Through the Wall
The Manchus — descendants of the Jurchen, state-built beyond the Great Wall by the chieftain Nurhaci — entered a China convulsed by the Ming collapse. When rebels took Beijing in 1644 and the last Ming emperor hanged himself, the Ming general at Shanhai Pass opened the Wall’s gates to the Manchus as allies; they came through as owners, proclaiming the Qing (“Pure”) dynasty. Conquest of the loyalist south took decades and famous atrocities (the Yangzhou massacre; the enforced Manchu queue hairstyle on pain of death), yet the dynasty’s formula matured into flexible dual rule: Manchu privilege and garrisons atop Confucian bureaucracy and examination — with the emperors presenting as Confucian sages to China, khans to Mongolia, and patrons of Buddhism to Tibet.
The High Qing
The 18th century was the summit. Under the long reigns of Kangxi and Qianlong, the empire roughly doubled — Taiwan, Mongolia, Tibet, and Xinjiang incorporated, fixing approximately the map modern China claims — while population tripled toward 400 million on New World crops, and the court compiled encyclopedias at scales matching its porcelain’s perfection. Qianlong’s 1793 reply to Britain’s Macartney trade embassy — the celestial empire “possesses all things in prolific abundance” — became the emblem, slightly unfairly, of the confidence about to be tested.
The broken century
The 19th century arrived as a compound fracture. Britain’s answer to the trade imbalance was opium, and the Opium Wars (1839-42, 1856-60) ended with treaty ports, Hong Kong ceded, the Summer Palace burned, and the “unequal treaties” era begun. Worse came from within: the Taiping Rebellion (1850-64) — led by the failed examination candidate Hong Xiuquan, self-declared brother of Jesus — devastated the richest provinces with a death toll conventionally put at 20-30 million, history’s bloodiest civil war. The dynasty survived on regional armies it could not fully control, under the four-decade dominance of the Empress Dowager Cixi, whose modernisation was real but rationed; the reform movement of 1898 was crushed in a hundred days, and the Boxer Rising of 1900 — court-backed against the foreign powers — ended with eight armies in Beijing and a crushing indemnity.
Reform came at last, too late and too fast: abolishing the thousand-year examination system in 1905 cut the gentry’s stake in the dynasty. The 1911 revolution began with an accidental bomb blast in Wuchang; province after province seceded, and on 12 February 1912 the six-year-old emperor Puyi abdicated — ending not just the Qing but two millennia of imperial China. Puyi’s own afterlife — Japanese puppet emperor, Soviet prisoner, communist-re-educated Beijing gardener — made him the century’s strangest biography, and the dynasty’s territorial legacy remains the working map, and the working arguments, of China today.