China: late imperial history 1279–1900

For the earlier history of China, see China: prehistoric and ancient history to 221 BC and China: early imperial history 221 BC–AD 1279.

The period 1279 to 1900 opened with the establishment of the vast Mongol Empire and the subsequent Yuan dynasty under Kublai Khan, but his successors after 1294 were less able. The Chinese regained control with the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), although it was more famous for its art and culture than its military might. The Manchu invaded from the north in 1619, establishing the Qing, or Manchu dynasty, (the last imperial dynasty of China) in 1644.

European interest in China, first encouraged by traders and explorers such as Marco Polo under the Mongols, re-emerged in the 16th century. The Portuguese established permanent trading posts and sent in Christian missionaries, but conflicts between Chinese and European traditions and values eventually led to a policy of exclusion under the Manchu from the early 18th century. Further conflicts on the reopening of trade in the late 19th century led to the Opium Wars waged by Britain against China. The second half of the 19th century was also a time of internal conflict, with the Taiping and Boxer rebellions.

The Mongols and the Yuan dynasty The Mongol leader Genghis Khan had destroyed the northern Jin dynasty between 1213 and 1234, with the collaboration of the southern Song dynasty, and his grandson Kublai Khan had eventually turned against their allies, defeating the Song in 1279.

Kublai Khan briefly ruled over a huge empire that extended from the River Dnieper in eastern Europe to the Pacific Ocean, and from the Arctic to the South China Sea. However, he moved his capital to Beijing, took the Chinese name Yuan, and concentrated on ruling China, where he established the Yuan dynasty, leaving the rest of the Mongol Empire to split into a number of khanates. Trade and business flourished, with trade being carried out even as far as Europe, and it was during this period that Marco Polo, the first European to give the Western peoples an accurate idea of China, was in the service of the Great Khan.

The Ming dynasty The rulers who succeeded Kublai Khan were unable to keep the Chinese under control. By the mid-14th century the Chinese began to rebel against the foreign emperors. In 1368 the Chinese leader Zhu Yuanzhang captured Beijing and made himself emperor, taking the name Hong Wu and establishing the Ming dynasty.

The Ming dynasty was famous rather for the arts of peace than for its conquests. Between 1405 and 1433 a Chinese fleet, led by the eunuch Admiral Zheng He (or Cheng Ho), called on many countries in Southeast Asia and explored and traded as far as the Gulf, Madagascar, and east Africa. The main purpose of Zheng He's voyages was to give the rulers of the lands he visited a chance to acknowledge the power and authority of the Chinese emperor over them, and offer gifts of respect to their overlord. However, the interests of the Chinese rulers soon turned inward, and in the early 16th century it was the Portuguese who took the initiative in establishing contacts with China, establishing a trading post at Macau. Christianity was also introduced more extensively by the exertions of the Italian Jesuit, Father Matteo Ricci.

The coming of the Manchu By the early 17th century China was facing new threats from enemies in the north. The Manchu, a nomadic people from Manchuria, began to attack China's borders. In 1616 a Manchu army entered China and defeated the army sent to fight it. In 1619 the Manchu took complete possession of Liaodong, and in the following year Tian Ming, the Manchu king, declared himself independent.

Meanwhile China itself was in a state of division and chaos. There were a number of rebel armies at war with the government. When the peasant leader, Li Zicheng (Li Tzu-ch'eng), captured Beijing the last Ming emperor hanged himself. The army of the Ming dynasty was left with no government or emperor, and was unsure about what action it should take. The general on the Manchu frontier invited the Manchus to come into China and subdue Li's peasant army. The Manchu did so, but refused to leave when their work was done. They took control of Beijing without a struggle, and in 1644 the last dynasty of China, the Qing (or Manchu), was established.

The pigtail, a plait of hair worn at the back and often considered typically Chinese, was in fact imposed during this period by the Manchus, who themselves plaited their hair in this way. Perhaps the greatest of the Manchu emperors was the second, Kangxi (K'ang-hsi) (reigned 1662–1722), who is famous both for learning and for generalship. Kangxi was interested in the scientific knowledge of the Jesuits, and it is to him the country owes the great dictionary of the Chinese language.

Kangxi's successor, Yongzheng (Yung-cheng), was a ruler of a very different type, and it is from his reign that the policy of ‘exclusion’ clearly begins. This policy, which stopped the introduction and spread of European science and technology to China, was partly due to the behaviour of Portuguese traders. Opposition to European influence was also encouraged by the quarrels between the Christian religious orders working in China, and an order from the pope forbidding Chinese Catholics to worship their ancestors. Ancestor worship was a key part of Chinese culture, and this order put the Catholic faith in direct opposite to Chinese traditional beliefs.

Conflict was inevitable given the enormous gulf between the cultures of East (China) and West (Europe), and from the early 18th to the later 19th century China attempted to retire within itself and exclude the European ‘barbarians’. Attempts by European nations such as Britain to get the Chinese to open up their country to trade and cultural contact were unsuccessful. One such example was the British diplomatic mission to China led by Lord Macartney between 1792 and 1794, which failed to normalize trade and diplomatic relations with China.

Internal rebellions A long period of turbulence and instability began around 1840. Popular uprisings, presaged by the White Lotus Rebellion (1796–1804), signalled the beginnings of dynastic decline. The population explosion (from 150 million in the late 17th century to 430 million in 1850) put severe pressure on land resources and fed peasant discontent. The great Taiping Rebellion (1851–64) extensively damaged economic and financial life, dealing the Qing dynasty a blow from which it never recovered.

