Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
The Manchus did not come out of nowhere. In their ancestral home-
land in Manchuria they had been building a conquest dynasty for sev-
eral decades. The Qing state started with a leader named Nurhachi
(1559-1626), who broke down the old Manchu tribal affiliations and
unified the Manchus as a people. Nurhachi nursed an enormous
grudge against the Ming for its complicity in the death of his father,
and like his Jurchen ancestors, he dreamed of conquering China. But
he died in 1626, much too early to see his dream realized. His succes-
sors carried on his “great enterprise” of constructing a conquest
dynasty, and as things worsened in Ming China a steady stream of
Chinese peasants defected to Manchuria and served the Manchus,
who were ruling over a more orderly society. In 1636 the Manchus
declared a new dynasty, Qing, which signaled their intentions to the
Ming. In 1644 a Ming Chinese general allowed massive numbers of
Manchu troops to enter China through a pass in the Great Wall, and
with this action the Ming dynasty was finished.
The Ming-Qing transition was one of the less traumatic dynasty
transitions in Chinese history. The Manchu Qing regime was attractive
to many Chinese because it presented an alternative to the chaos and
misrule of late Ming China and because it perpetuated Chinese institu-
tions virtually unchanged. Indeed, the Qing was undoubtedly the
most Chinese of all the conquest dynasties. Resistance to Manchu rule
continued in southern China for a few more decades, but it was com-
pletely eliminated in 1683, the year the first great Manchu emperor,
the Kangxi emperor (r. 1662-1722), invaded the island of Taiwan,
crushed a Ming loyalist regime there, and formally incorporated the
island into Chinese territory as a prefecture (fu) of Fujian province.
One token of submission the Manchus required of all Chinese males
beyond the age of puberty was, on pain of death, the Manchu coiffure,
sometimes called the Manchu “queue” or “pigtail.” The Manchu hair-
style for men specified that the front half of the head be shaved bald
and the back portion of the hair be grown long and gathered into a sin-
gle, tight braid. Many have seen pictures of men in “old China” with
these hairstyles, but they should remember that this is a Manchu
imposition, not a native Chinese coiffure. Starting in the nineteenth
century, Chinese opposed to continued Manchu rule in China
announced individual and collective rebellion by cutting off their
queues and letting their hair grow out in front.
The Qing was one of China's greatest dynasties. Eighteenth-century
China was the wealthiest, most powerful, and most populous nation
in the world, and Europeans often idolized China and outdid them-
selves for the privilege of trading with the Chinese. The first great
