In 1644 the Ming did not fall to foreign invaders. It fell to its own rebels. A rebel army under Li Zicheng took Beijing, and the last Ming emperor hanged himself on a hill behind the palace. At the Shanhai Pass, where the Great Wall meets the sea, the Ming general Wu Sangui had to choose between the rebels and the Manchu army waiting outside. He opened the Shanhai Pass to the Manchus, and together they routed Li Zicheng. The Manchus then took the throne for themselves. Their Qing dynasty would rule until 1912 and nearly double the territory of the Ming.

Who the Manchus were

The Manchus descended from the Jurchens of the northeast. In the early 1600s a chief named Nurhaci united them and organized his people into the Eight Banners, military and social units that came to include Mongols and Chinese as well. His son Hong Taiji adopted the name Manchu in 1635 and proclaimed the Qing dynasty in 1636. After 1644 the Qing kept Ming institutions, including the examinations, and employed Han Chinese officials, but bannermen held key posts and lived in separate garrisons.

Conquest was brutal. In 1645 the Qing ordered all men to shave the front of the head and wear the rest in a long braid, the queue, as a sign of submission. Resistance to the order brought massacres, notably at Jiading.

Kangxi and Qianlong

The Kangxi emperor, who reigned from 1661 to 1722, crushed a revolt by three southern generals, took Taiwan in 1683, and in 1689 signed the Treaty of Nerchinsk with the Russian Empire, fixing a border in the northeast. Jesuit missionaries at his court helped negotiate it in Latin. Kangxi studied Western mathematics with the Jesuits, though he kept their influence firmly under control.

His grandson the Qianlong emperor, who reigned from 1736 to 1795 and held power until his death in 1799, presided over the empire's greatest extent. In the 1750s Qing armies destroyed the Dzungar Mongol state in the northwest. War, smallpox and deliberate massacre wiped out most of the Dzungar people, and the historian Peter Perdue and others have described the campaign as genocidal. The conquered lands became Xinjiang, the "new frontier." Tibet came under a Qing protectorate, with imperial residents in Lhasa. The Qing ruled these regions differently from China proper, through local elites, separate laws and patronage of Buddhism.

Prosperity and its strains

The eighteenth century brought peace and growth inside China. Population rose from about 150 million around 1700 to roughly 300 million by 1800. New World crops such as maize and sweet potatoes, which grew on hillsides unsuited to rice, helped feed the increase, as did silver from the Americas that flowed in to buy tea, silk and porcelain. But the number of officials barely grew, so each magistrate governed more people, and pressure on land drove migration into hills and frontiers.

Qianlong was also a great patron and a great censor. His scholars compiled the Complete Library of the Four Treasuries, a collection of more than 3,400 works copied by hand. The same project searched out and destroyed books judged hostile to the Qing, about 3,000 titles by common estimates, especially writings critical of northern conquerors.

Historians argue over how "Chinese" the Qing were. An older view held that the Manchus were absorbed into Chinese culture. Since the 1990s, scholars of the "New Qing History," such as Evelyn Rawski and Mark Elliott, have argued that Manchu identity and ties to Inner Asia were central to how the Qing ruled. Some Chinese scholars reply that this view underrates the dynasty's Chinese foundations.

The Qing also faced a new kind of visitor. In 1793 a British embassy led by Lord George Macartney reached Qianlong's summer retreat at Chengde. Britain sought a resident ambassador and wider trading rights, and was refused.

Worked example: the Macartney embassy

Macartney declined to perform the full kowtow, kneeling three times and touching his head to the ground nine times, and knelt on one knee instead. Qianlong received him and sent home an edict for King George III. In the 1914 translation by Backhouse and Bland, it says: "As your Ambassador can see for himself, we possess all things. I set no value on objects strange or ingenious, and have no use for your country's manufactures."

For a century this line was read as proof of Chinese arrogance and backwardness, and as the root of China's later defeats. Historians such as James Hevia read it differently. Qing officials collected and studied foreign clocks and weapons; the edict followed set diplomatic forms; and rejecting Britain's demands was a reasonable defense of a trade system that already brought silver into China. The episode teaches a habit worth keeping. When a single famous quotation is used to explain a later disaster, ask who chose it, who translated it, and what else they left out. That habit serves well in reading history, and in reading the news.