellow Records and Fish Scale Records. These systems served both to secure the government’s income from land taxes and to affirm that peasants would not lose their lands.
However, the reforms did not eliminate the threat of the bureaucrats for the peasants. Instead, the expansion of the bureaucrats and their growing prestige translated into more wealth and tax exemption for those in government service. The bureaucrats gained new privileges, and some became illegal moneylenders and managers of gambling rings. Using their power, the bureaucrats expanded their estates at the expense of peasants’ land through outright purchase of those lands and foreclosure on their mortgages whenever they wanted the lands. The peasants often became either tenants or workers, and some sought employment elsewhere.
Since the beginning of the Ming dynasty in 1357, great care was taken by the Hongwu Emperor to distribute land to peasants. One way was through forced migration to less dense areas; some people were tied to a pagoda tree in Hongdong and moved. Public works projects, such as the construction of irrigation systems and dikes, were undertaken in an attempt to help farmers. In addition, the Hongwu Emperor also reduced the demands on the peasantry for forced labour. In 1370, the Hongwu Emperor ordered that some lands in Hunan and Anhui should be given to young farmers who had reached adulthood. The order was intended to prevent landlords from seizing the land, as it also decreed that the titles to the lands were not transferable. During the middle part of his reign, the Hongwu Emperor passed an edict stating that those who brought fallow land under cultivation could keep it as their property without being taxed.
Art under the Ming Dynasty
Literature, poetry, and painting flourished during the Ming dynasty, especially in the economically prosperous lower Yangtze valley.
Literature and Poetry
Short fiction had been popular in China as far back as the Tang dynasty (618 – 907), and the works of contemporaneous Ming authors such as Xu Guangqi, Xu Xiake, and Song Yingxing were often technical and encyclopedic. But the most striking literary development during the Ming period was the vernacular novel. While the gentry elite were educated enough to fully comprehend the language of classical Chinese, those with rudimentary educations—such as women in educated families, merchants, and shop clerks—became a large potential audience for literature and performing arts that employed vernacular Chinese. Literati scholars edited or developed major Chinese novels into mature form in this period, such as Water Margin and Journey to the West. Jin Ping Mei, published in 1610, though it incorporated earlier material, exemplifies the trend toward independent composition and concern with psychology. In the later years of the dynasty, Feng Menglong and Ling Mengchu innovated with vernacular short fiction. Theater scripts were equally imaginative. The most famous script, The Peony Pavilion, was written by Tang Xianzu (1550 – 1616) and had its first performance at the Pavilion of Prince Teng in 1598.
Informal essay and travel writing was another highlight of Ming literature. Xu Xiake (1587–1641), a travel literature author, published his Travel Diaries in 404,000 written characters, with information on everything from local geography to mineralogy. In contrast to Xu Xiake, who focused on technical aspects in his travel literature, the Chinese poet and official Yuan Hongdao (1568 – 1610) used travel literature to express his desires for individualism, as well as autonomy from and frustration with Confucian court politics. Yuan desired to free himself from the ethical compromises that were inseparable from the career of a scholar-official. This anti-official sentiment in Yuan’s travel literature and poetry was actually following in the tradition of the Song dynasty poet and official Su Shi (1037 – 1101). Yuan Hongdao and his two brothers, Yuan Zongdao (1560 – 1600) and Yuan Zhongdao (1570 – 1623), were the founders of the Gong’an School of letters. This highly individualistic school of poetry and prose was criticized by the Confucian establishment for its association with intense sensual lyricism, which was also apparent in Ming vernacular novels like the Jin Ping Mei. Yet even the gentry and scholar-officials were affected by the new popular romantic literature, seeking courtesans as soulmates to reenact the heroic love stories that arranged marriages often could not provide or accommodate.
The first reference to the publishing of private newspapers in Beijing was in 1582; by 1638 the Beijing Gazette switched from using woodblock print to movable type printing. The new literary field of the moral guide to business ethics was developed during the late Ming period for the readership of the merchant class.
