Manchu conquest of China

The Manchu conquest of China was a long period of war between the Qing Dynasty, established by Manchu clan Aisin Gioro in Manchuria (contemporary Northeastern China), and the Ming Dynasty of China in the south. In 1618, Aisin Gioro leader Nurhaci commissioned a document entitled the Seven Grievances in which he enumerated seven grievances against the Ming and began to rebel against the domination of the Ming Dynasty. Many of the grievances dealt with conflicts against Yehe, which was a major Manchu clan, and Ming favoritism of Yehe. Nurhaci demanded the Ming pay tribute to him to redress the seven grievances and this was effectively a declaration of war, as the Ming were not about to pay money to a former tributary. Shortly afterwards Nurhaci began forcing the Ming out of Liaoning in southern Manchuria.

At the same time the Ming Dynasty was fighting for its own survival against various peasant rebellions. On May 26, 1644, Beijing fell to a rebel army led by Li Zicheng, a former minor Ming official who became the leader of the peasant revolt, who then proclaimed the Shun dynasty. The last Ming emperor, the Chongzhen Emperor, hanged himself on a tree in the imperial garden outside the Forbidden City. When Li Zicheng moved against Ming general Wu Sangui, the latter made an alliance with the Manchus. Li Zicheng was defeated at the Battle of Shanhai Pass by the joint forces of Ming general Wu Sangui and Manchu prince Dorgon. On June 6, the Manchus and Wu entered the capital and proclaimed the young Shunzhi Emperor as Emperor of China.

Soon after, the Kangxi Emperor ascended the throne and fought off several rebellions, such as the Revolt of the Three Feudatories in southern China, and then countered by launching a series of campaigns that expanded his empire. In 1662, Zheng Chenggong founded the Kingdom of Tungning in Taiwan, a pro-Ming Dynasty state with a goal of reconquering China. However, the Kingdom of Tungning was defeated in the Battle of Penghu by Qing Han Chinese admiral Shi Lang. Although there were a number of non-Han Chinese dynasties that ruled parts of China, this was only the second (and the last) time all of China was ruled by a non-Han Chinese dynasty in history.

Jurchen expansion


Jurchen warlord Nurhaci is retrospectively identified as the founder of the Qing dynasty. In 1616 he declared himself khagan. His unifying efforts gave the Jurchen the strength to assert themselves. In 1618 he proclaimed Seven Grievances against the Ming and seized the city of Fushun in what is now Liaoning province in China's northeast. In a series of successful military campaigns in Liaodong and Liaoxi (east and west of the Liao River), the Jurchens seized a number of Ming cities including Shenyang, which they made into the capital of their newly founded "Later Jin" dynasty, named after a Jurchen polity that had ruled over north China several centuries earlier.

Under the inspirational leader Yuan Chonghuan, the Ming used western artillery to defeat the Jin forces at the Battle of Ningyuan in 1626. Nurhaci was injured and died soon afterwards, but the Ming failed to seize the chance to counter-attack. The Jurchens' nemesis Yuan Chonghuan was soon purged in a political struggle, while under the leadership of the new khan Hung Taiji the Jurchens kept seizing Ming cities, defeated Joseon Korea, a crucial ally of the Ming, in 1627 and 1636, and raided deep into China in 1642 and 1643.

The fall of the Ming and the Qing takeover


The Ming faced several famines, floods, economic chaos, and rebellions. Li Zicheng rebelled in the 1630s in Shaanxi in the north, while a mutiny led by Zhang Xianzhong broke out in Sichuan in the 1640s. Many people were killed in this self-proclaimed emperor's reign of terror.

Just as Dorgon and his advisors were pondering how to attack the Ming, the peasant rebellions that were ravaging northern China were dangerously approaching the Ming capital Beijing. In February 1644, rebel leader Li Zicheng had founded the Shun Dynasty in Xi'an and proclaimed himself king. In March his armies had captured the important city of Taiyuan in Shanxi. Seeing the progress of the rebels, on 5 April the Ming Chongzhen Emperor requested the urgent help of any military commandant in the Empire. But it was too late: on 24 April Li Zicheng breached the walls of Beijing, and the Emperor hanged himself the next day on a hill behind the Forbidden City. He was the last Ming emperor to reign in Beijing.

