The Manchus continued the Confucian civilservice system. Although Chinese were barred from the highest offices,Chinese officials predominated over Manchu officeholders outside the capital,except in military positions. The Neo-Confucian philosophy, emphasizingthe obedience of subject to ruler, was enforced as the state creed. TheManchu emperors also supported Chinese literary and historical projectsof enormous scope; the survival of much of China's ancient literature isattributed to these projects.

Ever suspicious of Han Chinese, the Qing rulersput into effect measures aimed at preventing the absorption of the Manchusinto the dominant Han Chinese population. Han Chinese were prohibited frommigrating into the Manchu homeland, and Manchus were forbidden to engagein trade or manual labor. Intermarriage between the two groups was forbidden.In many government positions a system of dual appointments was used--theChinese appointee was required to do the substantive work and the Manchuto ensure Han loyalty to Qing rule.

The Qing regime was determined to protectitself not only from internal rebellion but also from foreign invasion.After China Proper had been subdued, the Manchus conquered Outer Mongolia(now the Mongolian People's Republic) in the late seventeenth century.In the eighteenth century they gained control of Central Asia as far asthe Pamir Mountains and established a protectorate over the area the Chinesecall Xizang, but commonly known in the West as Tibet. The Qing thus becamethe first dynasty to eliminate successfully all danger to China Properfrom across its land borders. Under Manchu rule the empire grew to includea larger area than before or since; Taiwan, the last outpost of anti-Manchuresistance, was also incorporated into China for the first time. In addition,Qing emperors received tribute from the various border states.

The chief threat to China's integrity didnot come overland, as it had so often in the past, but by sea, reachingthe southern coastal area first. Western traders, missionaries, and soldiersof fortune began to arrive in large numbers even before the Qing, in thesixteenth century. The empire's inability to evaluate correctly the natureof the new challenge or to respond flexibly to it resulted in the demiseof the Qing and the collapse of the entire millennia-old framework of dynasticrule.
 
In 1644, the Manchus took over China andfounded the Qing dynasty. The Qing weren't the worst rulers; under themthe arts flowered (China's greatest novel, a work known variously as TheDream of the Red Chamber, A Dream of Red Mansions, and The Story of theStone, was written during the Qing) and culture bloomed. Moreover, theyattempted to copy Chinese institutions and philosophy to a much greaterextent than then the Mongols of the Yuan. However, in their attempt toto emulate the Chinese, they were even more conservative and inflexiblethan the Ming. Their approach to foreign policy, which was to make everyonetreat the Emperor like the Son of Heaven and not acknowledge other countriesas being equal to China, didn't rub the West the right way, even when theChinese were in the moral right (as in the Opium Wars, which netted BritainHong Kong and Kowloon).

To live during the Qing Dynasty was to livein interesting times. Most importantly, the Western world attempted tomake contact on a government-to-government basis, and, at least initially,failed. The Chinese (more specifically, the ultra-conservative Manchus)had no room in their world-view for the idea of independent, equal nations(this viewpoint, to a certain degree, still persists today). There wasthe rest of the world, and then there was China. It wasn't that they rejectedthe idea of a community of nations; it's that they couldn't conceive ofit. It would be like trying to teach a Buddhist monk about the Father,Son, and the Holy Ghost. This viewpoint was so pervasive that Chinese reformerswho advocated more flexibility in China's dealings with the West were oftenaccused of being Westerners with Chinese faces.

Other problems that plagued the late (1840onwards) Qing included rampant corruption, a steady decentralization ofpower, and the unfortunate fact that they were losing control on too manyfronts at the same time. Rebellions sprouted like mushrooms after a rain;apocalyptic cults undermined what little official authority remained. Severalof the rebellions, such as the Taiping Rebellion, very nearly succeeded.Compounding the problems was squabbling between various reformers who disagreedon how to best combat the chaos and the West (not necessarily in that order);in hindsight, it is clear that the entire system was slowly collapsing.An excellent account of this period is Frederic Wakeman Jr.'s

TheFall of Imperial China.