Painting
Famous painters included Ni Zan and Dong Qichang, as well as the Four Masters of the Ming dynasty: Shen Zhou, Tang Yin, Wen Zhengming, and Qiu Ying. They drew upon the techniques, styles, and complexity in painting achieved by their Song and Yuan predecessors, but they added new techniques and styles. Well-known Ming artists could make a living simply by painting due to the high prices they charged for their artworks and the great demand by the highly cultured community, who could afford to collect precious works of art. The artist Qiu Ying was once paid 100 oz of silver to paint a long hand-scroll for the eightieth birthday celebration of a wealthy patron’s mother. Renowned artists often gathered an entourage of followers, some who were amateurs who painted while pursuing an official career, and others who were full-time painters.
The painting techniques that were invented and developed before the Ming period became classical during it. More colors were used in painting during the Ming dynasty; seal brown became much more widely used, and even over-used. Many new painting skills and techniques were innovated and developed; calligraphy was much more closely and perfectly combined with the art of painting. Chinese painting reached another climax in the mid- and late-Ming, when painting was derived in a broad scale, many new schools were born, and many outstanding masters emerged.
Pottery
The Ming period was also renowned for ceramics and porcelains. The major production centers for porcelain were the imperial kilns at Jingdezhen in Jiangxi province and Dehua in Fujian province. By the 16th century, the Dehua porcelain factories catered to European tastes by creating Chinese export porcelain. Individual potters also became known, such as He Chaozong who became famous in the early 17th century for his style of white porcelain sculpture. The ceramic trade thrived in Asia; Chuimei Ho estimates that about 16% of late Ming era Chinese ceramic exports were sent to Europe, while the rest were destined for Japan and South East Asia.
Carved designs in lacquerware and designs glazed onto porcelain wares displayed intricate scenes similar in complexity to those in painting. These items could be found in the homes of the wealthy, alongside embroidered silks and wares in jade, ivory, and cloisonné. The houses of the rich were also furnished with rosewood furniture and feathery latticework. The writing materials in a scholar’s private study, including elaborately carved brush holders made of stone or wood that were designed and arranged ritually to give an aesthetic appeal.
Connoisseurship in the late Ming period centered on these items of refined artistic taste, which provided work for art dealers and even underground scammers who themselves made imitations and false attributions. The Jesuit Matteo Ricci, while staying in Nanjing, wrote that Chinese scam artists were ingenious at making forgeries and thus huge profits. However, there were guides to help the wary new connoisseurs; Liu Tong (d. 1637) wrote a book printed in 1635 that told his readers how to spot fake and authentic pieces of art. He revealed that a Xuande-era (1426 – 1435) bronze work could be authenticated by judging its sheen; porcelain wares from the Yongle era (1402 – 1424) could be judged authentic by their thickness.
Fall of the Ming Dynasty
The fall of the Ming dynasty was caused by a combination of factors, including an economic disaster due to lack of silver, a series of natural disasters, peasant uprisings, and finally attacks by the Manchu people.
Economic Breakdown
During the last years of the Wanli Emperor’s reign and the reigns of his two successors, an economic crisis developed that was centered around a sudden widespread lack of the empire’s chief medium of exchange: silver. The Protestant powers of the Dutch Republic and the Kingdom of England were staging frequent raids and acts of piracy against the Catholic-based empires of Spain and Portugal in order to weaken their global economic power. Meanwhile, Philip IV of Spain (r. 1621 – 1665) began cracking down on illegal smuggling of silver from Mexico and Peru across the Pacific towards China, in favor of shipping American-mined silver directly from Spain to Manila. In 1639, the new Tokugawa regime of Japan shut down most of its foreign trade with European powers, causing a halt of yet another source of silver coming into China. However, while Japanese silver still came into China in limited amounts, the greatest stunt to the flow of silver came from the Americas.
