Chinese Empire

Mongol and Manchu Rule: The Yuan and Qing Dynasties

Twice in Chinese history, the entire Chinese empire was conquered and ruled by non-Han peoples from the steppe or the forest frontier. The first was the Yuan Dynasty (1271–1368), founded by Kublai Khan and the Mongol ruling class that had swept out of the Mongolian steppe in the thirteenth century. The second was the Qing Dynasty (1644–1912), founded by the Aisin Gioro clan of the Manchu people, who had consolidated power in the forests of Manchuria and then marched through the Great Wall at the invitation of a Ming general in 1644. Together, these two dynasties ruled China for almost four hundred and fifty years — close to a quarter of the imperial period — and their rule had a profound and lasting effect on the Chinese state.

This section examines how the Mongols and the Manchus conquered and governed China, the institutions they brought with them, the ways they adapted to Chinese ways, and the long legacy of their rule. We begin with the Yuan as the prototype of the conquest dynasty, continue with the Qing as the most successful and durable of all the non-Han dynasties, and conclude with a comparison of the two and an assessment of their long-term significance. A focused look at Yuan rule in practice is provided in our article on the Yuan Dynasty in practice.

The Mongol Conquest of China

The Mongol Empire was founded by Genghis Khan (c. 1162–1227) through a series of brilliant military campaigns that united the Mongol and Turkic tribes of the steppe and then turned outward. By the time of Genghis’s death in 1227, the Mongols had conquered northern China (the Jin dynasty of the Jurchens), Central Asia, Persia, and parts of eastern Europe. His sons and grandsons extended the empire further: Hulagu took Baghdad in 1258, Kublai completed the conquest of the Southern Song in 1279, and the Mongol world empire reached its greatest extent in the late thirteenth century.

The conquest of northern China was brutal. The Jin capital Zhongdu (modern Beijing) was sacked in 1215, and the Jurchen royal family was wiped out. The conquest of the Southern Song, completed under Kublai, was also extremely violent, with mass slaughter at multiple cities. Yet the Mongols were not simply destroyers: they were exceptionally capable administrators who integrated the territories they conquered into a single Eurasian system, the so-called Pax Mongolica, which connected China to Persia, Russia, and the Mediterranean. Marco Polo’s famous journey took him along the postal roads of this system, from the Mediterranean to the court of Kublai Khan.

The Yuan Dynasty (1271–1368)

In 1271, Kublai Khan formally named his dynasty the Yuan, taking the name from a passage in the Book of Documents: “大哉乾元” — “Great is the heavenly primal.” The capital was established at Khanbaliq (汗八里, “city of the khan”), modern Beijing, where Kublai built a new imperial city. The Yuan Dynasty lasted almost a century, ending when the Buddhist monk-turned-rebel Zhu Yuanzhang drove the Mongols back into the steppe and founded the Ming in 1368.

Yuan Political Institutions

The Yuan was a conquest state. The ruling Mongols (and their Central Asian allies, called semu, “various categories”) sat at the top of a four-class hierarchy:

  • Mongols and their Central Asian allies held the highest offices, monopolised the military, and were exempt from many taxes.
  • Northern Chinese, Koreans, and Jurchens — peoples who had been conquered earlier — formed a second tier, often employed as officials and administrators.
  • Southern Chinese — the former subjects of the Southern Song — formed a third tier, restricted in their access to office.
  • Southerners at the very bottom were heavily taxed and barred from many positions.

Mongol rule was exercised through a dual administration in which each Chinese-style ministry existed in parallel with a Mongol department staffed by the steppe aristocracy. The emperor’s decrees went through both systems, ensuring that Mongol customs and Chinese bureaucracy were both observed. The Privy Council (樞密院) and the Central Administration (中書省) supervised a hierarchy of provinces, circuits, prefectures, and counties.

A famous Mongol institution was the postal relay system (驛站), inherited from Genghis Khan, with stations every 25 miles along the main roads, where official travellers could change horses and obtain food and lodging. By the time of Kublai, this system extended from Korea to Poland, and it was the infrastructure that made long-distance travel under Mongol rule both safe and fast. The system is the subject of detailed administrative handbooks that survive in both Chinese and Persian.

Yuan Society and Economy

The Yuan was a period of unusual cosmopolitanism. Kublai Khan patronised Tibetan Buddhism, but he also employed Muslim astronomers, European missionaries, and Confucian scholars. Marco Polo visited China in the 1280s, and his account provides a vivid picture of Yuan cities. Arab and Persian merchants traded throughout the empire, and many settled in Chinese cities, founding Muslim communities in Quanzhou, Guangzhou, Yunnan, and Xi’an. Nestorian Christian and Catholic Franciscan missionaries also came, although their conversions were few.

