Qianlong Emperor

Hongli (弘曆), who reigned as the Qianlong Emperor, was the sixth ruler of the Qing Dynasty counting Nurhaci and Hong Taiji, and the fourth to rule China proper. He succeeded his father, the Yongzheng Emperor, in 1735. His era name, Qianlong (乾隆), ran from 1736 to 1795, and his temple name is Gaozong.

He inherited a stable and solvent empire and presided over the high point of Qing power. Under his rule the empire reached its greatest territorial extent, the population grew rapidly and the court became one of the great centres of patronage in Chinese history. His reign was also marked by costly wars, a sweeping literary inquisition and, in its last decades, corruption at the highest level of government.

He abdicated in 1796 so as not to reign longer than his grandfather, the Kangxi Emperor, but kept real power until his death in 1799.

Early Life

Hongli was born in 1711, the fourth son of Yinzhen, the future Yongzheng Emperor. His mother, Lady Niohuru, later became Noble Consort Xi and, after her son's accession, Empress Dowager Chongqing.

The Kangxi Emperor is said to have taken a particular liking to his grandson when he met him in 1722, the last year of his reign, and to have brought the boy to live at court. A later tradition held that this affection helped decide Kangxi's choice of Yinzhen as his heir. The story cannot be proved, but it was widely repeated and suited Hongli's own later presentation of himself as Kangxi's successor in spirit.

He received a thorough education in the Confucian classics, history, poetry and calligraphy, together with the Manchu martial training of riding and archery. He learned Manchu, Chinese and Mongolian as a boy, and later studied Tibetan.

Prince Bao

His father's reign was overshadowed by the bitter succession struggle among Kangxi's sons, and Yongzheng was determined to avoid a repetition. Hongli's elder half-brother Hongshi, who was close to Yongzheng's rival Yinsi, was expelled from the imperial clan in 1726 and died the following year.

Hongli, by contrast, was trusted with ritual duties and brought into discussions of policy. In 1733 he was made a prince of the first rank with the title Prince Bao. By then most observers at court assumed that he was his father's choice.

Accession

Yongzheng had introduced a system of secret succession. The emperor wrote the name of his chosen heir and sealed it in a box placed behind the plaque above the throne in the Palace of Heavenly Purity, to be opened only on his death in the presence of the imperial family and senior ministers.

When Yongzheng died suddenly in October 1735, the box was opened and Hongli was proclaimed emperor. The new era name, Qianlong, took effect at the lunar new year of 1736.

The Reign of the Qianlong Emperor

A Change of Tone

Qianlong began by softening some of his father's harsher measures. Imprisoned relatives were released, and officials punished under Yongzheng were pardoned or restored. He also withdrew his father's Record of Great Righteousness Resolving Confusion, a work Yongzheng had circulated to refute the anti-Manchu writings of Zeng Jing, ordered the copies destroyed and had Zeng Jing executed.

He was more indulgent than his father towards officials, and historians have often traced the corruption of his later years to this relaxation.

Campaigns and Frontiers

Qianlong later celebrated his "Ten Great Campaigns". The most consequential was the destruction of the Dzungar Khanate between 1755 and 1759. The Dzungar lands and the Tarim Basin were brought under Qing rule and became known as Xinjiang, the "new frontier", with a garrison at Ili.

The campaign was also a catastrophe for the Dzungar people. The Qing scholar Wei Yuan estimated that of several hundred thousand Dzungars, around 40 per cent died of smallpox, 20 per cent fled to Russian or Kazakh territory and 30 per cent were killed by Qing troops. The historian Peter Perdue has argued that the killing followed a deliberate policy of extermination ordered by the emperor.

Other campaigns were fought against the Jinchuan peoples of western Sichuan, in Burma, Vietnam and Taiwan, and against the Gurkhas of Nepal. Several were costly and inconclusive, though Burma and Vietnam both returned to tributary relations with the Qing afterwards.

Prosperity at Home

For much of the reign China proper enjoyed peace. Farmland expanded, commerce grew and the population rose steeply over the century. The emperor remitted the land tax across the empire several times, and the state invested in granaries and flood control.

He also made six celebrated tours of inspection to the south, travelling to Jiangnan with a vast retinue. They displayed imperial authority and patronage, but they were also enormously expensive.