These events occurring at roughly the same time caused a dramatic spike in the value of silver and made paying taxes nearly impossible for most provinces. People began hoarding precious silver, forcing the ratio of the value of copper to silver into a steep decline. In the 1630s, a string of one thousand copper coins was worth an ounce of silver; by 1640 it was reduced to the value of half an ounce; by 1643 it was worth roughly one-third of an ounce. For peasants this was an economic disaster, since they paid taxes in silver while conducting local trade and selling their crops with copper coins.
Natural Disasters
In this early half of the 17th century, famines became common in northern China because of unusual dry and cold weather that shortened the growing season; these were effects of a larger ecological event now known as the Little Ice Age. Loss of life and normal civility was caused by widespread famine, tax increases, massive military desertions, a declining relief system, natural disasters such as flooding, and the inability of the government to properly manage irrigation and flood-control projects. The central government was starved of resources and could do very little to mitigate the effects of these calamities. Making matters worse, a widespread epidemic spread across China from Zhejiang to Henan, killing a large but unknown number of people. The famine and drought in the late 1620s and the 1630s contributed to the rebellions that broke out in Shaanxi led by rebel leaders such as Li Zicheng and Zhang Xianzhong.
The Qing Conquest of Ming: Rebellion, Invasion, Collapse
The Qing conquest of the Ming was a period of conflict between the Qing dynasty, established by the Manchu clan Aisin Gioro in Manchuria (contemporary Northeastern China), and the ruling Ming dynasty of China. The Manchu, formerly called the Jurchen people, had risen to power under the leadership of a tribal leader named Nurhaci. In 1618, leading up to the Qing conquest, Nurhaci commissioned a document titled the Seven Grievances, which enumerated resentments against the Ming and encouraged rebellion against their domination. Many of the grievances dealt with conflicts against Yehe, which was a major Manchu clan, and Ming favoritism of Yehe. Nurhaci’s demand that the Ming pay tribute to him to redress the Seven Grievances was effectively a declaration of war, as the Ming were not willing to pay money to a former tributary. Shortly afterwards, Nurhaci began to force the Ming out of Liaoning in southern Manchuria.
In 1640, masses of Chinese peasants—who were starving, unable to pay their taxes, and no longer in fear of the frequently defeated Chinese army—began to form into huge bands of rebels. The Chinese military, caught between fruitless efforts to defeat the Manchu raiders from the north and huge peasant revolts in the provinces, essentially fell apart. On April 24, 1644, Beijing fell to a rebel army led by Li Zicheng, a former minor Ming official who became the leader of the peasant revolt and then proclaimed the Shun dynasty. The last Ming emperor, the Chongzhen Emperor, hanged himself on a tree in the imperial garden outside the Forbidden City. When Li Zicheng moved against him, the Ming general Wu Sangui shifted his alliance to the Manchus. Li Zicheng was defeated at the Battle of Shanhai Pass by the joint forces of Wu Sangui and the Manchu Prince Dorgon. On June 6, the Manchus and Wu entered the capital and proclaimed the young Shunzhi Emperor as Emperor of China.
The Kangxi Emperor ascended the throne in 1661, and in 1662 his regents launched the Great Clearance to defeat the resistance of Ming loyalists in South China. In 1662, Zheng Chenggong founded the Kingdom of Tungning in Taiwan, a pro-Ming dynasty state with a goal of reconquering China. However, the Kingdom of Tungning was defeated in the Battle of Penghu by Han Chinese admiral Shi Lang, who had also served under the Ming. He fought off several rebellions, such as the Revolt of the Three Feudatories in southern China, which was led by Wu Sangui starting in 1673. Then he countered by launching a series of campaigns that expanded his empire.