Economically, the Yuan inherited a sophisticated Chinese economy and added to it the benefits of Eurasian integration. The Silk Road flourished, the maritime trade of the South China Sea was opened to foreign merchants, and Chinese silks, porcelains, and paper were exported in unprecedented quantities. Chinese technology — printing, gunpowder, the compass, paper money — spread west. Chinese porcelains and textiles have been found in archaeological sites from Egypt to East Africa.

Yuan Culture

Yuan culture is sometimes dismissed as derivative, but it was in fact highly creative. Yuan drama (元曲) — a form of theatrical performance including the famous zaju plays — produced masterworks such as Guan Hanqing’s The Injustice to Dou E and Wang Shifu’s The Story of the Western Wing. The Yuan period also saw the development of Mongol-language historical writing (the Secret History of the Mongols), the rise of Tibetan Buddhist art, and the development of a distinctive Yuan style in painting, exemplified by the literati painters Zhao Mengfu and Gong Kai.

The Fall of the Yuan

The Yuan collapsed in the mid-fourteenth century under the weight of a series of natural disasters, fiscal exhaustion, and the strain of ruling an empire that was now too large and too divided. The Black Death reached China in the 1330s, killing perhaps a quarter of the population. The Yellow River shifted course in 1344, causing devastating flooding. A series of rebellions, most importantly the Red Turban movement, brought the dynasty down. In 1368, the rebel leader Zhu Yuanzhang (later the Hongwu Emperor) captured Khanbaliq, and the last Yuan emperor, Toghon Temür, fled back to the Mongolian steppe, where the descendants of the Yuan continued to rule as the Northern Yuan until the seventeenth century. The rise of the Ming is treated in imperial Chinese dynasties.

The Manchu Conquest of China

The Manchus were a Jurchen people from the forests of Manchuria, descended from the Jurchens who had founded the Jin Dynasty in the twelfth century. Under the leadership of Nurhaci (1559–1626) and his son Hong Taiji (1592–1643), they consolidated their power, organised their clans into a banner system, and by 1636 had proclaimed a new dynasty, the Qing (清, “pure”).

In 1644, the Ming Dynasty collapsed under the weight of a peasant rebellion led by Li Zicheng. The last Ming general at the Shanhai Pass, Wu Sangui, famously opened the gates to the Manchu army to help him suppress the rebels. The Qing forces entered Beijing, proclaimed the Shunzhi Emperor as the new ruler of China, and over the next forty years completed the conquest of the rest of Ming China: the south by 1659, Taiwan in 1683, and the central Asian frontier over the following century.

The Qing Dynasty (1644–1912)

The Qing was the most successful of the conquest dynasties. It ruled for 268 years, longer than any other non-Han dynasty, and presided over the greatest territorial expansion in Chinese history. The early Qing emperors were extraordinarily able administrators. Kangxi (r. 1661–1722) reigned for sixty-one years and brought the empire to its greatest early-modern extent. Yongzheng (r. 1722–1735) reformed the bureaucracy and the finances. Qianlong (r. 1735–1796) completed the conquest of Xinjiang, incorporated Tibet more tightly into the empire, and presided over a long eighteenth-century boom in population and commerce.

Qing Political Institutions

The Qing combined Manchu institutions with Chinese ones in a careful balance. At the top, the Aisin Gioro ruling clan preserved its identity, language, and customs. The Manchu nobility held half of the highest offices, and the Eight Banners system (八旗) — a combined military, social, and administrative organisation — survived in modified form throughout the dynasty. The banner system divided the Manchu, Mongol, and (eventually) Chinese populations into the Plain Yellow Banner, Bordered Yellow Banner, Plain White Banner, and so on, each of which had its own officers, lands, and obligations.

The Qing inherited the Ming central state — the six ministries, the Censorate, the Hanlin Academy, the provincial system — and added to it several new institutions:

  • The Grand Council (軍機處), established in the 1730s, was a small, secret body that conducted the day-to-day business of the emperor and prepared his decisions. It became the effective centre of Qing government.
  • The Imperial Household Department managed the emperor’s personal affairs and the vast imperial estates.
  • The Lifan Yuan (理藩院) administered the empire’s relations with Mongolia, Tibet, and Xinjiang.
  • The Banner administration ran the military and the Manchu homeland in Manchuria.

The Qing also maintained a separate legal code for Mongols, and Tibet was administered through the Dalai Lama’s government under Qing supervision. The system was deliberately flexible: a Tibetan murder case in Lhasa was tried by Tibetan law, a Mongol horse-theft case by Mongol law, and a Chinese tax case by Qing law.

Qing Society and Economy

The Qing was a period of extraordinary demographic and economic growth. The population of China roughly doubled in the eighteenth century, from 150 million in 1700 to perhaps 300 million in 1800, on the strength of the introduction of new world crops (sweet potatoes, maize, peanuts), the extension of agriculture into Manchuria, Sichuan, and the southeast highlands, and a long peace. Cities grew, the empire was integrated by a network of roads and the Grand Canal, and the salt monopoly, the customs revenue, and the land tax provided a stable fiscal base.

