China in the 17th–18th Centuries: Manchu Conquest, Qing Rule, and Isolation

China in the 17th and 18th centuries entered history as an inglorious era marked both by the country's external isolation and by a struggle against everything progressive within its borders. Under the Qing dynasty, the immense wealth and cultural achievement of the preceding Ming period gradually gave way to closed borders, censorship, and an economy sealed off from the wider world — even as Chinese porcelain, lacquer, and tea were transforming taste across Europe and America.

China in the 17th–18th centuries: an inglorious age of isolation

The defining feature of China between roughly 1644 and the end of the 18th century was self-imposed isolation combined with internal repression. While the West was entering the age of bourgeois revolutions, the Manchu-conquered China preserved reactionary feudal structures, which sharply slowed the country's economic and cultural development. The "closed-door" policy embodied this era, which stretched across nearly three centuries and touched every field from foreign trade to scholarship and medicine.

The Manchu Qing dynasty and the conquest of China

The Qing dynasty came to power in 1644 after the Manchus overthrew the Ming dynasty and defeated a massive peasant uprising. What followed was one of the harshest occupations in the country's history: behind every official stood a Manchu overseer, and everything distinctly Chinese was targeted for suppression.

The peasant war and the fall of the Ming dynasty

A peasant war that had raged almost without interruption for sixteen years ended when the rebels entered Beijing on 25 April 1644. The last emperor of the Ming dynasty hanged himself in the courtyard of his palace. The rebels executed the greatest feudal lords and civil and military dignitaries, levied indemnities on the rich, abolished heavy taxes, cancelled crushing debts, and effectively handed the land to the peasants.

The establishment of Qing rule in 1644

The Manchus seized Beijing in 1644 after the frightened feudal aristocracy invited their recent enemies — the Manchu princes — to help them, accepting vassal status in return. The peasant army of Li Zicheng was crushed, and Beijing fell into the hands of the conquerors. In that same year, 1644, the Manchu Qing dynasty ascended the throne in China.

The occupation regime and the suppression of revolts

Qing rule over China rested on brutal coercion and cultural humiliation. As a sign of servile dependence and submission, Chinese men were obliged, following Manchu custom, to shave part of the head and wear a queue. The people answered these oppressions with fresh uprisings, and the conquerors put them down with extreme cruelty — in Yangzhou alone one hundred and fifty thousand of the defiant were killed. Even the gradual assimilation of the nomadic Manchus into the Chinese, a nation of high culture, could not soften this monstrous yoke. Over time, however, the Manchus adapted much of the existing Chinese administrative and governance apparatus, ruling through the Confucian bureaucracy they had inherited from the Ming dynasty even as they kept ultimate authority in Manchu hands.

China's foreign relations in the 17th–18th centuries

China's external ties in the 17th and 18th centuries suffered a heavy blow under the Qing dynasty. Seeing foreign contact as a threat to their dominion, the Manchu rulers pursued a hostile policy toward China's neighbours, sought to end trade with Russia, and even tried to provoke war with it.

Diplomatic relations with Russia

Russia was the first and, arguably, the only European state to establish treaty-based, mutually beneficial relations with China during this period. This stood in sharp contrast to the other European powers — the Netherlands, Portugal, France and England — who sought to penetrate China purely for colonial ends.

Russian embassies and the Treaty of Nerchinsk

Because the Manchu court was hostile to trade with Russia, one Russian peace embassy after another failed: those of Baykov (1654–1656), Perfilyev (1658), and Spafariy (1675–77) all came away empty-handed. Only Golovin, in 1689, succeeded in concluding the Treaty of Nerchinsk on borders and trade, the first durable agreement between the two empires.

The Treaties of Bura and Kyakhta

The Treaty of Nerchinsk was followed by the Bura and Kyakhta treaties of 1727, which fixed the frontier in the region of Mongolia and regulated caravan trade through the border post of Kyakhta. These agreements gave Russia a stable overland channel for exchanging furs and manufactured goods for Chinese tea, silk and porcelain, and they made the Russo-Chinese border one of the few points where Qing China maintained sanctioned, ongoing commerce with a European power throughout the 18th century.