The attitude of the Western powers towardsChina (England, Russia, Germany, France, and the United States, were, moreor less, the primary players) was strangely ambivalent. On the one hand,they did their best to undermine what they considered to be restrictivetrading and governmental regulations; the best (or worst, depending onyour point of view) example of that was the British smuggling of opiuminto Southern China. Other examples included the 'right' for foreign naviesto sail up Chinese rivers and waterways, and extra-territoriality, whichmeant that if a British citizen committed a crime in Qing China, he wouldbe tried in a British council under British law. Most of these 'rights'came into being under a series of treaties that came to be known, and rightlyso, as the Unequal Treaties.

On the other hand, they did do their bestto prop up the ailing Qing, the most notable example being the crushingof the Boxer Rebellion in 1900 by foreign troops (primarily U.S. Marines).What the Western powers were interested in was the carving up of Chinafor their own purposes, and that, paradoxically, required keeping Chinatogether.

But two things happened to prevent that. First,in 1911, the Qing dynasty collapsed and China plunged headlong into chaos.Second, in 1914, the Archduke Ferdinand told his driver to go down a streetin Sarajevo he shouldn't have, and Europe plunged headlong into chaos.

The period from 1644 AD to 1911 AD is knownas the Qing Dynasty. From the north, the Manchus invaded and set up thelast Imperial dynasty, the Qing. During the reign of Emperor Kang Xi (1661-1722),Chinese influence was extended to Mongolia, Central Asia, Tibet, Korea,Annam, Burma, and Thailand. By the 19th century the dynasty had gone intodecline from adherence to obsolete ways, corruption within, and the opiumtrade with Europe.  For the first 150 years of their rule, the Manchusgave China good government and strong leadership. In the eighteenth century,China attained the last golden age of the Imperial tradition and was verylikely the most awe-inspiring state in the world. Its principles of governanceand social organization were so admired by Voltaire and other Western intellectualsthat Confucianism became a much studied philosophy in Europe. Chinese objectsand themes had a lasting influence on European art, literature, architecture,gardens and decor. In 1911 revolutionary groups, inspired by Dr. Sun Yat-sen,a Western-educated physician, succeeded in overthrowing the Qing, bringingto an end more than 2,000 years of intermittent Imperial rule by eightmajor dynasties.

This large dish is one of the typical worksof Qing-dynasty fen-cai porcelain. Its decoration in bright colors is irresistiblyattractive. The chrysanthemum branches rising in curves bear yellow, pink,white and red flowers painted in careful brush work. The branches and leavesare also painted in delicately graduated shades of green, adding to thevividness of the designs which look almost like still-life paintings. Theample spacing enhances their noble grace.

The Opium War, 1839-42

During the eighteenth century, the marketin Europe and America for tea, a new drink in the West, expanded greatly. Additionally, there was a continuing demand for Chinese silk and porcelain.But China, still in its preindustrial stage, wanted little that the Westhad to offer, causing the Westerners, mostly British, to incur an unfavorablebalance of trade. To remedy the situation, the foreigners developed a third-partytrade, exchanging their merchandise in India and Southeast Asia for raw
materials and semiprocessed goods, whichfound a ready market in Guangzhou. By the early nineteenth century, rawcotton and opium from India had become the staple British imports intoChina, in spite of the fact that opium was prohibited entry by imperialdecree. The opium traffic was made possible through the connivance of profit-seekingmerchants and a corrupt bureaucracy.