The fall of the Ming dynasty was caused by a combination of factors. Kenneth Swope argues that one key factor was deteriorating relations between Ming royalty and the Ming empire’s military leadership. Other factors include repeated military expeditions to the North, inflationary pressures caused by spending too much from the imperial treasury, natural disasters, and epidemics of disease. Contributing further to the chaos was the peasant rebellion in Beijing in 1644 and a series of weak emperors. Ming power would hold out in what is now southern China for years, but would eventually be overtaken by the Manchus.
The Qing Dynasty
At the peak of the Qing dynasty (1644 – 1912), China ruled more than one-third of the world’s population, had the largest economy in the world, and by area was one of the largest empires ever.
Rise to Power
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 in the early 17th century was founded in Jianzhou (Manchuria) by Nurhaci—the chieftain of a minor Jurchen tribe known as Aisin Gioro. Originally a vassal of the Ming emperors, Nurhachi embarked on an intertribal feud in 1582 that escalated into a campaign to unify the nearby tribes. By 1616, he sufficiently consolidated Jianzhou enough to be able to proclaim himself Khan of the Great Jin, in reference to the previous Jurchen dynasty.
In 1618, Nurhachi announced the Seven Grievances, a document that enumerated grievances against the Ming, and began to rebel against the Ming domination. Nurhaci’s demand that the Ming pay tribute to him to redress the grievances was effectively a declaration of war, as the Ming were not willing to pay a former tributary. Shortly after, Nurhaci began to invade the Ming in Liaoning in southern Manchuria. After a series of successful battles, he relocated his capital from Hetu Ala to successively bigger captured Ming cities in Liaodong Peninsula: first Liaoyang in 1621, then Shenyang (Mukden) in 1625.
Relocating his court to Liaodong brought Nurhachi in close contact with the Khorchin Mongol domains on the plains of Mongolia. Nurhachi’s policy towards the Khorchins was to seek their friendship and cooperation against the Ming, securing his western border from a powerful potential enemy. Further, the Khorchin proved a useful ally in the war, lending the Jurchens their expertise as cavalry archers. To guarantee this new alliance, Nurhachi initiated a policy of inter-marriages between the Jurchen and Khorchin nobilities. This is a typical example of Nurhachi initiatives that eventually became official Qing government policy. During most of the Qing period, the Mongols gave military assistance to the Manchus.
Two of Nurhaci’s critical contributions were ordering the creation of a written Manchu script based on the Mongolian, after the earlier Jurchen script was forgotten, and the creation of the civil and military administrative system, which eventually evolved into the Eight Banners—the defining element of Manchu identity. The Eight Banners were administrative/military divisions under the Qing dynasty into which all Manchu households were placed. In war, the Eight Banners functioned as armies, but the banner system was also the basic organizational framework of Manchu society. The banner armies played an instrumental role in his unification of the fragmented Jurchen people and in the Qing dynasty’s conquest of the Ming dynasty. In 1635, Nurchaci’s son and successor Huangtaiji changed the name of the Jurchen ethnic group to the Manchu.
At the same time, the Ming dynasty was fighting for its survival. Ming government officials fought against each other, against fiscal collapse, and against a series of peasant rebellions. In 1640, masses of Chinese peasants who were starving, unable to pay their taxes, and no longer in fear of the frequently defeated Chinese army began to form huge bands of rebels. The Chinese military, caught between fruitless efforts to defeat the Manchu raiders from the north and huge peasant revolts in the provinces, essentially fell apart. Unpaid and unfed, the army was defeated by Li Zicheng—who became the self-styled as the Prince of Shun. In 1644, Beijing fell to a rebel army led by Li Zicheng when the city gates were opened from within. During the turmoil, the last Ming emperor hanged himself on a tree in the imperial garden outside the Forbidden City. Li Zicheng, a former minor Ming official, established a short-lived Shun dynasty.