European powers and colonial interests

The colonizing intentions of the European powers became clear soon after Portuguese ships reached Guangzhou (Canton) in 1516. To prevent this foreign penetration, which was plainly predatory in character, the Ming court forbade Europeans to enter the country — a policy the Qing rulers later carried further. For the merchants of the Netherlands, Portugal, France and England, the appeal of the China Sea Region lay in the extraordinary demand back home for Chinese goods, part of a broader European expansion in Asia driven by fascination with Eastern trade goods and cultures.

American engagement with the China Trade after the Revolutionary War

American merchants entered the China Trade almost immediately after the Revolutionary War, when independence freed the young United States from British commercial restrictions. From 1784 onward, ships sailing out of ports such as Salem, Boston and New York carried silver, ginseng and furs to Guangzhou and returned with tea, silk and porcelain. This commerce reshaped tastes on both sides of the Atlantic: Chinese export porcelain decorated with the American eagle, and so-called Hong bowls painted with the waterfront warehouses (the "hongs") of Guangzhou, became prized souvenirs of the voyage and furnished fashionable homes in the Federal/Neoclassical style. Institutions such as The Henry Ford preserve examples of these export wares as records of early American engagement with Asia.

Trade in the China Sea Region

The China Sea Region formed one of the great arteries of world commerce in the 18th century, even as the Qing dynasty tried to constrain it. Historians of maritime Asia — notably Denys Lombard and Leonard Blussé, whose work appeared in journals such as Archipel and Itinerario — have traced how Chinese, Southeast Asian and European networks interlocked across these waters, exchanging porcelain, tea, spices and silver in defiance of every official effort to seal the coast.

Chinese maritime history in the 18th century

Chinese maritime history in the 18th century is a story of thriving private trade squeezed by imperial restriction. Even after the Qing banned the construction of large seagoing vessels, junks continued to sail between southern Chinese ports and Southeast Asia, and shipwreck archaeology has recovered rich cargoes that document this trade. The Vung Tau Shipwreck, a Chinese junk lost in the South China Sea around the 1690s, went down carrying tens of thousands of pieces of Chinese porcelain bound for the European market via Dutch intermediaries — physical proof of how deeply the region's commerce depended on ceramics.

The supercargo and the organization of the China Trade

The China Trade was managed at the point of sale by the supercargo, the merchant's agent who sailed with the cargo and handled every transaction in Guangzhou. Because foreign captains could not deal directly with Chinese officials or the wider market, the supercargo negotiated with the licensed Hong merchants, selected and commissioned goods — including bespoke porcelain services and Hong bowls — arranged payment in silver, and supervised loading for the return voyage. This role concentrated enormous responsibility in a single individual and made the supercargo the indispensable human link between Canton's warehouses and distant European and American markets.

The "closed-door" policy and the country's isolation

The Qing rulers went further than the Ming in isolating China, embodying the era in a rigid "closed-door" policy. This programme restricted shipbuilding, sealed off ports, and confined foreign traders to a single, tightly controlled channel at Guangzhou.

The ban on shipbuilding and the closing of ports

The rulers of the Qing dynasty forbade the building of large ships, and Chinese maritime trade fell sharply as a result. In 1757 the situation hardened further: access for foreign vessels was closed to every port except Guangzhou (Canton), funnelling all legal overseas commerce through one bottleneck under close official supervision.

Restricting foreigners' access to Canton

At Guangzhou itself, foreigners lived and traded under stringent controls that grew tighter through the 18th century. European and American merchants were confined to a narrow strip of riverside factories (the hongs), permitted to trade only through the licensed Hong merchants, barred from bringing their families into the city, and required to leave once the trading season ended. This so-called Canton System governed all foreign commerce with the Qing empire and became a lasting source of friction that would erupt into open conflict in the following century.