Soon after the emperor had called for help, powerful Ming general Wu Sangui had left his stronghold of Ningyuan north of the Great Wall and started marching toward the capital. On 26 April, his armies had moved through the fortifications of Shanhai Pass (the eastern end of the Great Wall) and were marching toward Beijing when he heard that the city had fallen. He returned to Shanhai Pass. Li Zicheng sent two armies to attack the Pass but Wu's battle-hardened troops defeated them easily on 5 May and 10 May. Then on 18 May, Li Zicheng personally led 60,000 of his troops out of Beijing to attack Wu. At the same time, Wu Sangui wrote to Dorgon to request the Qing's help in ousting the bandits and restoring the Ming dynasty.



Meanwhile Wu Sangui's departure from the stronghold of Ningyuan had left all territory outside the Great Wall under Qing control. Two of Dorgon's most prominent Chinese advisors, Hong Chengchou and Fan Wencheng (范文程), urged the Manchu prince to seize the opportunity of the fall of Beijing to present themselves as avengers of the fallen Ming and to claim the Mandate of Heaven for the Qing. Therefore when Dorgon received Wu's letter, he was already about to lead an expedition to attack northern China and had no intention to restore the Ming. When Dorgon asked Wu to work for the Qing instead, Wu had little choice but to accept.

After Wu formally surrendered to the Qing in the morning of 27 May, his elite troops charged the rebel army repeatedly, but were unable to break the enemy lines. Dorgon waited until both sides were weakened before ordering his cavalry to gallop around Wu's right wing to charge Li's left flank. Li Zicheng's troops were quickly routed and fled back toward Beijing. After their defeat at the Battle of Shanhai Pass, the Shun troops looted Beijing for several days until Li Zicheng left the capital on 4 June with all the wealth he could carry, one day after he had defiantly proclaimed himself Emperor of the Great Shun.

The conquest
Under the reign of Dorgon––whom historians have variously called "the mastermind of the Qing conquest" and "the principal architect of the great Manchu enterprise"––the Qing subdued the capital area, received the capitulation of Shandong local elites and officials, and conquered Shanxi and Shaanxi, then turned their eyes to the rich commercial and agricultural region of Jiangnan south of the lower Yangtze River. They also wiped out the last remnants of rival regimes established by Li Zicheng (killed in 1645) and Zhang Xianzhong (Chengdu taken in early 1647). Finally they managed to kill claimants to the throne of the Southern Ming in Nanjing (1645) and Fuzhou (1646), and chased Zhu Youlang, the last Southern Ming emperor, out of Guangzhou (1647) and into the far southwestern reaches of China.

Suppressing the bandits
Very soon after entering Beijing in June 1644, Dorgon despatched Wu Sangui and his troops to pursue Li Zicheng, the rebel leader who had driven the last Ming emperor to suicide, but had been defeated by the Qing in late May at the Battle of Shanhai Pass. Wu managed to engage Li's rearguard many times, but Li still managed to cross Gu Pass (故關) into Shanxi; Wu then broke pursuit to return to Beijing. Li Zicheng reestablished a power base in Xi'an (Shaanxi province), where he had declared the foundation of his Shun dynasty in February 1644. After repressing revolts against Qing rule in Hebei and Shandong in the Summer and Fall of 1644, in October of that year Dorgon sent several armies to root out Li Zicheng from his Shaanxi stronghold. Qing armies led by Ajige, Dodo, and Shi Tingzhu (石廷柱) won consecutive engagements against Shun forces in Shanxi and Shaanxi, forcing Li Zicheng to leave his Xi'an headquarters in February 1645. Li retreated through several provinces until he was killed in September 1645, either by his own hand or by a peasant group that had organized for self-defense in this time of rampant banditry.

