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The Qing Empire
Chinas last imperial dynasty, whose Manchu rulers more than doubled the land under Beijing
The Qing was founded by the Manchus, a people from the forests and plains northeast of the Great Wall, who took Beijing in 1644 and ruled China until 1912. Under its eighteenth-century emperors it became the largest Chinese state in history, more than doubling the area of the preceding Ming and bringing Mongolia, Xinjiang, Tibet and Taiwan under Qing rule or overlordship. Its population passed 400 million, and its silk, porcelain and tea drew European silver into China for generations. The borders of modern China largely follow those of the late Qing, and several of the territorial questions China and its neighbors still dispute, from Taiwan to the Himalayan frontier with India, trace back to that inheritance.
At its peak around 1790 the Qing covered about 14.7 million square kilometers, reaching well beyond China proper, the farmland of the Yellow and Yangtze river basins and the southern hills. Manchuria, the dynasty's homeland, extended north to the Amur River and beyond. Outer and Inner Mongolia filled the steppe and the Gobi, Xinjiang held the oases of the Tarim Basin and the Dzungarian grasslands, and Tibet occupied the high plateau, governed by the Dalai Lama's administration under the supervision of Qing resident officials. Taiwan was annexed in 1683. Its lands now lie mainly in China and Taiwan, along with Mongolia, the part of the Russian Far East north of the Amur and east of the Ussuri ceded to Russia in 1858 and 1860, and border areas of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan.
Nurhaci united the Jurchen tribes in the early seventeenth century, and his son Hong Taiji renamed his people the Manchus and proclaimed the Qing dynasty at Mukden, today's Shenyang, in 1636. Qing armies entered Beijing in 1644 after rebels toppled the Ming. The Kangxi, Yongzheng and Qianlong emperors presided over a long period of expansion and prosperity, including campaigns in the 1750s that destroyed the Dzungar Khanate with very heavy loss of Dzungar life. In the nineteenth century the Qing lost wars to Britain over the opium trade, to other European powers and to Japan, while the Taiping Rebellion of 1850 to 1864 caused an estimated 20 to 30 million deaths. The Xinhai Revolution of 1911 ended the dynasty, and the last emperor, Puyi, abdicated on February 12, 1912, giving way to the Republic of China.