The suppression of scholarship and the "literary prisons"

Under the Qing dynasty not only European science but any attempt by Chinese scholars to introduce something new into any field of knowledge was forbidden. The regime created "literary prisons," into which was thrown anyone who dared even timidly to voice views contradicting the ideology of the ruling circles and their Confucian religion in its medieval form.

The persecution of scholars and historians

The scholar Dai Mingshi was executed for a truthful reconstruction of China's history in the 14th–17th centuries, and the physician Ba Domin, who translated a six-volume anatomy with an atlas into Manchu, was cruelly punished and his work burned. By entrenching scholasticism through inquisitorial measures, the rulers confronted scholars with a stark choice: open falsification to please the conquerors, or a study of ancient sources wholly detached from reality. The result crippled honest historical writing — a discipline that in the wider world would later be transformed by scholars such as Fernand Braudel, whose global, long-duration approach to material civilization and capitalism (his Civilisation matérielle, économie et capitalisme) stands as the opposite of the closed, defensive erudition the Qing imposed.

The fate of Chinese medicine in the Qing era

What happened to historiography, as if halted before the "closed doors" of the Qing era, also befell Chinese medicine, which had flourished so vigorously during the Middle Ages (more detail: Medieval Chinese medicine). Bowing to circumstances, most physicians turned to compiling commentaries and annotations, to which, in turn, further annotations and commentaries were written.

The development of medicine in China

A significant role in the development of medicine in China was played by the Ming-period physician Wang Kentang (Yu Te), born in 1552 and died in 1639 — five years before the Manchu conquest. A senior official of Fujian province and a wealthy man, he devoted his life and fortune to assembling a medical library and studying the vast experience accumulated by previous generations of physicians.

This was aided by the fact that, owing to his mother's illness, prominent physicians frequently visited Wang Kentang's house, and the scholar grew close to them at a very young age.

His description of each medicine was accompanied by a short but, as historians note, very "rich" annotation on the drug's properties, its indications and contraindications, its dosage and so on. A great merit of Wang Kentang lies in his exclusion of all "miraculous" prescriptions and his bold rejection of everything that had not stood the test of practice.

Wang Kentang's constant availability to visitors and his selflessness brought him great renown even in his youth. Patients began to seek his help even from distant provinces. Throughout his life, intensively engaged in medical practice and the study of medicine, Wang remained a government official.

After his death he left a large literary legacy, including valuable works on symptomatology, diagnostics, treatises on febrile diseases, on the most common illnesses, on the treatment of abscesses, and a number of other works.

Wang Kentang is also the author of the collection "Tang tou ge ko" ("Essential prescriptions in verse for students of medicine") and "Yi fang ji jie" ("A great collection of remedies with detailed explanation"), in the appendix of which are described means and methods of rendering aid in urgent cases (poisoning, the bite of a venomous snake and a rabid dog, drowning, and so on), as well as the rules of personal hygiene.

The author attached great importance to cold, warmth and enhanced nutrition. These works give a profound synthesis of the experience and medical knowledge of the Ming period — the time of the greatest flowering of Chinese pharmacology.

Combating epidemics in China

Another important direction in the development of medicine in the 14th–17th centuries was linked with the significant growth of cities, whose populations frequently suffered from various epidemics. Studying their causes, Chinese physicians during this very time worked out a number of quite accurate principles.

They established that epidemics in China most often appeared after drought, famine, flood and internecine war, that their spread was aided by large movements of people, and that the contagious agent could be transmitted not only through direct contact with the sick but also, for example, through worn clothing. Significant success was achieved by the medicine of the Ming era in combating smallpox.

Variolation with human smallpox, discovered in the 10th–11th centuries, had by the 16th century gained not only full recognition but also wide distribution. As for the treatment of smallpox patients, a special specialty was even created for this purpose, and physicians already had at their disposal more than 50 books on the subject.