In early 1646 Dorgon sent two expeditions to Sichuan to try to destroy Zhang Xianzhong's regime: the first expedition did not reach Sichuan because it was caught up against remnants; the second one, under the direction of Hooge (the son of Hung Taiji who had lost the succession struggle of 1643) reached Sichuan in October 1646. Hearing that a Qing army led by a major general was approaching, Zhang Xianzhong fled toward Shaanxi, splitting his troops into four divisions that were ordered to act independently if something were to happen to him. Before leaving, he ordered a massacre of the population of his capital Chengdu. Zhang Xianzhong was killed in a battle against Qing forces near Xichong in central Sichuan on 1 February 1647. Hooge then easily took Chengdu, but found it in a state of desolation he had not expected. Unable to find food in the countryside, his soldiers looted the area, killing resisters, and even resorted to cannibalism as food shortages grew acute.

Jiangnan


A few weeks after the Chongzhen Emperor committed suicide in Beijing in April 1644, some descendants of the Ming imperial house started arriving in Nanjing, which had been the auxiliary capital of the Ming dynasty. Agreeing that the Ming needed an imperial figure to rally support in the south, the Nanjing Minister of War Shi Kefa and the Fengyang Governor-general Ma Shiying (馬士英) agreed to form a loyalist Ming government around the Prince of Fu, Zhu Yousong, a first cousin of the Chongzhen Emperor who had been next in line for succession after the dead emperor's sons, whose fates were still unknown. The Prince was crowned as emperor on 19 June 1644 under the protection of Ma Shiying and his large war fleet. He would reign under the era name "Hongguang" (弘光). The Hongguang regime was ridden with factional bickering that facilitated the Manchu conquest of Jiangnan, which was launched from Xi'an in April 1645. Greatly aided by the surrender of Southern Ming commanders Li Chengdong (李成東) and Liu Liangzuo (劉良佐), the Qing army took the key city of Xuzhou north of the Huai River in early May 1645, leaving Shi Kefa in Yangzhou as the main defender of the Southern Ming's northern frontiers.

Several contingents of Qing forces converged on Yangzhou on 13 May 1645. Shi Kefa's small force refused to surrender, but could not resist Dodo's artillery: on 20 May Qing cannon breached the city wall and Dodo ordered the "brutal slaughter" of Yangzhou's entire population, to terrorize other Jiangnan cities into surrendering to the Qing. On 1 June Qing armies crossed the Yangzi River and easily took the garrison city of Zhenjiang, which protected access to Nanjing. The Qing arrived at the gates of Nanjing a week later, but the Hongguang Emperor had already fled. The city surrendered without a fight on 16 June after its last defenders had made Dodo promise he would not hurt the population. Within less than a month, the Qing had captured the fleeing Ming emperor (he died in Beijing the following year) and seized Jiangnan's main cities, including Suzhou and Hangzhou; by then the frontier between the Qing and the Southern Ming had been pushed south to the Qiantang River.

On 21 July 1645, after the Jiangnan region had been superficially pacified, Dorgon issued "the most untimely promulgation of his career": he ordered all Chinese men to shave their forehead and to braid the rest of their hair into a queue just like the Manchus. The punishment for non-compliance was death. This policy of symbolic submission to the new dynasty helped the Manchus in telling friend from foe. For Han officials and literati, however, the new hairstyle was "a humiliating act of degradation" (because it breached a common Confucian directive to preserve one's body intact), whereas for common folk cutting their hair "was tantamount to the loss of their manhood." Because it united Chinese of all social backgrounds into resistance against Qing rule, the haircutting command "broke the momentum of the Qing conquest." The defiant population of Jiading and Songjiang was massacred by former Ming general Li Chengdong (李成東), respectively on August 24 and September 22. Jiangyin also held out against about 10,000 Qing troops for 83 days. When the city wall was finally breached on 9 October 1645, the Qing army led by Ming defector Liu Liangzuo (劉良佐), who had been ordered to "fill the city with corpses before you sheathe your swords," massacred the entire population, killing between 74,000 and 100,000 people. Hundreds of thousands of people were killed before all of China was brought into compliance.