In 1839 the Qing government, after a decadeof unsuccessful anti-opium campaigns, adopted drastic prohibitory lawsagainst the opium trade. The emperor dispatched a commissioner, Lin Zexu( 1785-1850), to Guangzhou to suppress illicit opium traffic. Lin seizedillegal stocks of opium owned by Chinese dealers and then detained theentire foreign community and confiscated and destroyed some 20,000 chestsof illicit British opium. The British retaliated with a punitive expedition,thus initiating the first Anglo-Chinese war, better known as the OpiumWar (1839-42). Unprepared for war and grossly underestimating the capabilitiesof the enemy, the Chinese were disastrously defeated, and their image oftheir own imperial power was tarnished beyond repair. The Treaty of Nanjing(1842), signed on board a British warship by two Manchu imperial commissionersand the British plenipotentiary, was the first of a series of agreementswith the Western trading nations later called by the Chinese the "unequaltreaties." Under the Treaty of Nanjing, China ceded the island of HongKong ( or Xianggang in pinyin) to the British; abolished the licensed monopolysystem of trade; opened 5 ports to British residence and
foreign trade; limited the tariff on tradeto 5 percent ad valorem; granted British nationals extraterritoriality(exemption from Chinese laws); and paid a large indemnity. In addition,Britain was to have most-favored-nation treatment, that is, it would receivewhatever trading concessions the Chinese granted other powers then or later.The Treaty of Nanjing set the scope and character of an unequal relationshipfor the ensuing century of what the Chinese would call "national humiliations."The treaty was followed by other incursions, wars, and treaties that grantednew concessions and added new privileges for the foreigners.

The Taiping Rebellion,1851-64

During the mid-nineteenth century, China'sproblems were compounded by natural calamities of unprecedented proportions,including droughts, famines, and floods. Government neglect of public workswas in part responsible for this and other disasters, and the Qing administrationdid little to relieve the widespread misery caused by them. Economic tensions,military defeats at Western hands, and anti-Manchu sentiments all combinedto produce widespread unrest, especially in the south. South China hadbeen the last area to yield to the Qing conquerors and the first to beexposed to Western influence. It provided a likely setting for the largestuprising in modern Chinese history--the Taiping Rebellion.

The Taiping rebels were led by Hong Xiuquan( 1814-64), a village teacher and unsuccessful imperial examination
candidate. Hong formulated an eclectic ideologycombining the ideals of pre-Confucian utopianism with Protestant beliefs.He soon had a following in the thousands who were heavily anti-Manchu andanti-establishment. Hong's followers formed a military organization toprotect against bandits and recruited troops not only among believers butalso from among other armed peasant groups and secret societies. In 1851Hong Xiuquan and others launched an uprising in Guizhou () Province. Hongproclaimed the Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace ( or Taiping Tianguo) withhimself as king. The new order was to reconstitute a legendary ancientstate in which the peasantry owned and tilled the land in common; slavery,concubinage, arranged marriage, opium smoking, footbinding, judicial torture,and the worship of idols were all to be eliminated. The Taiping toleranceof the esoteric rituals and quasi-religious societies of south China--themselvesa threat to Qing stability--and their relentless attacks on Confucianism--stillwidely accepted as the moral foundation of Chinese behavior--contributedto the
ultimate defeat of the rebellion. Its advocacyof radical social reforms alienated the Han Chinese scholar-gentry class.The Taiping army, although it had captured Nanjing and driven as far northas Tianjin (), failed to establish stable base areas. The movement's leadersfound themselves in a net of internal feuds, defections, and corruption.Additionally, British and French forces, being more willing to deal withthe weak Qing administration than contend with the uncertainties of a Taipingregime, came to the assistance of the imperial army. Before the Chinesearmy succeeded in crushing the revolt, however, 14 years had passed, andwell over 30 million people were reported killed.

To defeat the rebellion, the Qing court needed,besides Western help, an army stronger and more popular than the demoralizedimperial forces. In 1860, scholar-official Zeng Guofan (  1811-72),from Hunan () Province, was appointed imperial commissioner and governor-generalof the Taiping-controlled territories and placed in command of the waragainst the rebels. Zeng's Hunan army, created and paid for by local taxes,became a powerful new fighting force under the command of eminent scholar-generals.Zeng's success gave new power to an emerging Han Chinese elite and erodedQing authority.

Simultaneous uprisings in north China (theNian  Rebellion) and southwest China (the Muslim Rebellion) furtherdemonstrated Qing weakness.