HEAVY-HANDED:The Qing Dynasty

The Manchu proclaimed their new dynasty the Qing (1644-1911), al- though it took them four decades to stamp out Ming loyalists in the south and pacify the entire country. This victory for the Qing came at great cost to the population with acts of severe brutality and massacre.

The Qing neutralised threats from inner Asia by incorporating their homeland of Manchuria into the empire as well as that of the Mongols, whom they had subordinated. Their cultural policy involved a careful bal- ance of attention to the Chinese, Manchu, Mongols and Tibetans. They courted the literati via the examination system and great literary projects. Their own people were appointed to key positions in the bureaucracy, but matching positions were created for Chinese officials.

As an alien dynasty, the Qing remained keen to establish its own legitimacy. Chinese men were forced to wear their hair like the Manchu- style (shave the front and braid the back into a long tail), a look you'll quickly recognise as a sign of 'Chineseness' used in countless Western cartoons. Harsh censorship was practised during the 18th century, with a literary inquisition begun in the 1770s and cruel punishments inflicted on authors of works containing anti-Manchu sentiments.

Despite such ideological control, scholarship flourished.

Women's Cultural Battleground Women became a site of Chinese cultural resistance to Manchu rule. Chinese women continued to wear Chinese-style dress, with skirts worn over loose jackets and trousers, as opposed to the one-piece robe worn by Manchu women. Footbinding, in force from perhaps the 10th or 11th centuries, persisted despite Qing prohibitions. Chinese women remained devout to Chinese men, continuing to honour them through the practice of widow suicide. The Manchu showed considerable political skill in moving from opposition to endorsement of widow suicide, awarding honours to women who followed their husbands to the grave.

The Opium War & British Hong Kong

The early Qing emperors had shown a relatively open attitude towards Europeans in China, but this changed in the 18th century. Qianlong, ruler from 1736 to 1795, imposed strict controls on maritime trade, which from 1757 was limited to the single port of Guangzhou.

Chinese exports well exceeded imports at Guangzhou until Westerners hit upon the opium trade. Opium had long been a popular drug in China, but had been outlawed since the early 18th century. The Portuguese first discovered that there was profit to be made through opium, and began trading it between India and China. The British soon joined in. Stronger Chinese prohibitions against the use and sale of the drug followed, but were far from effective as many officials were opium addicts and therefore assisted in smuggling it into China. By the early 19th century the opium trade had grown to the point of shifting the balance in trade in favour of the Westerners.

In March 1839 Lin Zexiu, an official of great personal integrity, was dispatched to Guangzhou to put a stop to the illegal traffic once and for all. He acted promptly, demanding and eventually getting some 20,000 chests of opium stored by the British in Guangzhou. The British believed they were due compensation and, without it, had the pretext for military action. In 1840 a British naval force assembled in Macau and moved up the coast to Bei He, not far from Beijing. The Opium War was on.

The emperor watched with mild distress and authorised a negotiation that managed to fob off the first British force with a treaty that neither side ended up recognising. This increased British frustration, leading to an attack on Chinese positions close to Guangzhou.

A second treaty was drawn up, ceding Hong Kong to the British, and calling for indemnities of Y6,000,000 and the full resumption of trade. The furious Qing emperor refused to recognise the treaty, and in 1841 British forces once again headed up the coast, taking Fujian and eastern Zhejiang. In the spring of 1842 an army inflated with reinforcements moved up Yangzi River. With British guns trained on Nanjing, the Qing fighting spirit evaporated and they reluctantly signed the humiliating Treaty of Nanking. This left Hong Kong in the hands of the British 'in perpetuity'.

In 1898 the New Territories adjoining Kowloon were 'leased' to the British for 99 years and the British agreed to hand the entire colony back to China when the lease on the New Territories expired. For more details on the handover, see p493.

Christ's Kid Brother

By the 19th century the increased presence of missionaries had fuelled hatred against 'foreign devils', leading to further rebellion throughout the provinces (see Boxed Up, opposite).

Also at this time, the Taiping Rebellion erupted in 1850 in the southern province of Guangxi, and commanded forces of 600,000 men and 500,000 women as it raged through central and eastern China. The Taipings owed much of their ideology to Christianity. Its leader was Hong Xiuquan, a failed examination candidate from Guangdong province whose encoun- ters with Western missionaries had led him to believe he was the younger brother of Jesus Christ. The Taipings forbade gambling, opium, tobacco and alcohol, advocated agricultural reform, and outlawed foot binding for women, prostitution and slavery. The rebellion took tens of millions of lives before being suppressed in 1864 by a coalition of Qing and Western forces - the Europeans preferring to deal with a corrupt and weak Qing govern- ment rather than a powerful, united China governed by the Taipings.