The Southern Ming
Meanwhile the Southern Ming had not been eliminated. When Hangzhou fell to the Qing on 6 July 1645, Prince of Tang Zhu Yujian, a ninth-generation descendant of Ming founder Zhu Yuanzhang managed to escape by land to the southeastern province of Fujian. Crowned as the Longwu Emperor in the coastal city of Fuzhou on 18 August, he depended on the protection of talented seafarer Zheng Zhilong (also known as "Nicholas Iquan"). The childless emperor adopted Zheng's eldest son and granted him the imperial surname. "Koxinga," as this son is known to Westerners, is a distortion of the title "Lord of the Imperial Surname" (Guoxingye 國姓爺). In the mean time another Ming claimant, the Prince of Lu Zhu Yihai, had named himself regent in Zhejiang, but the two loyalist regimes failed to cooperate, making their chances of success even lower than they already were.

In February 1646, Qing armies seized land west of the Qiantang River from the Lu regime and defeated a ragtag force representing the Longwu Emperor in northeastern Jiangxi. In May, they besieged Ganzhou, the last Ming bastion in Jiangxi. In July, a new Southern Campaign led by Prince Bolo sent Prince Lu's Zhejiang regime into disarray and proceeded to attack the Longwu regime in Fujian. On the pretext of relieving the siege of Ganzhou, the Longwu court left their Fujian base in late September 1646, but the Qing army caught up with them. Longwu and his empress were summarily executed in Tingzhou (western Fujian) on 6 October. After the fall of Fuzhou on 17 October, Zheng Zhilong surrendered to the Qing and his son Koxinga fled to the island of Taiwan with his fleet.

The Longwu Emperor's younger brother Zhu Yuyue, who had fled Fuzhou by sea, soon founded another Ming regime in Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong province, taking the reign title Shaowu (紹武) on 11 December 1646. Short of official costumes, the court had to purchase robes from local theater troops. On 24 December, Prince of Gui Zhu Youlang established the Yongli (永曆) regime in the same vicinity. The two Ming regimes fought each other until 20 January 1647, when a small Qing force led by former Southern Ming commander Li Chengdong (李成東) captured Guangzhou, killing the Shaowu Emperor and sending the Yongli Emperor fleeing to Nanning in Guangxi. In May 1648, however, Li Chengdong mutinied against the Qing, and the concurrent rebellion of another former Ming general in Jiangxi helped the Yongli regime to retake most of southern China. This resurgence of loyalist hopes was short-lived. New Qing armies managed to reconquer the central provinces of Huguang (present-day Hubei and Hunan), Jiangxi, and Guangdong in 1649 and 1650. The Yongli Emperor fled to Nanning and from there to Guizhou. Finally on 24 November 1650, Qing forces led by Shang Kexi captured Guangzhou and massacred the city's population, killing as many as 70,000 people.

The northwest
Late in 1646, forces assembled by a Muslim leader known in Chinese sources as Milayin (米喇印) revolted against Qing rule in Ganzhou (Gansu). He was soon joined by another Muslim named Ding Guodong (丁國棟). Proclaiming that they wanted to restore the fallen Ming, they occupied a number of towns in Gansu, including the provincial capital Lanzhou. These rebels' willingness to collaborate with non-Muslim Chinese suggests that they were not only driven by religion, and were not aiming to create an Islamic state. To pacify the rebels, the Qing government quickly despatched Meng Qiaofang (孟喬芳), governor of Shaanxi, a former Ming official who had surrendered to the Qing in 1631. Both Milayin and Ding Guodong were captured and killed in 1648, and by 1650 the Muslim rebels had been crushed in campaigns that inflicted heavy casualties. The Muslim Ming loyalists were supported by the Muslim Chagatid Kumul Khanate and the Turfan Khanate and after their defeat, Kumul submitted to the Qing. Another Muslim rebel, Ma Shouying, was allied to Li Zicheng and the Shun Dynasty.