In 1531 the well-known physician Wang Ji wrote the treatise "On the rationale of treating smallpox," which discusses smallpox prevention through taking certain medicines. Zhang Jingyue also devoted much time to the study of smallpox, but in the history of Chinese medicine he is better known as an advocate and promoter of prevention and hygiene.

Zhang Jingyue (Te Wing) was born in 1561 and died in 1639. Beginning his medical studies under the physician Ting Ying, well known in his day, he not only fully absorbed all the knowledge this famous physician could give him but also developed his own theory of disease, based on the teachings of "yang" and "yin," the circulation of the five primary elements, and the "six qi."

He regarded all these substances from materialist positions as internal and external factors influencing the organism. Proceeding from this, Zhang Jingyue attached extremely great importance to prevention. In his work he was guided by the motto:

Very hard to gain, but easy to lose.

Zhang Jingyue was among the first to give deep grounding to the principle of the importance of the organism's resistance, and he proceeded from it in his medical practice. An advocate of treatment through warmth and rational nutrition, he at the same time considered the use of purgatives to be mistaken.

On the basis of these principles he wrote a book called "Lei Jing," consisting of 42 sections. The scholar worked on this famous work over the course of 40 years. In addition, he wrote extensive works on the pulse.

With great expertise he described the diagnosis of smallpox, a number of surgical diseases, and also many medicinal plants.

Literary evidence of the time shows that in the 16th century China isolated not only lepers but also patients with pulmonary tuberculosis. Hygienic rules were developed for the troops (according to the chronicle, medical posts in the army had been established as early as 960) and for the workers who built the palaces and city walls of Beijing, who were served by 300 physicians.

Medical supervision was also established over laundries. Finally, an enormous sewer network was laid in Beijing, which still operates today. A significant benefit to the development of Chinese medicine came from the refinement of the method of keeping case histories. A model in this respect was provided by the 200 case histories left by Zhang Zihe, an outstanding physician of the 13th century.

Interest in anatomy and surgery

In the 16th century, and especially in the early 17th century, a heightened interest in anatomy and surgery was noted in China. Advances in metalworking placed many new and more refined instruments in physicians' hands. And, despite the ban that persisted by tradition and for religious reasons, some self-sacrificing physicians dared to perform dissections.

Much for the improvement of operative technique was done by Xue Ji, author of a large number of books on surgery. He was the first to describe gangrene and developed a method for amputating an affected limb. Widely renowned were such infectious-disease specialists of the time as Zhang Zhongjing, author of the book "Shang han lun" ("On typhoid"), and Wu Youxin, who wrote the work "Wen yi lun" ("On fever") in 1649.

In general it must be noted that the scientific literature of the Ming era — medical literature in particular — is very extensive and diverse in content. In order somehow to gather this enormous bibliographic legacy together, in 1403 work began on compiling a comprehensive encyclopedic dictionary. For decades, 2,180 people worked on its 11,095 books — figures one can only marvel at today.

The dictionary bears the title "Yongle dadian" (originally "Wenxian dacheng") and is one of the largest in the world. It contains information on the classical Confucian and historical books, on books of Chinese medicine, on the writings of philosophers, astronomers and geographers, on technology and so on. In character and scope this dictionary can be compared only with the encyclopedias created in Europe only in the middle of the 18th century — that is, three centuries after its appearance.

The first edition of the dictionary burned, and only 375 books survive from later ones, now held both in China and in other countries to which they were removed in 1900, when the combined imperialist forces of eight states (Germany, the United States, England, France, Japan, tsarist Russia, Austria-Hungary and Italy) suppressed the Boxer Rebellion. (The Chinese name "Yihequan" means "Fist in the name of justice and harmony.")

On their banners the Yihequan drew the image of a clenched fist — and from this came the name "Boxers." The work of compiling encyclopedias was continued under the following, Qing, dynasty. Created in the middle of the 18th century as a collection of works on all fields of knowledge, the new bibliographic dictionary "Siku quanshu" was distinguished by greater systematization.

