Qianlong Emperor

The Qianlong Emperor, born Hongli, was the fifth emperor of the Manchu Qing dynasty and ruled China from 1735 to 1796, then held power as retired emperor until his death in 1799. His reign marked the height of Qing power: the empire reached its greatest size, the population grew to around 300 million, and the court sponsored art and scholarship on an enormous scale. It also saw the destruction of the Dzungar people, a sweeping literary inquisition, and the corruption and military weakness that left the dynasty in decline by the time he died.

Hongli was born on 25 September 1711 in Beijing, a son of Prince Yinzhen, who became the Yongzheng Emperor in 1722, and of a consort of the Niohuru clan. He was a favourite of his grandfather, the Kangxi Emperor, who took an interest in his education, and some historians have suggested that Kangxi's fondness for the boy helped decide his own choice of successor. Hongli received a thorough education in the Confucian classics, Chinese poetry and painting, as well as in Manchu, archery and riding.

Yongzheng, who had come to power after a bitter struggle among his brothers, introduced a system of secret succession: the heir's name was sealed in a box behind a plaque in the palace, to be opened only after the emperor's death. When Yongzheng died in October 1735, the box named Hongli, then 24, and he took the throne with the reign name Qianlong, "enduring prosperity".

Qianlong styled himself the "Old Man of the Ten Complete Victories", counting ten military campaigns as triumphs. The most important was the war against the Dzungar Khanate, the Western Mongol state that had challenged the Qing for decades. Exploiting a succession crisis among the Dzungars, Qing armies took their homeland in 1755. When the Dzungar prince Amursana, who had sided with the Qing, rebelled, Qianlong ordered the Dzungars to be exterminated. Between 1755 and 1758 Qing troops and their allies killed large numbers of Dzungar men, women and children, while smallpox and flight did the rest. A contemporary Qing scholar estimated that of some 600,000 Dzungars, about 30 percent were killed by Qing forces and 40 percent died of smallpox, with most of the rest fleeing to Russian or Kazakh lands. Historians such as Peter Perdue describe it as a deliberate genocide; the Dzungars ceased to exist as a people.

Qing forces then conquered the Turkic Muslim oasis cities of the Tarim Basin, including Kashgar, in 1759. The combined territories became known as Xinjiang, the "new frontier". Qianlong also tightened control over Tibet after a revolt in Lhasa in 1750, fought two long and brutal wars against the Jinchuan hill peoples of western Sichuan, crushed a rebellion on Taiwan in 1787 to 1788, and forced the Gurkhas of Nepal, who had invaded Tibet, to accept terms in 1792.

Not every campaign was a victory. Four invasions of Burma between 1765 and 1769 ended in failure and a negotiated withdrawal. In 1788 Qing troops entered Vietnam to restore the deposed Lê ruler, but early in 1789 the Tây Sơn leader Nguyễn Huệ routed them in a surprise attack at the lunar new year, an episode remembered in the History of Vietnam. By the end of his reign the Qing had roughly doubled the territory ruled by the Ming, but the campaigns had cost vast sums.

Qianlong saw himself as a model Confucian ruler and a connoisseur. He made six long tours of the prosperous south, collected paintings, calligraphy, bronzes and ceramics on an unprecedented scale, and stamped his seals and poems on many of the masterpieces in the imperial collection. Over his life he was credited with more than 40,000 poems, though many were probably polished by court scholars. He employed European Jesuits at court, notably the painter Giuseppe Castiglione, and had European-style palaces and fountains built in the Old Summer Palace, the Yuanmingyuan, outside Beijing. He was also a devoted patron of Tibetan Buddhism, presenting himself to Tibetan and Mongol subjects as an incarnation of the bodhisattva Manjushri.

His greatest scholarly project was the Siku Quanshu, the Complete Library of the Four Treasuries, compiled between 1773 and the 1780s by hundreds of scholars. It copied out some 3,400 complete works in about 36,000 volumes. The same search of the empire's libraries served as a literary inquisition. Books judged hostile to the Manchus, or to earlier non-Chinese dynasties, or otherwise dangerous were banned, altered or destroyed, and some 2,300 titles were listed for total suppression. Authors and their families could be severely punished for a single suspect phrase.

Foreign trade with Europeans was restricted from 1757 to the single port of Canton, today's Guangzhou, where it was handled by licensed Chinese merchants. In 1793 the British government sent Lord Macartney to request wider trade, a permanent embassy and the opening of more ports. Qianlong received him at his summer retreat at Chengde but rejected every request, in an edict addressed to George III that declared China had no need of foreign manufactures. The episode was later treated as a symbol of Qing complacency in the face of the rising British Empire, though historians now note that the court was well informed about Britain and rejected the requests for strategic reasons.

In his later decades Qianlong relied heavily on the favourite Heshen, a young Manchu guardsman who rose to dominate the court from the 1770s and built up an enormous fortune through bribery and embezzlement while corruption spread through the bureaucracy. Population growth was outpacing farmland, and unrest increased. In 1796 the White Lotus Rebellion broke out in central China and took years to suppress.

Out of filial respect, Qianlong had promised not to reign longer than his grandfather Kangxi's 61 years. In February 1796, after 60 years, he abdicated in favour of his son, the Jiaqing Emperor, but kept real power as Emperor Emeritus. He died on 7 February 1799, aged 87, one of the longest-lived monarchs in history. Within days Jiaqing had Heshen arrested and forced him to commit suicide, seizing his wealth.

Qianlong presided over the last great age of imperial China. The borders of modern China largely follow those of his empire, including Xinjiang and Tibet. But the costs of his wars, the corruption of his final years and the rigidity of his government left his successors poorly prepared for internal rebellion and for the European powers, a weakness exposed in the First Opium War four decades after his death. Much of the art he gathered is now in the Palace Museums in Beijing and Taipei. His long reign is part of the wider History of China.