Transition from Ming to Qing

The transition from Ming to Qing was the long period of war, rebellion and conquest, from the early seventeenth century to 1683, in which the Manchu Qing dynasty replaced the Ming dynasty as rulers of China. Its turning point came in 1644, when rebels took Beijing, the last Ming emperor killed himself, and Manchu forces entered the capital. Resistance in the south lasted for decades, and the cost in lives was enormous.

In the north-east, beyond the Great Wall, the Jurchen chief Nurhaci united many tribes, organised them into military units called the Eight Banners and in 1616 declared a new state, the Later Jin. In 1618 he issued a list of grievances against the Ming and went to war, taking much of Liaodong over the following years. His son Hong Taiji renamed his people the Manchus and in 1636 proclaimed the Qing dynasty. He recruited Han Chinese officials and soldiers on a large scale and forced Korea's Joseon dynasty to submit.

The Ming state was meanwhile in deep trouble. Heavy military spending, factional struggles at court, financial crisis, and a run of droughts, famines and epidemics linked to a period of colder climate drove many peasants into revolt. In the 1630s and 1640s rebel armies spread across northern and central China. One rebel leader, Li Zicheng, proclaimed his own Shun dynasty and in April 1644 captured Beijing. The Chongzhen Emperor, the last Ming ruler in the capital, hanged himself in the palace grounds.

The Ming general Wu Sangui was guarding Shanhai Pass, where the Great Wall meets the sea. Caught between Li Zicheng's army and the Manchus, he chose to join the Qing regent Dorgon. Their combined forces defeated Li at Shanhai Pass in late May 1644, and in June the Qing entered Beijing. The young Shunzhi Emperor was installed there as ruler of China. Li fled and was dead within about a year.

Ming princes set up a series of rival courts in the south, known as the Southern Ming. Qing armies, many of their soldiers former Ming troops, took Yangzhou in 1645 after a siege followed by a notorious massacre, and Nanjing surrendered soon afterwards. An order that all Chinese men adopt the Manchu hairstyle, shaving the forehead and wearing a long queue, provoked fierce local resistance that was suppressed with further mass killings. The last Ming claimant, the Yongli Emperor, was driven into Burma in 1659, handed over to the Qing and executed in 1662.

At sea, the loyalist commander Zheng Chenggong, known in the West as Koxinga, raided the coast and in 1659 threatened Nanjing. He then drove the Dutch from Taiwan in 1662 and founded a loyalist state there. The Qing responded by forcibly clearing the population from long stretches of the southern coast. In 1673 Wu Sangui and two other Chinese generals who governed the south as near-independent princes rebelled against the young Kangxi Emperor. This Revolt of the Three Feudatories was crushed by 1681, and in 1683 a Qing fleet defeated the Zheng regime and annexed Taiwan.

The wars, famines and massacres caused a heavy loss of life and a fall in population across much of China, though estimates of the scale vary greatly. Yet the Qing went on to rule China until 1912. Under Kangxi and his successors, the Qing dynasty restored order and prosperity and expanded far into Inner Asia, creating the borders on which modern China largely rests.

Our 1600 map shows Ming China before the Manchu conquest, and the 1650 map shows the Manchu empire holding the north and the Yangtze valley while the far south still lies outside it. By our 1783 map, the Qing Empire covers all of China and much of Inner Asia.