The Qing Dynasty

The Manchus descended from the Jurchen peoples of the north-east. Nurhaci united their tribes and in 1616 proclaimed the Later Jin dynasty. His son Hong Taiji renamed his people Manchu in 1635 and in 1636 adopted the dynastic name Qing, meaning "pure".

In 1644 the rebel leader Li Zicheng captured Beijing, and the last Ming emperor, Chongzhen, hanged himself. Wu Sangui, the Ming general holding the Great Wall at Shanhai Pass, joined the Manchus against the rebels, and the Qing entered Beijing that summer. The child Shunzhi Emperor was enthroned under the regency of his uncle Dorgon. Conquering the south took decades: Ming loyalist courts held out until 1662, and Taiwan until 1683.

For porcelain, the upheaval opened the Transitional period, roughly 1620 to 1683. With imperial orders interrupted, Jingdezhen potters worked for private and export buyers, painting landscapes and narrative scenes with new freedom. Our guide to Transitional porcelain describes the wares of these decades.

The Kangxi Emperor came to the throne as a child in 1661 and reigned for 61 years, until 1722, the longest reign in Chinese history. He removed his regent Oboi in 1669, crushed the Revolt of the Three Feudatories (1673–1681), brought Taiwan under Qing rule in 1683 and fixed the border with Russia in the Treaty of Nerchinsk of 1689. At court he sponsored great works of scholarship and employed Jesuit missionaries as astronomers and mapmakers.

His son, the Yongzheng Emperor (r. 1723–1735), was a hard-working administrator who reformed taxation and tightened control of the bureaucracy.

Hongli, the Qianlong Emperor, ruled from 1735 for 60 years. His campaigns brought Xinjiang under Qing rule and the empire to its greatest size. In 1796 he abdicated so as not to reign longer than his grandfather, but he kept real power until his death in 1799. He was one of the greatest collectors in Chinese history, adding his seals and poems to paintings in the palace collection. In his later years his favourite, Heshen, grew rich on corruption that weakened the state.

The Qing kept the Ming civil service and examinations, placed Manchus and Han Chinese side by side in high office, and ordered Han men to adopt the Manchu queue. The Manchu banner armies remained a privileged hereditary caste.

Qing law divided ordinary people into "good people" (liangmin), including the four classic occupations of scholars, farmers, artisans and merchants, and "mean people" (jianmin), such as bond-servants, entertainers and certain hereditary groups, who were barred from the examinations. Officials and degree-holders formed a privileged elite above both. In the 1720s the Yongzheng Emperor freed several hereditary "mean" groups, although the distinction survived until the end of the dynasty.

The court was also a great patron of craft. The palace workshops in the Forbidden City, expanded under Kangxi, produced jade, lacquer, enamel and glass of a standard rarely equalled.

The early Qing court favoured the Orthodox school of painting, led by the Four Wangs, who modelled their landscapes on the old masters. Against them stood the Individualists, among them Zhu Da (Bada Shanren) and Shitao, descendants of the Ming imperial house who became Buddhist monks after its fall. At court the Italian Jesuit Giuseppe Castiglione combined Western perspective and shading with Chinese materials.

Classical scholarship flourished under imperial patronage. The Kangxi Dictionary of 1716 remained a standard reference for two centuries, and the Siku quanshu, begun in 1773, copied more than 3,000 works; the first set was finished in 1782 and seven manuscript sets were eventually made. The same project served a literary inquisition in which works judged hostile to the Manchus were banned or destroyed. Vernacular fiction reached new heights: Cao Xueqin's Dream of the Red Chamber, written in the mid-18th century, is widely regarded as the greatest Chinese novel.

Peking opera traces its origins to 1790, when theatre troupes from Anhui came to Beijing for Qianlong's eightieth birthday. Combining song, speech, mime and acrobatics, it took its classic form by the middle of the 19th century.

Qing imperial porcelain was made at the imperial factory in Jingdezhen, Jiangxi province. Damaged during the war with the Three Feudatories, it was reorganised in the 1680s, and later records credit its supervisor Zang Yingxuan with a series of new monochrome glazes.

