Three Thousand Years of Chinese Painting. Fong, and Maxwell K. Exhibition catalogue. Visiting The Met? Landscape in the style of Huang Gongwang Wang Shimin. Landscapes Painted for Yuweng Fan Qi.
Landscapes after old masters Wang Hui. Landscapes and trees Gong Xian. Wooded Mountains at Dusk Kuncan. Returning Home Shitao Zhu Ruoji. Landscapes in the styles of old masters Gao Cen. Fish and rocks Bada Shanren Zhu Da. The Ming Empire developed a somewhat laissez-faire attitude to internal trade and industry.
But under Emperor Kangxi and his successors, the court more carefully controlled commerce and industry and monopolized important industries, reverting to the economic policies of earlier dynasties. Emperor Kangxi only allowed foreign businessman to trade with Chinese in four cities: Guangzhou, Xiamen, Songjian, and Ningbo.
The Manchu rulers didn't want the Han in coastal areas to grow stronger through trade with foreigners. The Qing government was angered by foreign ambassadors' "impoliteness" - the ambassadors refused to kneel to the ruling class.
Emperor Kangxi had a lot of sons by different women, but Emperor Yongzheng — the fourth prince was named as successor in his will. Less well known than his father and son, he continued the Qing's prosperous period with efficiency. Emperor Yongzheng's son was named Emperor Qianlong — He officially reigned for 61 years as Kangxi did.
But he actually reigned till his death in His court was successful early in his reign, but he later his greed set the empire on an unfavorable course. Qianlong's reign was the most prosperous in the Qing Dynasty, and the population grew quickly to about million. However foreign trade was restricted to only Guangzhou Canton at one point. The empire grew larger , as they subdued Tibet and the Xinjiang regions , inheriting Mongolia from the dynasties founders, and wiping out the Dzungars a large Mongolian tribe of hundreds of thousands.
The land area of the Qing empire was second only to the Yuan Empire's in size. The Qing era's main literary accomplishments were extremely large encyclopedias and compendiums of literature comprised of hundreds of volumes and popular novels. In the middle of their dynastic era, when the empire was at its height, one of the four great classic novels was written called Dream of the Red Chamber.
See more on The History of Chinese Literature. However, Emperor Qianlong grew greedy. After his victories in the west, he tried to conquer the kingdoms of Burma and Vietnam from to and failed at a great cost to the empire. In his later years he indulged in luxuries, sex, and palaces, leaving court matters to corrupt officials.
Discontent against Qing rule increased, and people arose in rebellion over heavy taxation. His isolationist actions towards Europeans kept the people from adopting technology and scientific knowledge, and set the stage for later inadequacy and invasions. During the s, the dynasty seemed somewhat successful because the population kept growing and the territory stayed intact, but the empire modernized too slowly, and the ruling court dealt poorly with a rapidly changing world and numerous uprisings.
Protestant evangelical Christianity was introduced by Western missionaries, and tens of thousands of Chinese converted. The missionaries set up numerous schools and hospitals, educating tens of thousands of students and educating doctors and nurses in Western medicine.
They also set up colleges and universities. See more on Christianity in China. In the s, Europeans easily defeated the Qing army and navy, and forced the Qing to give them trading ports. The British wanted greater Qing Empire trade, but the Qing court wanted to keep out British opium and influence. Britain defeated China twice in and the Opium Wars to force trade treaties, and gained Hong Kong until under the Treaty of Nanking of From until the end of the dynastic era, the Qing court faced rebellion after rebellion, but they defeated or thwarted all of them.
This was however at great cost to the population and the Qing grip on power. The leader of the Taiping Rebellion was Hong Xiuquan. His quasi-Christian movement had some forward-thinking ideals which the Qing Dynasty disagreed with he banned slavery, men using concubines, arranged marriages, opium use, foot binding, torture, and the worship of idols, and he wanted women to have more equality in society.
He made Nanjing his capital, and his army seemed ready to attack Beijing. However, Britain and France sent troops to aid the Qing army. In 13 years, about 25 million people died. It is thought to be the second bloodiest war in history after WWII. The Miao people also rebelled in Guizhou. It is thought that millions of people were killed in two wars around and from to The Hakka people and the Punti people in the southeast fought a long ethnic war between the years and The Panthay Rebellion was a Muslim rebellion in Yunnan that lasted from to , in which about a million people died.