The Second Opium War

With Hong Kong in the hands of the British following the first Opium War, official trade was diverted to Shanghai. This left Hong Kong's economy in dire straits. With the attention of the Qing court focused on the Taiping Rebellion, the foreign powers struck again. The Anglo- French expedition of 1856 to 1860, sometimes called the Second Opium War, ended with the occupation of Beijing and the flight of the court to Jehol in the Manchurian homeland.

The final outcome was the Treaty of Tianjin, which opened further Treaty ports and established a regular diplomatic corps in Beijing. At the same time further massive rebellions were brewing: the Nian in central north China, the Panthay in Yunnan and the Donggan in the northwest.

DRAGON WOMAN

Like many other Qing dynasty teenagers, at the age of 15, Cixi (1835-1908) gave up her true love to become one of Emperor Xianfeng's concubines. Her cunningness and intelligence soon made her a favourite of the emperor, particularly after she gave birth to his only son in 1856. Cixi's subsequent rise to power was largely due to the convenient deaths of her adversaries. Xianfeng died at the age of 30 and his empress followed suit a few years later. This made Cixi's five-year-

old son, Tongzhi, the new emperor, and Cixi herself the ruling Dowager Empress.

Cixi held onto the government reins for over 40 years in total, galloping over anyone who got in her way - including her own son and Emperor Guangxu whom she replaced him with. Other opponents were slowly starved, thrown down wells or locked away. She spent her reign focusing on her own position rather than the country's; at the end of her life she left nine storerooms of personal treasures, a refurbished Summer Palace and the Qing dynasty in an irreparable state of decline. To see one of her more ridiculous 'achievements', take a gander at the marble boat in Beijing's Summer Palace.

100 DAYS REFORMS

A visionary reformer, Kang Youwei (1858-1927) became a key adviser to the Qing emperor fol- lowing China's disastrous war with Japan. The result was the famous '100 Days Reforms' of 1898, which were expected to set China on the modernising path already taken by Japan. Reforms to the bureaucracy and examination system were proposed, as well as social reforms like the abolition of foot binding. Sadly, '100 Days' ended with a palace coup staged by the supposedly retired Dowager Empress Cixi, the house arrest of the Emperor Guangxu, the execution of some reformist activists and the flight of others, including Kang.

Bringing Home the Enemy

in the second half of the 19th century China sent embassies and students to the West. The goal was to pick up pointers from the enemy on how to strengthen Chinese military technology and industrial development. The Treaty-port cities, especially Shanghai, became the face of mod- ernisation in China. Factories, banks, newspapers, new-style schools, bicycles, trains, and eventually motor cars, trade unions, chambers of commerce and political parties all made their appearance. In Shanghai, land conceded to Western nations quickly outgrew the old city. The unique architecture and atmosphere of the old French Concession makes it worth a wander even today .

In the late 1890s China was in danger of being 'cut up like a melon, divided like a bean', as further leases of land and spheres of influence were ceded to the foreign powers. The Western powers were soon joined by the Japanese who, after a small scrap on Korean soil with Chinese forces, were ceded Taiwan in 1895. The same treaty granted the Japanese (and thereby other foreign powers) the right to construct their own factories in Shanghai. In 1898 Germany gained a lease in Qingdao after Lutheran missionaries were murdered inland. They commenced building a railway that became the focus of protests by local people upset at the disturbance of feng shui. You'll still find a certain 'Germanness' in the air when you visit Qingdao, likely to be emanating from the leftover brewery .

BOXED UP

Culled from secret societies, the Boxen were a xenophobic group who erupted in rebellion at the end of the 19th century with violent attacks on missionaries and their families. Tired of the foreigners themselves, the Qing Court decided to support the Boxers. Armed with this backing and with charms and martial-arts techniques that they believed made them impervious to West- ern bullets, the Boxers began massacring foreigners at random and the famous 50-day siege of Beijing's Foreign Legations began. It wasn't long before Western allies landed, handed the Qing Court a crippling foreign debt and knocked the Boxers down for the count.

The Fall of the Qing

In 1908 the Dowager Empress died and two-year-old Emperor Puyi ascended to the throne. The Qing was now rudderless and teetered on the brink of collapse.

As an increasing number of new railways were financed and built by foreigners, public anger grew and gave birth to the Railway Protection Movement that spread and took on an anti-Qing nature. The movement turned increasingly violent, especially in Sichuan, and troops were taken from Wuhan to quell the disturbances.

As it happened, republican revolutionaries in Wuhan were already planning an uprising. With troops dispensed to Sichuan, they seized the opportunity and were able to not only take control of Wuhan, but to ride on the back of the large-scale Railway Protection uprisings to victory all over China.

Two months later representatives from 17 provinces throughout China gathered in Nanjing to establish the Provisional Republican Government of China. China's long dynastic cycle had come to an end.