Qing Dynasty

The Qing Dynasty was the last imperial dynasty of China and one of the largest empires in world history, ruled by the Manchus, a people from the northeast beyond the Great Wall. Its foundations were laid by Nurhaci, who united the Jurchen tribes and founded the Later Jin state in 1616.

His son Hong Taiji renamed the dynasty 'Great Qing' in 1636 and reorganised its society around the Eight Banners military system. In 1644, taking advantage of the collapse of the Ming under rebellion, the Qing seized Beijing and over the following decades conquered the rest of China. Though a foreign conquest dynasty representing a small ethnic minority, the Qing adopted and preserved Chinese institutions, the Confucian examination system, and the bureaucracy, while maintaining a distinct Manchu identity and privileged banner elite. The empire reached its zenith during the long and prosperous reigns of the Kangxi, Yongzheng, and Qianlong emperors in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a period of stability, population explosion, economic growth, and enormous territorial expansion that incorporated Mongolia, Tibet, and Xinjiang, roughly doubling the size of China and creating the multiethnic state that broadly defines its modern borders. From the early nineteenth century the dynasty faced mounting crises. Internal pressures including population strain, corruption, and the catastrophic Taiping Rebellion combined with aggressive foreign intrusion. Defeat in the Opium Wars forced humiliating 'unequal treaties,' territorial concessions, and the opening of China to Western and later Japanese imperialism. Reform efforts came too late to restore the dynasty's authority, and rising nationalism and revolutionary sentiment culminated in the Xinhai Revolution of 1911. In February 1912 the child emperor Puyi abdicated, ending more than two millennia of imperial rule in China and giving way to the Republic of China.

Key figures