Kangxi blue and white is prized for its brilliant, pure blue. The same decades produced famille verte enamels, the pinkish-red glaze called peach bloom and the deep copper red known as langyao. Famille rose enamels, introduced late in the Kangxi reign, were refined under Yongzheng, whose potters also made delicate monochromes and faithful versions of Song glazes and early Ming blue and white.

Under Qianlong, with Tang Ying supervising the kilns, Jingdezhen reached a peak of technical virtuosity. Potters imitated bronze, jade, lacquer and wood in porcelain, made revolving and reticulated vases, and painted famille rose of great refinement.

The Taiping war brought disaster. The imperial kilns were destroyed in the 1850s and rebuilt only in the Tongzhi reign, one reason why imperial porcelain of the Xianfeng reign is comparatively scarce. Our Qing dynasty porcelain collection includes pieces from across the dynasty.

The standard imperial mark has six characters, Da Qing, the reign name and nian zhi: "made in the Kangxi reign of the Great Qing" on a Kangxi piece. It is usually written in underglaze blue on the base. Four-character marks omit Da Qing.

The script is one of the most useful guides. Kangxi marks are almost always in regular script (kaishu). Under Yongzheng regular script remained usual, often within a double circle, while seal script (zhuanshu) came into use. Under Qianlong seal script became the usual form, and it remained so under Jiaqing and Daoguang. Regular script returned for most marks from the Xianfeng reign onwards.

Kangxi marks are less common than collectors expect. A local Jingdezhen ban of 1677 on writing the reign title on porcelain is often cited to explain why so many Kangxi pieces carry earlier Ming marks, an empty double circle or a symbol instead.

A mark is evidence, not proof. Kangxi, Yongzheng and Qianlong marks appear on a great many 19th and 20th-century pieces, and the body, glaze, foot, painting and enamels must all agree with a mark before it can be trusted.

The first great rising of the late Qing, the White Lotus Rebellion, broke out in the mid-1790s where Sichuan, Hubei and Shaanxi meet. It was suppressed by 1804, but the campaigns drained the treasury and exposed the weakness of the Qing armies.

Western demand for tea, silk and porcelain had long been paid for in silver. British merchants reversed the flow with opium grown in British India and smuggled into China. In 1839 the commissioner Lin Zexu destroyed more than a thousand tonnes of opium at Canton, and Britain went to war. The First Opium War (1839–1842) ended with the Treaty of Nanjing, which ceded Hong Kong Island and opened five treaty ports. A second Opium War (1856–1860) ended after British and French troops looted and burned the Yuanmingyuan, the Old Summer Palace; many imperial works of art now in Western collections left China then.

The Taiping Rebellion (1850–1864), led by Hong Xiuquan, who believed himself the younger brother of Jesus, devastated the richest provinces and is usually estimated to have cost at least 20 million lives.

For almost half a century the court was dominated by Empress Dowager Cixi, regent for the boy emperors Tongzhi and Guangxu. In 1898 she ended Guangxu's Hundred Days' Reform with a coup. In 1900 she backed the anti-foreign Boxers as they besieged the Beijing legations; an eight-nation force relieved them, and the Boxer Protocol of 1901 imposed an indemnity of 450 million taels. Wares made for Cixi's residences in the 1870s, painted with flowers and birds on coloured grounds, often carry the hall name Dayazhai.

The shock of 1900 finally drove the court to reform. The New Policies created modern schools and a new army, abolished the civil service examinations in 1905 and promised a constitution. Cixi and the Guangxu Emperor died within a day of each other in November 1908, and the two-year-old Puyi succeeded as the Xuantong Emperor.

The revolutionary movement had begun in 1894, when Sun Yat-sen founded the Revive China Society in Honolulu. On 10 October 1911 revolutionaries in the New Army rose at Wuchang, and within weeks most southern and central provinces had declared independence. Sun became provisional president of the Republic of China on 1 January 1912, but the court's most powerful general, Yuan Shikai, held the balance. He negotiated the abdication, and on 12 February 1912 Puyi gave up the throne, ending more than two thousand years of imperial rule.

A last attempt to restore Puyi, led by the general Zhang Xun in July 1917, collapsed within twelve days.