In its compilation, only 385 books were borrowed from the earlier dictionary. The "Complete Collection of Books of Old and New Times" — "Gujin tushu jicheng," a vast edition in 10,000 volumes, likewise published in the 18th century — is the richest encyclopedia of Chinese culture.

But this work and its continuations — the "Xu tongdian" ("Continuation of the political compendium"), the "Xu tongzhi" ("Continuation of the historical compendium") and others — were all, in chronological terms, carried only up to the Qing dynasty. And this has its explanation.

China in the 17th–18th centuries gave the country renowned physicians

Against this faceless background, three figures stand out in the medicine of China in the 17th–18th centuries: Ye Tianshi, Wang Qingren and Wu Shangxian. The first of them is the creator of the doctrine of non-febrile infectious diseases and of a classic textbook from which, for almost 200 years, examination topics were drawn to test the knowledge of folk physicians (another crucial teaching aid was the books under the common title "Yizong jinjian" ("Golden Mirrors of the Sources of Medicine"), published in 1742).

The hereditary physician Ye Tianshi

Ye Tianshi (born 1667, died 1746) belonged to a family of hereditary physicians and began his medical training under his father, who, however, died early. He therefore received his subsequent medical education from ten renowned physicians of the country.

From this, historians note, came the exceptional breadth of outlook that distinguished the scholar, who mastered the theories of the most important medical schools of his time. At the foundation of Ye Tianshi's broad practice, which won him fame as a physician who

"treated very well and quickly, and the gravest and most dangerous illnesses yielded to his remedies,"

there always lay the rule:

"to dig down to the root of the illness" (that is, to the causes of the disease).

Another of his rules was, in treating each patient, to record the surname, age, state of the pulse, symptoms of the illness, the prescribed medicine, and so on. Enjoying wide renown and a large practice, he unfortunately wrote little. Only his pupil Hua Nantian put in order the scattered notes and case histories of Ye Tianshi and published them under the title "Lin zheng nan yi an" ("the magnetic needle that truly points the path to follow in treating illnesses").

This ten-volume work, devoted mainly to internal non-febrile diseases, was for many generations considered a classic textbook and for more than 200 years served as the most important criterion for determining physicians' knowledge on the fundamental questions of internal illnesses. Ye Tianshi left his sons a testament in which he emphasized the role of labour and observation in the study of medicine. He wrote:

To practice medicine, one must have a sharp mind, work hard and read much — only then can one be a useful physician. Without these qualities a physician will be harmful, not useful, to suffering people.

These words, like a motto, were repeated in many textbooks, and modern physicians are guided by them in training the younger generation.

The fighter for truth Wang Qingren

Not without reason is Wang Qingren (1768–1831) called "the great righteous man of medicine" and "a fighter for truth." Because dissection of the dead was forbidden by law in China, the teaching on the structure of the human body — data for which were drawn from ancient textbooks and only to an insignificant degree from the works of European scholars — contained many erroneous propositions.

Wang Qingren was the first to draw attention to these errors and wrote a fundamental work on human anatomy. Interestingly, he came to the study of anatomy by chance, at the age of 30, when in a province he had the opportunity to examine the body of a child; on dissecting it (illegally) he discovered an extremely great discrepancy with what he knew from the literature on anatomy.

From that time Wang began to use every convenient occasion to dissect corpses. Such an opportunity presented itself rather rarely, usually somewhere in a province, when the bodies of the executed, cast beyond the city walls, came into the scholar's hands. As the result of 42 years of persistent and self-sacrificing labour, Wang gathered a mass of anatomical information and wrote a large work in two books, "On the Errors of the Old Physicians in Their Account of Anatomy."