At the same time, the Qing was a period of cultural efflorescence. The Kangxi Dictionary (康熙字典) and the Gujian (古文淵鑒) were major scholarly compilations. Cao Xueqin’s Dream of the Red Chamber (紅樓夢), one of the four great classical novels, was written in the mid-eighteenth century. The Qianlong emperor assembled the Siku Quanshu (四庫全書), the largest collection of books in history. Garden design, silk weaving, and porcelain manufacture reached new heights. The Qianlong emperor’s Mountain Estate at Chengde and the Old Summer Palace at Beijing were monuments of an eighteenth-century cosmopolitanism.

The Crisis of the Nineteenth Century

The nineteenth century brought the Qing to ruin. The First Opium War (1839–1842) ended with the Treaty of Nanking, which ceded Hong Kong to Britain, opened five treaty ports, and abolished the Canton system. The Second Opium War (1856–1860) ended with the burning of the Old Summer Palace and further concessions. The Taiping Rebellion (1850–1864), led by the Christian mystic Hong Xiuquan, devastated much of south China and killed perhaps 20 million people. The Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895 ended with the cession of Taiwan. The Boxer Rebellion of 1900 and the subsequent Boxer Protocol of 1901 imposed an enormous indemnity and the stationing of foreign troops in Beijing.

The Hundred Days’ Reform of 1898, the abolition of the examination system in 1905, and the late Qing constitutional movement all attempted to save the dynasty by transforming it, but the reforms came too late. The Wuchang Uprising of October 1911 triggered a chain of provincial declarations of independence. The last emperor, Puyi, abdicated on 12 February 1912, and the Republic of China was proclaimed. The end of the imperial system see the [the fall of imperial China] section (../../../pillar-fall-of-imperial-china/).

Comparing the Yuan and the Qing

The Yuan and the Qing were both conquest dynasties, but they differed in important ways.

The Yuan was relatively short, ruling for less than a century, and the Mongols were expelled by a Han Chinese national uprising. The Manchus, by contrast, ruled for almost 270 years, longer than the Ming. The reason for this difference lies in the depth of sinicisation. The Yuan ruling class never fully adopted Chinese customs, never patronised Confucianism to the same degree, and remained, in cultural terms, alien throughout. The Manchus, by contrast, were deeply sinicised: they adopted the Chinese language, patronised Confucian scholarship, and married into Han Chinese elite families. By the eighteenth century, the Qing court was culturally almost indistinguishable from the Ming court that had preceded it.

The Yuan was also more pluralistic in religious policy. The Mongols were religiously tolerant in principle, patronising Tibetan Buddhism, Islam, Nestorian Christianity, and Confucianism. The Qing was more ideological: it patronised Confucianism and Tibetan Buddhism, but restricted Christianity and Islam. The Manchu hairstyle (the queue) was imposed on Han Chinese men as a sign of submission, a demand that the Yuan had not made.

In territorial terms, however, the Yuan was the larger empire. At its height, the Yuan included the whole of China, Mongolia, Manchuria, Korea, Tibet, parts of Southeast Asia, and (as part of the wider Mongol world) territories extending as far as Poland. The Qing, while it ruled more of China proper, was more focused on the Chinese core and the Inner Asian frontier (Mongolia, Xinjiang, Tibet, Manchuria).

The Legacy of Mongol and Manchu Rule

The legacy of Mongol and Manchu rule is enormous. Both dynasties expanded the territorial extent of the Chinese state. The Yuan incorporated the southwest (Yunnan, Guizhou) more fully into China. The Qing incorporated Manchuria, Mongolia, Xinjiang, and Tibet — a vast Inner Asian territory that remains part of the People’s Republic of China today. Without the Qing conquest, the modern map of China would look very different.

Both dynasties also shaped Chinese culture. The Yuan brought the maritime and Eurasian trading system that produced the world of Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta. The Qing brought the cosmopolitan, multi-ethnic empire of the eighteenth century, with its Manchu, Mongol, Tibetan, Uyghur, and Han components, and the elaborate legal pluralism that governed them. The “multi-ethnic unified state” (多民族统一国家) that the Chinese Communist Party claims to govern is, in significant part, an inheritance of the Qing.

Finally, both dynasties left a powerful and ambivalent legacy in Chinese historical memory. Chinese historians from the Ming and early Republican period tended to portray both the Yuan and the Qing as alien occupations, interruptions in the proper Han Chinese line of succession. But more recent scholarship, both Chinese and Western, has emphasised the degree to which the Yuan and the Qing were Chinese in their administrative practices and the degree to which they contributed to the formation of the modern Chinese state.

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