Qing Empire
The Qing fell to the reign of Dorgon, who historians have called “the mastermind of the Qing conquest” and “the principal architect of the great Manchu enterprise.” Under Dorgon, the Qing eventually subdued the capital area, received the capitulation of Shandong local elites and officials, and conquered Shanxi and Shaanxi. Then, they turned their eyes to the rich commercial and agricultural region of Jiangnan south of the lower Yangtze River. They also wiped out the last remnants of rival regimes (Li Zicheng was killed in 1645). Finally, they managed to kill claimants to the throne of the Southern Ming in Nanjing (1645) and Fuzhou (1646), and they chased Zhu Youlang, the last Southern Ming emperor, out of Guangzhou (1647) and into the far southwestern reaches of China.
Over the next half-century, all areas previously under the Ming dynasty were consolidated under the Qing. Xinjiang, Tibet, and Mongolia were also formally incorporated into Chinese territory. Between 1673 and 1681, the Kangxi Emperor suppressed the Revolt of the Three Feudatories: an uprising of three generals in Southern China who were denied hereditary rule of large fiefdoms granted by the previous emperor. In 1683, the Qing staged an amphibious assault on southern Taiwan, bringing down the rebel Kingdom of Tungning, which was founded by the Ming loyalist Koxinga in 1662 after the fall of the Southern Ming and had served as a base for continued Ming resistance in Southern China. The Qing defeated the Russians at Albazin, resulting in the Treaty of Nerchinsk. The Russians gave up the area north of the Amur River, as far as the Stanovoy Mountains, and kept the area between the Argun River and Lake Baikal. This border along the Argun River and Stanovoy Mountains lasted until 1860. The decades of Manchu conquest caused enormous loss of lives and the economy of China shrank drastically. In total, the Qing conquest of the Ming (1618 – 1683) cost as many as 25 million lives.
The Ten Great Campaigns of the Qianlong Emperor from the 1750s to the 1790s extended Qing control into Central Asia. The early rulers maintained their Manchu ways and while their title was Emperor, they used khan to the Mongols and were patrons of Tibetan Buddhism. They governed using Confucian styles and institutions of bureaucratic government and retained the imperial examinations to recruit Han Chinese to work under or in parallel with Manchus. They also adapted the ideals of the tributary system in dealing with neighboring territories.
The Qianlong reign (1735 – 96) saw the dynasty’s apogee and initial decline in prosperity and imperial control. The population rose to some 400 million, but taxes and government revenues were fixed at a low rate, virtually guaranteeing eventual fiscal crisis. Corruption set in, rebels tested government legitimacy, and ruling elites did not change their mindsets in the face of changes in the world system. Still, by the end of Qianlong Emperor’s long reign, the Qing Empire was at its zenith. China ruled more than one-third of the world’s population and had the largest economy in the world. By area alone, it was one of the largest empires ever.
Government
The early Qing emperors adopted the bureaucratic structures and institutions from the preceding Ming dynasty but split rule between Han Chinese and Manchus, with some positions also given to Mongols. Like previous dynasties, the Qing recruited officials via the imperial examination system until the system was abolished in 1905. The Qing divided the positions into civil and military positions. Civil appointments ranged from an attendant to the emperor or a Grand Secretary in the Forbidden City (highest) to prefectural tax collector, deputy jail warden, deputy police commissioner, or tax examiner. Military appointments ranged from a field marshal or chamberlain of the imperial bodyguard to third class sergeant, corporal, or first or second class private.
The formal structure of the Qing government centered on the Emperor as the absolute ruler, who presided over six boards (Ministries); the Ministries were each headed by two presidents and assisted by four vice presidents. In contrast to the Ming system, however, Qing ethnic policy dictated that appointments be split between Manchu noblemen and Han officials who had passed the highest levels of the state examinations. The Grand Secretariat, a key policy-making body under the Ming, lost its importance during the Qing and evolved into an imperial chancery. The institutions inherited from the Ming formed the core of the Qing Outer Court, which handled routine matters and was located in the southern part of the Forbidden City.
