The Legacy of the High Qing

The Ottoman Empire fell on hard times during the mid-nineteenth century. So did the dynasty ruling China in those years, whose fate in some ways echoes that of the Ottomans. The political system that encountered the Opium Wars in the mid­nineteenth century was itself the inheritor of a long period of expansion.

The idea of the “Sinosphere” is helpful to understand the kind of empire that China became in the high imperial era.^[2434] Although its political writ ran only in defined Chinese territories, the Qing court exercised suzerainty in a variety of other areas, including Korea and Vietnam. The Chinese court also maintained the practices which have come to be known as “the tributary system” in which gifts were presented by other peoples who were deemed to be accepting their status in the hierarchy below China itself. However, in practice these exchanges were not all that they appeared; the gifts given in return to the people performing tribute were in many cases more valuable than the original tribute itself, blurring the line be­tween a ceremonial relationship and a trading one.^[2435]

The Qing were inexorably shaped by their origins as a Manchu dynasty. One of the most important sets of debates on the period in recent years has been the “new Qing history” that has drawn on the Manchu-language sources that give insights into the rulers of China.

However, in the 1990s, scholars began to examine the Manchu- language materials relating to the court, and found that they were very different in nature from those in Chinese. There was a clear sense of ethnic separation, expressed in martial activities and ceremonies in which the nomadic traditions of the Manchus were preserved. These divisions were by no means absolute; for instance, the “Banners” or military formations that made up the Manchu population also had Han (ethnic Chinese) equivalents. By the late Qing dynasty, there was also consternation among some Manchu nobles that there was insufficient attention to keeping up the traditional Manchu way of life.^[2437]

Was Qing China therefore a state under Manchu occupation? That goes too far; clearly the situation needs to be understood as a hybrid. The norm in most cases was that China's empire did continue under traditional modes of governance. Qing imperial forms were indeed very similar in many ways to the predecessor Ming dy­nasty (which had itself drawn on formations from the predecessor Mongol dynasty, the Yuan), and the story of its officials and grandees is a story of Chinese history rather than of Manchu history. However, at times of tension, the divisions between Manchus and Han would become clearer: the Taiping war of 1850-1864 is one ex­ample of that, as would be the anti-Manchu revolutionary ideas of thinkers such as Zou Rong and Zhang Binglin in the very last decades of the Qing. To understand the reasons for this change, we must turn to the momentous changes of the mid­nineteenth century.