The Opium Wars Western imperialist penetration exacerbated the internal crisis. For centuries China's rulers had kept Western traders at arm's length, confining them to dealing with recognized Chinese merchants (the Hong) at Guangzhou (Canton).

The British East India Company made huge profits by illegally importing opium into China, in collaboration with corrupt Chinese officials. In order to uphold the government ban on opium the imperial commissioner, Lin Zexu (Lin Tse-hsu), was sent to terminate the traffic in 1839. After Lin had burned the British merchants' opium stock, a British expeditionary force sailed to China in 1840 determined to force wider trading concessions and to obtain compensation for the destroyed merchandise. The First Opium War followed. Superior firepower broke Chinese resistance, and the war was ended in 1842 by the Treaty of Nanjing (Nanking). The treaty provided for the opening of five ports – Guangzhou (Canton), Xiamen (Amoy), Fuzhou (Foochow), Ningbo (Ningpo), and Shanghai – to British trade, the ceding of Hong Kong to Britain, the payment of a large indemnity, and the granting of special privileges to missionaries. The opium trade was not mentioned in the treaty.

This was the start of the period of unequal treaties and the establishment of foreign concessions in the so-called treaty ports, where Europeans were not subject to Chinese laws or taxes. Economically, the First Opium War deepened China's domestic troubles.

In 1856 the Arrow, a Chinese-crewed but British-registered ship, was seized by the Chinese authorities, and the British used this as an excuse to embark on the Second Opium War. Under the pretext of deploring the execution of a French missionary, France allied itself with Britain. The two powers won victories against the Chinese imperial armies, who were concurrently engaged in suppressing the Taiping Rebellion and another major uprising known as the Nien Rebellion. The Treaty of Tainjin (Tientsin) was signed in 1858, and provided, among other things, for the opening of further ports, the payment of indemnities, and permission for foreigners and missionaries to trade or propagate religion in the interior of China. The Arrow war had a second phase which culminated in the Anglo-French occupation of Beijing and the burning of the Summer Palace. It ended in 1860. Britain was granted control of the Kowloon peninsula.

Further imperialist encroachment Through to the end of the 19th century the Chinese were engaged in resisting encroachment by the Russians along the River Ili from Kazakhstan in the far west. They also had to resist the Japanese in Formosa (Taiwan) and the nearby Pescadores islands (Penghu) and the French in the south. During the 1870s and 1880s Korea, nominally under Chinese suzerainty, came under increasing pressure from Japan. In 1894 this finally led to the First Sino-Japanese War. After a year of conflict, China signed the Treaty of Shimonoseki (1895), in which it recognized the independence of Korea, and ceded Formosa (Taiwan), part of the Pescadores archipelago, and the Liaodong peninsula (for a naval base) to Japan. However, Japan was forced to renounce the award of the Liaodong peninsula by the ‘Triple Intervention’ of France, Germany, and Russia.

During this period many new treaty ports were opened up to the Western powers, who aided the Chinese in return for ejecting the Japanese from Liaodong. In 1897 Germany seized the port of Jiaozhou (Kiaochow), and in the following year China granted the Germans a lease of this district for 99 years. In the same year (1898) Russia also received the lease of Port Arthur (Lüshun, part of modern Dalian) and its district in Liaodong, while Britain received Weihai and the portion of the mainland opposite Hong Kong (the ‘New Territories’). France received a 90-year lease on the Bay of Kwangchow-wan and the island near the bay. Continual encroachment of this sort helped to provoke the Chinese nationalist Boxer Uprising of 1900.

In February 1904 Russia and Japan came into collision over the question of Korea, and in the Russo-Japanese War that followed Russia was decisively defeated. Although the war took place in Manchuria, Korea, and on Chinese seas, China remained a passive spectator throughout. The terms of the Treaty of Portsmouth (29 August 1905) included the conveyance of the lease of Port Arthur and Dairen (Dalian) to Japan, and the recognition by Russia that Korea and southern Manchuria were within Japan's ‘sphere of influence’. Korea was finally annexed by Japan in August 1910, and the annexation was not questioned by the Western powers.

Attempts at internal reform From 1860 to 1895 the ‘self-strengthening movement’ within China had gained momentum, calling for a measure of military and economic modernization, regularization of diplomatic contacts, and promotion of Western learning as a means of dealing both with domestic rebels and foreign aggressors. This was the age of men such as Zeng Guofan (Tseng Kuo-fan), who was responsible for the suppression of the Taiping Rebellion, and the modernizing politician Li Hongzhang. But the self-strengthening movement was limited by its confinement within the old Confucian system. Merchants were encouraged to invest, but only under strict bureaucratic supervision. The First Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95 (see above) revealed the shortcomings of self-strengthening as an attempt to graft modern ideas onto the traditional body politic.

Defeat at the hands of Japan – formerly a tributary of China, and now a constitutional monarchy – convinced men such as Kang Youwei (K'ang Yu-wei) and Liang Qichao (Liang Ch'i-chao) of the need for radical institutional reform. By 1898 growing imperialist pressure had created a situation in which Kang could convince the ambitious young emperor Guangxu (Kuang Hsu) of the need for liberalization and administrative change. But Kang was betrayed by Yuan Shihkai (Yuan Shih-k'ai), viceroy of Zhili (Chihli), so bringing to an end his Hundred Days' Reform. The Dowager Empress Zi Xi (Tz'u-hsi), representing the reactionary establishment, staged a coup d'état and put the emperor under detention. Six leading reformers were executed, and Kang and Liang fled to Japan.

For subsequent events, see China: history 1900–49, China, and Taiwan.