In order to keep routine administration from taking over the empire, the Qing emperors made sure that all important matters were decided in the Inner Court, dominated by the imperial family and Manchu nobility and located in the northern part of the Forbidden City. The core institution of the inner court was the Grand Council. It emerged in the 1720s under the reign of the Yongzheng Emperor as a body charged with handling Qing military campaigns against the Mongols, but soon took over other military and administrative duties and centralized authority under the crown. The Grand Councilors served as a sort of privy council to the emperor.
Society Under the Qing
Under Qing rule, the empire’s population expanded rapidly and migrated extensively, the economy grew, and arts and culture flourished, but the development of the military gradually weakened central government’s grip on the country.
During the early and mid-Qing period, the population grew rapidly and was remarkably mobile. Evidence suggests that the empire’s expanding population moved in a manner unprecedented in Chinese history. Migrants relocated hoping for either permanent resettlement or at least in theory, a temporary stay. The latter included the empire’s increasingly large and mobile manual workforce, its densely overlapping internal diaspora of merchant groups, and the movement of Qing subjects overseas, largely to Southeastern Asia, in search of trade and other economic opportunities.
The Qing society was divided into five relatively closed estates. The elites consisted of the estates of the officials, the comparatively minuscule aristocracy, and the intelligentsia. There also existed two major categories of ordinary citizens: the “good” and the “mean.” The majority of the population belonged to the first category and were described as liangmin, a legal term meaning good people, as opposed to jianmin meaning the mean (or ignoble) people. Qing law explicitly stated that the traditional four occupational groups of scholars, farmers, artisans, and merchants were “good,” and they could have the status of commoners. On the other hand, slaves or bonded servants, entertainers (including prostitutes and actors), and low-level employees of government officials were the “mean” people, and they were considered legally inferior to commoners.
Economy
By the end of the 17th century, the Chinese economy had recovered from the devastation caused by the wars in which the Ming dynasty was overthrown. In the 18th century, markets continued to expand but with more trade between regions, a greater dependence on overseas markets, and a greatly increased population. After the re-opening of the southeast coast, which was closed in the late 17th century, foreign trade was quickly re-established and expanded at 4% per annum throughout the latter part of the 18th century. China continued to export tea, silk, and manufactures, which resulted in a large, favorable trade balance with the West. The resulting inflow of silver expanded the money supply, facilitating the growth of competitive and stable markets.
The government broadened land ownership by returning land that was sold to large landowners in the late Ming period by families unable to pay the land tax. To give people more incentives to participate in the market, the tax burden was reduced in comparison with the late Ming and the corvée system replaced with a head tax used to hire laborers. A system of monitoring grain prices eliminated severe shortages and enabled the price of rice to rise slowly and smoothly through the 18th century. Wary of the power of wealthy merchants, Qing rulers limited their trading licenses and usually banned new mines, except in poor areas. Some scholars see these restrictions on the exploitation of domestic resources and limits imposed on foreign trade as a cause of the Great Divergence by which the Western world overtook China economically.
By the end of the 18th century the population had risen to 300 million from approximately 150 million during the late Ming dynasty. This rise is attributed to the long period of peace and stability in the 18th century and the import of new crops China received from the Americas, including peanuts, sweet potatoes, and maize. New species of rice from Southeast Asia led to a huge increase in production. Merchant guilds proliferated in all of the growing Chinese cities and often acquired great social and even political influence. Rich merchants with official connections built up huge fortunes and patronized literature, theater, and the arts. Textile and handicraft production boomed.
Military
The early Qing military was rooted in the Eight Banners first developed by Nurhaci to organize Jurchen society beyond petty clan affiliations. The banners were differentiated by color. The yellow, bordered yellow, and white banners were known as the Upper Three Banners and remained under the direct command of the emperor. The remaining banners were known as the Lower Five Banners. They were commanded by hereditary Manchu princes descended from Nurhachi’s immediate family. Together, they formed the ruling council of the Manchu nation, as well as the high command of the army. Nurhachi’s son Hong Taiji expanded the system to include mirrored Mongol and Han Banners. After capturing Beijing in 1644, the relatively small Banner armies were further augmented by the Green Standard Army, made up of Ming troops who had surrendered to the Qing. They eventually outnumbered Banner troops three to one. They maintained their Ming-era organization and were led by a mix of Banner and Green Standard officers.