Empress Dowager Cixi 's son Emperor Tongzhi "reigned" from to , and her nephew Emperor Guangxu "ruled" from to But it is said that she was the real ruler during this long and crucial period of time. The Empress Dowager — started to rule after British and French troops attacked Beijing and destroyed the Summer Palace in It's said that Emperor Xianfeng then fell into a depression, and as a result died in , making Cixi his concubine and son's mother an empress dowager to help his son rule.
To maintain and gain power at the top, Cixi was ruthless in a dangerous court situation where assassinations and plots were the way of life. She had to maintain the traditional system, although this cost millions of lives and kept the empire from progressing.
With several other large rebellions and wars happening around the Qing Empire, the Dungan Revolt involved a large region in the central north. It was partly a war between three Muslim sects, aiming to establish a regional Muslim kingdom. Several million people were killed. The Northern Chinese Famine killed about 10 percent of the population of several northern provinces. The White Lotus rebellion began when large groups of Chinese rioted in Eventually, the rebellion was crushed by the Qing elites; but the White Lotus organization remained secret and intact, and advocated for the overthrow of the Qing dynasty.
Another major contributing factor to the downfall of the Qing dynasty was European imperialism and China's gross miscalculation of the power and ruthlessness of the British crown. By the midth century, the Qing dynasty had been in power for over a century, and the elites and many of their subjects felt they had a heavenly mandate to remain in power. One of the tools they used to stay in power was a very strict restriction on trade. The Qing believed that the way to avoid the errors of the White Lotus rebellion was to clamp down on foreign influence.
The British under Queen Victoria were a huge market for Chinese teas, but the Qing refused to engage in trade negotiations, rather demanding that Britain pay for the tea in gold and silver.
Instead, Britain began a lucrative, illicit trade in opium, traded from British imperial India into Canton, far from Beijing. The Chinese authorities burned 20, bales of opium, and the British retaliated with a devastating invasion of mainland China, in two wars known as the Opium Wars of —42 and — Completely unprepared for such an onslaught, the Qing dynasty lost, and Britain imposed unequal treaties and took control of the Hong Kong region, along with millions of pounds of silver to compensate the British for the lost opium.
This humiliation showed all of China's subjects, neighbors, and tributaries that the once-mighty China was now weak and vulnerable. With its weaknesses exposed, China began to lose power over its peripheral regions.
France seized Southeast Asia, creating its colony of French Indochina. Japan stripped away Taiwan, took effective control of Korea formerly a Chinese tributary following the First Sino-Japanese War of —96, and also imposed unequal trade demands in the Treaty of Shimonoseki. By , foreign powers including Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and Japan had established "spheres of influence" along China's coastal areas.
There the foreign powers essentially controlled trade and the military, although technically they remained part of Qing China. The balance of power had tipped decidedly away from the imperial court and toward the foreign powers. Within China, dissent grew, and the empire began to crumble from within. Ordinary Han Chinese felt little loyalty to the Qing rulers, who still presented themselves as conquering Manchus from the north.
The calamitous Opium Wars seemed to prove that the alien ruling dynasty had lost the Mandate of Heaven and needed to be overthrown. In response, the Qing Empress Dowager Cixi clamped down hard on reformers. Rather than following the path of Japan's Meiji Restoration and modernizing the country, Cixi purged her court of modernizers.
When Chinese peasants raised a huge anti-foreigner movement in , called the Boxer Rebellion , they initially opposed both the Qing ruling family and the European powers plus Japan.
Eventually, the Qing armies and the peasants united, but they were unable to defeat the foreign powers. This signaled the beginning of the end for the Qing dynasty. Strong rebel leaders began to have major impacts on the ability of the Qing to rule.
Others began to openly call for the overthrow of the existing regime and replace it with a constitutional rule. Sun Yat-Sen emerged as China's first "professional" revolutionary, having gained an international reputation by being abducted by Qing agents in the Chinese Embassy in London in One Qing response was to suppress the word "revolution" by banning it from their world-history textbooks.
The French Revolution was now the French "rebellion" or "chaos," but in fact, the existence of leased territories and foreign concessions provided plenty of fuel and varying degrees of safety for radical opponents. The crippled Qing dynasty clung to power for another decade, behind the walls of the Forbidden City, but the Wuchang Uprising of put the final nail in the coffin when 18 provinces voted to secede from the Qing dynasty.
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