THE WORLD ATLAS

Empire · 1636–1912 · East Asia

Qing Empire

Also known as Manchu Empire

The Qing were founded by the Manchus, Jurchen peoples of the northeast united by Nurhaci, whose son Hong Taiji proclaimed the Qing dynasty in 1636. When rebels toppled the Ming in 1644, Manchu armies entered Beijing and went on to conquer all of China, forcing Chinese men to adopt the Manchu queue hairstyle.

The Kangxi, Yongzheng and Qianlong emperors ruled for over a century of prosperity, roughly doubling the empire's size by conquering Taiwan, Mongolia, Xinjiang and Tibet, and the population soared past 300 million. In the 19th century the empire was battered by the Opium Wars with Britain, the Taiping Rebellion, which killed perhaps 20 million people, and defeat by Japan in 1895. Reforms came too late: the 1911 revolution forced the child emperor Puyi to abdicate in 1912, ending over two thousand years of imperial rule.

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Longevity Hill and the Tower of Buddhist Incense at the Summer Palace, Beijing, laid out from 1750 and rebuilt after 1886 under the Qing
Longevity Hill and the Tower of Buddhist Incense at the Summer Palace, Beijing, laid out from 1750 and rebuilt after 1886 under the Qing xiquinhosilva · CC BY 2.0
Years
1636–1912
Capital
Mukden (Shenyang), then Beijing from 1644
Greatest extent
1790, about 14.70 million km²
Region
East Asia

c. 14.7M km² (Taagepera 1997; Turchin, Adams & Hall 2006), including Mongolia, Xinjiang, Tibet and Manchuria

Legacy

The borders of modern China, including Tibet, Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia, largely follow those the Qing conquered.

Timeline of Qing Empire

  1. Manchu victory over the Ming at Sarhu

    The Qing began as the Later Jin, a state founded in 1616 by Nurhaci, a Jurchen chieftain who had united most Jurchen tribes and organised them into the Eight Banners. In 1618 he declared war on the Ming, and in spring 1619 the Ming sent a large army, with Korean (Joseon) allies, in four columns to destroy his capital at Hetu Ala. Nurhaci concentrated his cavalry and defeated the columns one by one around Sarhu, in today's Liaoning, over a few days. The victory gave the Jurchens the initiative in the northeast, and within a few years they took Shenyang and most of Liaodong.

  2. Hong Taiji renames his state the Great Qing

    Nurhaci's son Hong Taiji, who took power in 1626, conquered Inner Mongolia and the rest of Manchuria and invaded Korea, which became a Qing tributary. In 1635 he renamed his people from Jurchen to 'Manchu', and in 1636 he proclaimed himself emperor and changed the name of his dynasty from 'Great Jin' to 'Great Qing'. The Qing now claimed to rule as a rival to the Ming, with its capital at Mukden (Shenyang), and Hong Taiji prepared the way for the conquest of China.

  3. Qing and Wu Sangui defeat Li Zicheng at Shanhai Pass; Beijing taken

    In April 1644 the rebel Li Zicheng captured Beijing and the last Ming emperor killed himself. The Ming general Wu Sangui, guarding the Great Wall at Shanhai Pass, turned to the Manchus for help. On 27 May 1644 Li's army attacked the pass, and the combined forces of Wu Sangui and the Qing regent Dorgon routed it. Li abandoned Beijing, and the Qing entered the city on 6 June; the young Shunzhi Emperor was enthroned there as ruler of China. The battle opened China proper to the Manchus, who spent the next two decades conquering the Ming lands to the south.

  4. Revolt of the Three Feudatories crushed after eight years

    To reward Wu Sangui and two other Chinese generals who had helped conquer the south, the Qing gave them vast hereditary fiefs in Yunnan, Guangdong and Fujian. By the 1670s these 'Three Feudatories' were almost independent and very costly. When the Kangxi Emperor moved to abolish them in 1673, Wu Sangui rebelled, and the other two feudatories and the Zheng regime on Taiwan joined him, taking much of southern China. The Qing gradually won back the provinces, and the revolt was crushed in 1681. Kangxi's victory secured Qing control over all of southern China.

  5. Zheng regime on Taiwan surrenders to the Qing

    After the Ming fell, the loyalist commander Koxinga (Zheng Chenggong) drove the Dutch from Taiwan in 1662 and founded the Kingdom of Tungning there, which kept fighting the Qing. In July 1683 the Qing admiral Shi Lang attacked with a large fleet and destroyed the Zheng navy at the Battle of Penghu, killing or capturing thousands of men. With its fleet gone, the Zheng government under the young Zheng Keshuang surrendered on 5 September 1683. Taiwan was brought into the Qing empire for the first time, ending the last organised Ming loyalist resistance.

  6. Treaty of Nerchinsk with Russia

    As Russian explorers and Cossacks pushed into the Amur River valley, they clashed with the Qing, who besieged the Russian fort at Albazin in 1685–86. In 1689 envoys of the Kangxi Emperor and the Russian tsars met at Nerchinsk and, using Latin with Jesuit priests as interpreters, signed the first formal treaty China ever made with a Western power. Russia gave up the Amur basin, and the border was set along the Argun River and the Stanovoy Mountains, while Russia gained trading rights. The treaty secured the Qing's northern frontier in Manchuria for about 170 years.