Banner armies were organized along ethnic lines, namely Manchu and Mongol, but they included non-Manchu bonded servants registered under the household of their Manchu masters. During Qianlong’s reign, the Qianlong Emperor emphasized Manchu ethnicity, ancestry, language, and culture in the Eight Banners, and in 1754 started a mass discharge of Han bannermen. This led to a change from Han majority to a Manchu majority within the Eight Banner system. The eventual decision to turn the banner troops into a professional force led to its decline as a fighting force.
After a series of military defeats in the mid-19th century, the Qing court ordered a Chinese official, Zeng Guofan, to organize regional and village militias into an emergency army. He relied on local gentry to raise a new type of military organization that became known as the Xiang Army, named after the Hunan region where it was raised. The Xiang Army was a hybrid of local militia and a standing army. It was given professional training, but it was paid for out of regional coffers and funds its commanders could muster. Commanders of the local militia were mostly members of the Chinese gentry. The Xiang Army and its successor, the Huai Army, created by Zeng Guofan’s colleague and mentee Li Hongzhang, were collectively called the Yong Ying (Brave Camp). The Yong Ying system signaled the end of Manchu dominance in Qing military establishment. The fact that the corps were financed through provincial coffers and were led by regional commanders weakened central government’s grip on the whole country. This structure fostered nepotism and cronyism among its commanders, who laid the seeds of regional warlordism in the first half of the 20th century.
Arts and Culture
Under the Qing, traditional forms of art flourished and innovations developed rapidly. High levels of literacy, a successful publishing industry, prosperous cities, and the Confucian emphasis on cultivation all fed a lively and creative set of cultural fields.
The Qing emperors were generally adept at poetry, often skilled in painting, and offered their patronage to Confucian culture. The Kangxi and Qianlong emperors, for instance, embraced Chinese traditions both to control the people and proclaim their own legitimacy. Imperial patronage encouraged literary and fine arts, as well as the industrial production of ceramics and Chinese export porcelain. However, the most impressive aesthetic works were by the scholars and urban elite. Calligraphy and painting remained a central interest to both court painters and scholar-gentry who considered the arts part of their cultural identity and social standing.
Literature grew to new heights in the Qing period. Poetry continued as a mark of the cultivated gentleman, but women wrote in larger numbers and poets came from all walks of life. The poetry of the Qing dynasty is a field studied (along with the poetry of the Ming dynasty) for its association with Chinese opera, developmental trends of classical Chinese poetry, the transition to a greater role for vernacular language, and poetry by women in Chinese culture. In drama, the most prestigious form became the so-called Peking opera, although local and folk opera were also widely popular. Even cuisine became a form of artistic expression. Works that detailed the culinary aesthetics and theory, along with a wide range of recipes, were published.
The Qing emperors generously supported the arts and sciences. For example, the Kangxi Emperor sponsored the Peiwen Yunfu, a rhyme dictionary published in 1711, and the Kangxi Dictionary published in 1716, which remains to this day an authoritative reference. The Qianlong Emperor sponsored the largest collection of writings in Chinese history, the Siku Quanshu, completed in 1782. Court painters made new versions of the Song masterpiece, Zhang Zeduan’s Along the River During the Qingming Festival, whose depiction of a prosperous and happy realm demonstrated the beneficence of the emperor.
By the end of the 19th century, all elements of national artistic and cultural life recognized and began to come to terms with world culture as found in the West and Japan. Whether to stay within old forms or welcome Western models was now a conscious choice rather than an unchallenged acceptance of tradition.
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