The Cambridge Illustrated History of China

After the Ming collapsed, a new dynasty was founded, not by a warlord or rebel leader but by the chieftains of the Manchus, a non-Chinese people living in the hilly forests and plains to the northeast of the Ming realm. Chinese elites and commoners in many parts of the country put up a determined resistance to Manchu rule, but within a generation most influential Chinese literati were co-operating with the new rulers. The three Manchu emperors who ruled over the course of the eighteenth century – Kangxi, Yongzheng, and Qianlong – proved excellent managers. This was a great age of agrarian empires across Eurasia. The Russians, the Ottomans, the British in India, and the Qing all expanded their empires, pursuing similar projects of conquest, settlement, exploration, and trade. The Qing brought under their control Mongolia, Tibet, and large parts of Muslim Central Asia.

Even when judged strictly by the standards of traditional Chinese civilization, the early Qing can be viewed as a great age. Commerce and industry reached new heights. Standards of living were high and the population doubled or tripled. Fiction, art, Confucian scholarship, and other fields of creative endeavour all flourished.

Manchu rule

The people who adopted the name ‘Manchu’ were not nomadic horsemen like the Mongols, living on the open steppe and engaging in near constant warfare to defend and augment their herds. Rather they were a hunting, fishing, and farming people from the broad river valleys of the Liao, Sungari, and Yalu rivers of central and southern Manchuria, which is the region east of Mongolia and northeast of the eastern end of the Great Wall. They were descended from the Jurchen, the people who had ruled north China as the Jin dynasty, contemporaneous with the Southern Song. In Ming times, several different Manchu tribal groups (then still called Jurchens) had participated in the Ming diplomatic system and traded at approved border markets, exchanging their horses, furs, and ginseng for Chinese tea, cotton, silk, rice, and salt. Many Manchus had settled to the south in the Liaodong peninsula, where they lived among Chinese villagers and townsmen; some served as soldiers of the Ming. Their society was hierarchical, with elites and slaves, the slaves often Chinese or Koreans who had been captured.