He wrote, in particular, that "the mind is generated not in the heart but in the brain." Apparently, until then it had been believed that thoughts formed in the heart. Wang Qingren's work on anatomy was translated into English by the Englishman Tejen and printed. In Wang's preface to this book there was a high appraisal of the knowledge of anatomy:

Not knowing the structure of a person's internal organs, a physician in his practice is like a blind man walking, and at night besides.

Wang Qingren was a major public figure. He studied the works of physicians of Chinese medicine, and energetically fought for carrying out a reform of medicine in China on the basis of his original, progressive ideas.

The advocate of physiotherapeutic methods Wu Shangxian

The creator of the doctrine of diseases of the "external organs," Wu Shangxian (1806–1886), is also known as an advocate of physiotherapeutic methods of treatment, rational nutrition, therapeutic gymnastics and regimen, which he clearly preferred over medicinal remedies.

This versatility is evidently explained by the fact that, although Wu Shangxian specialized in the treatment of skin diseases, living among the poor rural population he naturally engaged in general medical practice. In prescribing medicines he was very cautious, each time repeating that medicines, along with their benefit, could also bring great harm.

Therefore, in treating many illnesses Wu Shangxian, striving to manage without the help of medicines, used such methods as rational nutrition, a special regimen and gymnastics, and also applied heat, cold and the like for therapeutic purposes.

Convinced of the harmful action of many preparations and wishing to give a correct direction to the rational use of medicines, Wu Shangxian in 1865, after moving to the city of Hangzhou, opened his own pharmacy, giving its work a definite orientation: medicines that, by his information, were harmful he did not admit into his pharmacy's stock.

By contrast, the pharmacy held a great many remedies whose beneficial action had been reliably established.

Moreover, the pharmacy abounded in such means of physical action on the organism as cupping glasses and heating pads. Especially great importance was attached to sternutatory (sneeze-inducing) agents and all manner of plasters. Plasters as a form of medicine are very widely used in Chinese medicine to this day.

Wu Shangxian left a rich literary legacy. In his works he attached extremely great importance to disease prevention and the hardening of the organism. These physicians lit up China in the 17th–18th centuries with a bright ray and made a great contribution to the development of Chinese medicine.

Court painting and the traditions of professional artists

Even amid Qing repression, the imperial court sustained a rich tradition of professional painting, and it was here that Western artistic techniques entered Chinese art. The court employed professional painters to record ceremonies, portraits and imperial life, working in parallel with the scholar-amateur painters and the more idiosyncratic Individualist artists who pursued personal expression rather than official commissions. The three great Qing emperors — Kangxi, Yongzheng and Qianlong — presided over a period of prosperity that funded these workshops generously.

The most striking fusion of traditions came through the Jesuits, European missionaries who served at court. The Italian Jesuit Giuseppe Castiglione, known in China as Lang Shining, spent decades in Beijing painting for the emperors and blending Western realism — modelling, perspective and lifelike depiction of animals and portraits — with Chinese materials and formats. This European influence on Qing art, transmitted through Jesuit interactions, gave court painting a distinctive hybrid character that fascinated later collectors and historians alike.

Chinese porcelain in Europe in the 17th–18th centuries

Chinese porcelain became one of the most coveted luxuries in 17th- and 18th-century Europe, prized precisely because Europeans could not yet make it. Chinese potters had mastered hard paste porcelain — a translucent, resonant ceramic fired at very high temperatures from kaolin and porcelain stone — while European workshops could produce only opaque earthenware or, at best, imitative soft paste porcelain. The gulf between Chinese porcelain and Western earthenware ceramics was so wide that fine porcelain was often called simply "china."

The centre of this production was Jingdezhen, the great porcelain city whose imperial and commercial kilns supplied both the Qing court and the export market. Under the Kangxi, Yongzheng and Qianlong emperors, Jingdezhen refined enamel and colour innovations — new palettes of overglaze enamels that gave Qing wares their brilliant decoration — and shipped enormous quantities through Guangzhou to Europe and America. European response was intense: after decades of experiment, the Meissen manufactory in Saxony finally reproduced true hard paste porcelain in the early 18th century, and factories such as England's Worcester Porcelain Company developed their own soft paste porcelain and imitated Chinese designs in earthenware to satisfy demand.