  7. Conquest of Dzungaria and the Tarim Basin (Xinjiang) completed

    For decades the Dzungar Khanate, the last great nomadic empire of the Mongol Oirats, had fought the Qing for control of Mongolia, Tibet and Central Asia. In the 1750s, amid a Dzungar succession crisis, the Qianlong Emperor sent armies that destroyed the khanate; a large part of the Dzungar population died in the slaughter and epidemics that followed, now described as a genocide. Qing forces then took the Tarim Basin, and by 1759 the conquest was complete. The new region became known as Xinjiang ('new frontier'), adding a vast territory in Central Asia to the empire.

  8. c. 1790: Qing at its greatest extent, about 14.7 million km²

    Under the Kangxi, Yongzheng and Qianlong emperors, the Qing fought a long series of wars, including Qianlong's 'Ten Great Campaigns', on its Inner Asian and southern frontiers. By about 1790 the empire stretched from Manchuria and Mongolia to Xinjiang and Tibet, about twice the size of the Ming state, and by scholarly estimates covered some 14.7 million km². It was the largest territory of any Chinese dynasty and laid the territorial base of modern China. In peace its population rose to around 400 million, but taxes stayed low and fixed, and costly wars and corruption soon strained the state.

  9. Treaty of Nanking ends the First Opium War; Hong Kong Island ceded

    British merchants smuggled opium from India into China to pay for tea, and when the Qing official Lin Zexu enforced the ban by seizing their opium stocks in 1839, Britain went to war. British warships defeated Qing forces along the coast and up the Yangtze, threatening Nanjing. On 29 August 1842 the Qing signed the Treaty of Nanking, paying an indemnity, opening five treaty ports to British merchants and ceding Hong Kong Island to Britain. It was the first of the 'unequal treaties' that forced China open to Western powers and began what Chinese call the century of humiliation.

  10. Taiping Rebellion breaks out (crushed 1864)

    In the 1840s Hong Xiuquan, a failed civil-service candidate who believed he was the younger brother of Jesus, founded a religious movement in southern China. In late 1850 his followers rose in revolt and proclaimed the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom; in 1853 they captured Nanjing and made it their capital. For over a decade they held much of the rich Yangtze valley. Regional armies raised by officials such as Zeng Guofan and Li Hongzhang, later helped by Western-led forces, finally retook Nanjing in 1864. Estimates of the dead range from 20 to 100 million, and the war left the Qing government badly weakened.

  11. Outer Manchuria ceded to Russia (Convention of Peking)

    In the Second Opium War (1856–60) British and French forces fought the Qing again, captured Beijing in 1860 and burned the Old Summer Palace. Russia, which had already won the north bank of the Amur by the Treaty of Aigun in 1858, offered to mediate. In the Convention of Peking, signed in 1860, China also ceded Kowloon to Britain, and the Russian envoy Nikolay Ignatyev obtained the land between the Ussuri River and the Pacific. China lost all of Outer Manchuria, about 400,000 km² by this treaty alone, and its access to the Sea of Japan.

  12. Treaty of Shimonoseki: Taiwan and Penghu ceded to Japan

    Japan, modernising rapidly after 1868, and China clashed over influence in Korea, a Qing tributary state. In the war of 1894–95 Japan's army and navy defeated the Qing forces, defeating the Beiyang Fleet at the Yalu River and taking Port Arthur and Weihaiwei. By the Treaty of Shimonoseki, signed on 17 April 1895, China recognised Korea's independence, paid an indemnity of 200 million taels, and ceded Taiwan, the Penghu Islands and the Liaodong Peninsula to Japan. Russia, Germany and France forced Japan to return Liaodong a week later. The defeat by a smaller Asian neighbour showed the weakness of the Qing and set off a scramble by foreign powers for concessions in China.

  13. Boxer Rebellion; foreign armies occupy Beijing

    Anger at foreign influence and Christian missionaries fed a movement in northern China known in the West as the Boxers, whose followers attacked missionaries and Chinese Christians. In June 1900 the Qing court backed them and declared war on the foreign powers; Chinese troops and Boxers besieged the foreign legations in Beijing from 20 June to 14 August. An Eight-Nation Alliance of foreign armies relieved the legations and occupied Beijing, and the Empress Dowager Cixi fled to Xi'an. The Boxer Protocol of 1901 imposed an indemnity of 450 million taels of silver and foreign troops in Beijing, further weakening the dynasty.

  14. Wuchang Uprising starts the Xinhai Revolution (abdication Feb 1912)

    By 1911 many Chinese blamed the Manchu Qing for China's weakness, and revolutionary groups such as Sun Yat-sen's Tongmenghui had spread their ideas in the army. On 10 October 1911 units of the New Army rose in revolt at Wuchang, in today's Wuhan, starting the 1911 (Xinhai) Revolution, and one province after another renounced the Qing. On 1 January 1912 the Republic of China was proclaimed at Nanjing with Sun as provisional president. The court turned to Yuan Shikai, who negotiated the abdication of the six-year-old Xuantong Emperor (Puyi) on 12 February 1912, ending 267 years of Qing rule and over two millennia of imperial rule in China.

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