Trade with the West

From 1757 European trade was confined to the single port of Canton (Guangzhou), where it was conducted through licensed Chinese merchants. This Canton System, rather than any complete ban on foreign trade, shaped China's commerce with Europe until the Opium Wars of the nineteenth century.

Collector, Patron and Scholar

No Chinese emperor collected on the scale of Qianlong. The imperial holdings of painting and calligraphy, bronzes, jades and ceramics were greatly enlarged in his reign, often by absorbing important private collections, and were catalogued in works such as the Shiqu baoji for painting and calligraphy and the Xiqing gujian for ancient bronzes.

He was a compulsive annotator. Many paintings in the imperial collection carry his poems, colophons and seals, sometimes added over many years as he returned to a favourite work. He kept three pieces of early calligraphy that he prized above all others in a small study in the Hall of Mental Cultivation, which he named the Hall of the Three Rarities. His poems were also carved into the bases of admired Song ceramics, including Ru and Guan wares.

Poetry and Calligraphy

More than 40,000 poems are attributed to him, together with a large body of prose. Court writers certainly helped, and it is impossible to know how much he composed unaided, but he was a genuine and practised calligrapher and poet. His Ode to Mukden, written in 1743 in praise of the Manchu homeland around modern Shenyang, was printed in 1748 in Chinese and Manchu in thirty-two ornamental seal scripts, the Manchu versions devised for the occasion.

The Complete Library of the Four Treasuries

In 1773 the emperor ordered the compilation of the Siku quanshu, a collection of the most important works in the four traditional divisions of classics, history, philosophy and belles-lettres. Under the chief editors Ji Yun and Lu Xixiong, hundreds of scholars copied some 3,400 works by hand. Seven sets were made: four for imperial libraries in the north and three for libraries in the south that scholars could consult. Its annotated catalogue is still a standard reference for classical Chinese literature.

The Literary Inquisition

The same project also served as an instrument of censorship. Books thought hostile to the Manchus or to earlier non-Chinese dynasties, or careless about frontier and defence matters, were sought out across the empire. Around 2,300 works were listed for total suppression and some 350 for partial suppression, and thousands of titles were destroyed. Works of the late Ming suffered most. Authors, and sometimes their families, were punished severely, and the dead could be posthumously disgraced.

The Manchu Language and Tibetan Buddhism

Qianlong worked harder than any of his predecessors to preserve the Manchu language, which he regarded as essential to Manchu identity. He sponsored new dictionaries, among them the five-language Pentaglot of Manchu, Tibetan, Mongolian, Chagatai and Chinese, a multilingual gazetteer of Xinjiang place names, and a translation of the Buddhist canon into Manchu.

He was also a committed patron of Tibetan Buddhism. In 1744 he turned his father's former residence in Beijing into the Yonghe Gong, a Tibetan Buddhist monastery. In 1792 he set up a stele there, inscribed in Manchu, Chinese, Mongolian and Tibetan, explaining that the court supported the Gelug school in order to keep the peace among the Mongols, and not out of any special reverence of the kind shown to lamas under the Yuan.

Palaces and Gardens

The emperor built on a large scale. He greatly extended the Yuanmingyuan, the Old Summer Palace north-west of Beijing, adding the adjoining Garden of Eternal Spring with its European-style palaces designed by Jesuit artists at court. For his mother's sixtieth birthday he had the lake of the Garden of Clear Ripples enlarged and renamed Kunming Lake. He also expanded the summer palace at Chengde beyond the Great Wall, where he received Mongol nobles and held the annual imperial hunts at nearby Mulan.

Porcelain of the Qianlong Reign

The imperial kilns at Jingdezhen reached a peak of technical accomplishment under Qianlong, much of it during the long supervision of Tang Ying, who ran the factory until 1756. The range is remarkable: painted enamels of great refinement, including famille rose and the palace falangcai wares; faithful copies of Song glazes and Ming blue and white; revolving and reticulated vases; and porcelain made to imitate bronze, wood, lacquer and jade. Later in the reign the decoration became denser and more elaborate.

The standard imperial mark is the six-character Da Qing Qianlong nian zhi (大清乾隆年製), usually written in seal script in underglaze blue. It was copied throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, so it is where study begins rather than proof of date. You can browse our Qing dynasty porcelain collection.