Continuous campaigns against the Southern Ming
Though the Qing under Dorgon's leadership had successfully pushed the Southern Ming deep into southern China, Ming loyalism was not dead yet. In early August 1652, Li Dingguo, who had served as general in Sichuan under bandit king Zhang Xianzhong (d. 1647) and was now protecting the Yongli Emperor of the Southern Ming, retook Guilin (Guangxi province) from the Qing. Within a month, most of the commanders who had been supporting the Qing in Guangxi reverted to the Ming side. Despite occasionally successful military campaigns in Huguang and Guangdong in the next two years, Li failed to retake important cities. In 1653, the Qing court put Hong Chengchou in charge of retaking the southwest. Headquartered in Changsha (in what is now Hunan province), he patiently built up his forces; only in late 1658 did well-fed and well-supplied Qing troops mount a multipronged campaign to take Guizhou and Yunnan. In late January 1659, a Qing army led by Manchu prince Doni took the capital of Yunnan, sending the Yongli Emperor fleeing into nearby Burma, which was then ruled by King Pindale Min of the Toungoo dynasty. The last sovereign of the Southern Ming stayed there until 1662, when he was captured and executed by Wu Sangui, whose surrender to the Manchus in April 1644 had allowed Dorgon to start the Qing conquest of China.

Zheng Chenggong ("Koxinga"), who had been adopted by the Longwu Emperor in 1646 and ennobled by Yongli in 1655, also continued to defend the cause of the Southern Ming. In 1659, just as Shunzhi was preparing to hold a special examination to celebrate the glories of his reign and the success of the southwestern campaigns, Zheng sailed up the Yangtze River with a well-armed fleet, took several cities from Qing hands, and went so far as to threaten Nanjing. When the emperor heard of this sudden attack he is said to have slashed his throne with a sword in anger. But the siege of Nanjing was relieved and Zheng Chenggong repelled, forcing Zheng to take refuge in the southeastern coastal province of Fujian. Pressured by Qing fleets, Zheng fled to Taiwan in April 1661 but died that same summer. His descendants resisted Qing rule until 1683, when the Kangxi Emperor successfully took the island.

The Three Feudatories
Wu Sangui, Shang Kexi, and Geng Jimao, the "Three Feudatories", rebelled against the Kangxi Emperor. They dominated southern China, and Wu declared the "Zhou Dynasty". However, their disunity destroyed them. Shang Zhixin and Geng surrendered in 1681 after a massive Qing counteroffensive.

Taiwan
The Kangxi Emperor, the one who had crushed the Three Feudatories' revolt, began his own campaigns to expand his empire. In 1683 he dispatched Shi Lang with a fleet of 300 ships to take Taiwan in 1683 from the wealthy Zheng family. The descendants of Koxinga did not stand a chance against the experienced Manchu troops.

Aftermath
The Kangxi Emperor used the Zheng family's knowledge of sea warfare to seize the town of Albazin on the Amur River from Russia in 1685, giving the Manchus control of all the area south of the river. By 1689, a peace treaty (Treaty of Nerchinsk) had been successfully signed between the Qing and the Russian court, which would last for about two centuries.

Finally, Kangxi gambled on an invasion of the north. Galdan, leader of the Zunghar Khanate, prepared to unite the tribes of Mongolia to restore the Mongol Empire. The Chinese armies of 80,000 led by the Emperor Kangxi himself marched south of Ulaanbaatar to engage the Zunghars. In a brief engagement, the enemy units were pounded by cannon fire and routed. Galdan died one year later.

Kangxi's conquest of Mongolia completed his northern expedition. Before his death in 1722, he expanded his empire as far as the Tibetan capital of Lhasa. His successors campaigned further, taking over areas such as Qinghai and Xinjiang. By the end of the 18th century, the Qing Dynasty had reached its largest territorial extent, considered one of the largest empires ever in history. In addition, many neighboring countries, such as Korea and Vietnam, were listed as its tributary states.

The Qing Dynasty had weakened after the mid-19th century with the growth of Anti-Qing sentiment among the populace, fueled by the idea that the Qing had inhibited Chinese industrialization, causing it to fall severely behind the West. The Wuchang Uprising of 1911 overthrew the Qing, and Puyi, the last reigning Manchu emperor, officially abdicated the following year. The new Chinese Republic was also established in the same year, ending the over two thousand years of imperial rule in Chinese history.