Qing dynasty

The Qing (清朝) were a Manchu dynasty. In 1616 the Jurchen chief Nurhaci founded the Later Jin; in 1636 his son Hong Taiji proclaimed the Great Qing. In 1644, allied with the Ming general Wu Sangui, the Manchus entered Beijing on 6 June and installed the Shunzhi emperor, a child, under the regency of his uncle Dorgon. Dorgon kept Beijing as the capital and reappointed most of the Ming officials.

In July 1645 Dorgon ordered Han men, on pain of death, to adopt the Manchu hairstyle: shave the front of the head and braid the rest of the hair into a long queue (辫子). A saying of the time summed up the choice: "keep your head and lose your hair, or keep your hair and lose your head". The order met fierce resistance in Jiangnan: the city of Jiangyin held out for nearly three months, after which the Qing army massacred its people. The queue remained compulsory until the revolution of 1911.

The conquest took years more. The last Ming pretender was executed in 1662. The Revolt of the Three Feudatories, three former Ming generals who had become governors in the south, lasted eight years; the Qing controlled the south only in 1681. Finally, Taiwan surrendered in 1683.

Three reigns mark the height of the dynasty. Kangxi (康熙, r. 1661–1722) came to the throne at seven and took power at fifteen, in 1669, by having the regent Oboi arrested. His 61-year reign is the longest in Chinese history. He defeated the Three Feudatories, took Taiwan and signed the Treaty of Nerchinsk with Russia (1689), China's first formal treaty with a European power; Jesuits served at his court as astronomers and map-makers.

His son Yongzheng (雍正, r. 1723–1735) ruled with a firm hand: he fought corruption and created the Grand Council, a small circle of advisers that became the dynasty's real cabinet. Yongzheng's son Qianlong (乾隆, r. 1735–1796) led ten great campaigns that extended the empire into Xinjiang, Mongolia and Tibet. By the end of the 18th century the population had reached about 300 million. But corruption spread in his later years, and Lord Macartney's British embassy of 1793 left without the opening of trade it had come for.

Qianlong also had the Complete Library of the Four Treasuries (四库全书) compiled, begun in 1772 and finished in the early 1780s: nearly 80,000 scrolls copied by hand, arranged in four sections (classics, histories, masters, literary collections), in seven copies. The project also served censorship: more than 2,800 books, mostly from the late Ming, were banned for their hostility to the Qing, although most of them have survived.

In 1710 Kangxi ordered the compilation of a character dictionary, published in 1716: the Kangxi Dictionary (康熙字典). It drew in part on two Ming dictionaries, the Zihui (字汇, 1615) by Mei Yingzuo and the Zhengzitong (1627). With more than 47,000 characters, many of them variants and rare forms, it remained the authority on written Chinese until the early 20th century. The emperor chose the word zidian (字典) for its title himself; it has become the ordinary word for "dictionary".

Characters are arranged under 214 radicals (部首), then by the number of strokes added to the radical. The system was not invented for the Kangxi Dictionary. The first dictionary to classify characters by radical, Xu Shen's Shuowen jiezi (说文解字) of around 100 CE, used 540; it was the Zihui that fixed the list of 214 and first ordered both radicals and characters by stroke count. The Kangxi Dictionary made it standard, and it has been known ever since as the "Kangxi radicals" (康熙部首).

These 214 radicals are still the reference system for dictionaries arranged by radical, often with a few changes; dictionaries published in Taiwan mostly follow them. In mainland China, a 2009 standard keeps 201 radicals for simplified characters, a system that recent editions of the Xinhua zidian dictionary have adopted.

From 1757, maritime trade with Europeans was confined to the single port of Canton (Guangzhou). The British bought tea and porcelain and made up their trade deficit by smuggling in opium grown in India, which was illegal in China. In 1839 the Daoguang emperor sent Lin Zexu (林则徐) to Canton. He wrote to Queen Victoria (she never received the letter), forced the British merchants to hand over their opium and had it destroyed in public at Humen in June 1839.