The fashion for chinoiserie and the borrowing of Chinese aesthetics

The European appetite for Chinese goods gave rise to Chinoiserie, a decorative movement that adapted — and freely reinvented — Chinese motifs across furniture, textiles, wallpaper and ceramics. Flourishing alongside the Rococo style, Chinoiserie filled 18th-century interiors with pagodas, dragons, blossoming branches and imagined Chinese landscapes, few of them accurate but all of them fashionable. This aesthetic appropriation reflected a genuine fascination with the East even as it romanticized a China most Europeans would never see, since the closed-door policy barred them from the country itself.

Chinese lacquer and tea accessories for Western markets

Beyond porcelain, Chinese workshops supplied Western markets with lacquerware and a range of accessories tied to the booming tea trade. Lacquered boxes, screens and cabinets, along with tea caddies for storing precious leaves, entered European and American homes as the tea service became a luxury ritual. Metalworkers also produced Paktong — a silvery copper-nickel-zinc alloy — into candlesticks, fenders and other export wares admired for their resemblance to silver. Together, tea, porcelain, lacquer and Paktong made the China Trade a defining feature of 18th-century material life on both sides of the Atlantic, feeding fashionable homes furnished in the Federal/Neoclassical style.

The decline of the Qing empire in the 19th century

The isolation and stagnation of the 18th century left the Qing empire ill-prepared for the pressures of the 19th, when foreign powers forced open its markets and internal crises multiplied. The rigid Canton System, the ban on modern industry and the suppression of new ideas all left China weak precisely as European states grew stronger, and the balance of the China Trade tipped decisively against the Qing.

The transformation of foreign trade practice

Foreign trade practice was transformed in the 19th century when Britain, unwilling to keep paying silver for Chinese tea, began flooding China with opium grown in India. The opium trade reversed the flow of silver, spread addiction, and provoked Qing efforts at suppression that Britain answered with force. The resulting Opium Wars shattered the Canton System, forced open additional ports, ceded territory, and imposed unequal treaties — marking the moment when the self-contained commercial order of the previous century collapsed under foreign pressure.

The Boxer Rebellion and the end of the Qing dynasty

The Boxer Rebellion of 1899–1901 was the last convulsion of a dying dynasty. The Yihequan — "Fist in the name of justice and harmony," whose clenched-fist emblem gave them the Western name "Boxers" — rose against foreign missionaries and imperial influence, and their revolt was crushed in 1900 by the combined forces of eight foreign powers who then looted priceless cultural treasures, including surviving volumes of the great Ming encyclopedia. Weakened beyond recovery, the Qing dynasty fell little more than a decade later, ending more than two millennia of imperial rule and beginning China's transition from empire to republic.

The legacy of China's 17th–18th centuries

The 17th and 18th centuries left China with a paradoxical legacy: a civilization of immense wealth, artistry and knowledge that had deliberately sealed itself off from the currents transforming the wider world. This was the era that produced the most sought-after porcelain on earth, sustained a court art enriched by European technique, and preserved a deep medical tradition — yet it was also the era of literary prisons, banned shipbuilding, and a persecution of scholarship whose costs China would pay dearly in the 19th century.

The consequences of that self-isolation echo into debates about China's place in the modern world. Historians and economists note that China was among the dominant economies of the 16th to 18th centuries before its long relative decline — a decline set in motion by exactly the closed-door policies described here. That history now frames arguments about a possible "Chinese Century," about the People's Republic of China's rise through programmes such as Made in China 2025 and the Belt and Road Initiative, and about the balance of power between China and the United States. For readers exploring this longer arc of the past, our wider coverage of history traces how eras of openness and closure have repeatedly shaped a nation's fortunes.