Britain answered with war (1839–1842), which it won thanks to its superior ships and guns. The Treaty of Nanjing (南京条约), signed on 29 August 1842 aboard a British warship, ceded Hong Kong Island to Britain, opened five ports to trade (Canton, Xiamen, Fuzhou, Ningbo and Shanghai) and imposed an indemnity, without settling the opium question. It was one of the first of what the Chinese would call the "unequal treaties", and many historians date the beginning of modern Chinese history to 1839.

A Second Opium War (1856–1860) pitted China against Britain and France. In 1860 British and French troops looted the Old Summer Palace (圆明园) near Beijing, which British troops then burned, and the opium trade was legalised.

The century's greatest revolt began in the south. Hong Xiuquan (洪秀全), a Hakka from Guangdong, failed the imperial examinations for the third time in 1837; after a series of visions he proclaimed himself the younger brother of Jesus Christ. His movement founded the Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace (太平天国), took Nanjing in 1853 and made it its capital, Tianjing (天京), "the heavenly capital". The Taiping set out to overturn the whole social order; they refused the queue and let their hair grow, hence their nickname "long hairs" (长毛). They were defeated by provincial armies such as Zeng Guofan's (曾国藩) Xiang Army: Hong died in June 1864 and Nanjing fell a month later. The war (1850–1864) was one of the deadliest civil wars in history; its exact toll is unknown, with estimates of 20 to 30 million dead and some far higher.

After these disasters, senior officials launched the Self-Strengthening Movement (洋务运动, literally "Western affairs movement") around 1861. Around Prince Gong, Zeng Guofan and Li Hongzhang (李鸿章), they set up a foreign affairs office, arsenals, shipyards and foreign-language schools, then telegraph lines and railways. But they kept to military and economic modernisation, and the defeat of 1895 ended the movement. The term "self-strengthening" (自强) comes from the Book of Changes.

From 1861 until her death in 1908, power lay mostly with Cixi (慈禧, 1835–1908). A concubine of the Xianfeng emperor, she was the mother of the Tongzhi emperor, who came to the throne as a child in 1861, and she acted as regent; in 1875 she put her nephew on the throne as the Guangxu emperor. Long portrayed as a reactionary, she has been reassessed by some historians.

The war with Japan (1894–1895), fought over influence in Korea, ended in disaster. The Chinese call it the Jiawu War (甲午战争), after the name of the year 1894 in the traditional calendar. By the Treaty of Shimonoseki (17 April 1895), China ceded Taiwan to Japan and paid a heavy indemnity. In 1898 the Guangxu emperor launched the Hundred Days' Reform; Cixi ended it with a coup and put him under house arrest.

In 1899–1901 the Boxers (义和团), a popular movement in northern China, attacked missionaries and Chinese Christians under the slogan "Support the Qing, destroy the foreigners" (扶清灭洋). In June 1900 they besieged the foreign legations in Beijing for 55 days; Cixi backed them and declared war. An alliance of eight powers took Beijing on 14 August and the court fled to Xi'an. The 1901 protocol imposed an indemnity of 450 million taels of silver, payable over 39 years. Cixi then began reforms: the imperial examinations were abolished in 1905. She died in November 1908, just after the Guangxu emperor, leaving the throne to a two-year-old boy, Puyi.

On 10 October 1911 an uprising of New Army soldiers at Wuchang set off the revolution; one province after another renounced the Qing. The Chinese call it the Xinhai Revolution (辛亥革命), after the name of the year 1911 in the sixty-year cycle of the traditional calendar. On 1 January 1912 the Republic of China (中华民国) was proclaimed in Nanjing, with Sun Yat-sen as provisional president.

In Beijing the prime minister, Yuan Shikai (袁世凯), negotiated: he was promised the presidency of the Republic if he secured the abdication. On 12 February 1912 Empress Dowager Longyu issued the edict of abdication in the name of the six-year-old Xuantong emperor, Puyi (溥仪). The text hands power to the whole nation and adopts "a constitutional republic" as the form of the state; the new republic is to unite the territories of the "five peoples": Manchu, Han, Mongol, Hui and Tibetan. So ended the Qing dynasty and the Chinese empire.

Under an agreement with the Republic, Puyi kept his title and went on living in the Forbidden City until he was expelled in 1924. He died in 1967.