hello everybody and welcome back to the historians crafts so i've got one more video to do on the new historiography but it occurred to me and a few of you did point out that you know talking about the shifts in historical interpretation for any event doesn't really work unless there's some kind of a baseline for discussion so what this is going to be then is a slightly brief detour outlining the general history of the rise of the early qing dynasty because it's designed to be a general video though obviously some of the details are going to be missing here so what i want you all to do is use this as an introduction to dive deeper into the topic all right so let's talk about the qing who were these people well they have an extremely upsetting end the last qing emperor this guy named puyi was overthrown during the uh senhai revolution in 1911 and he becomes a puppet ruler of the japanese for the colony of manchester and after world war ii puyi basically loses everything he becomes tried um as a war criminal during the tokyo trials and he's forced to do things in prison he had never before had to actually do now this is not something like you know dropping the soap um this is basic like daily routine stuff like brushing his teeth buttoning his shirt etc he was the emperor of china he had people do do this for him which leads to the other prisoners you know verbally abusing the guy and puyi after the war basically comes to regret what he had done and the things done in his name as he was emperor and he basically becomes a propaganda piece for the people's republic of china because the guy goes on record numerous times stating how good life was in communist china but there is some doubt as to how much he really believed this on the other hand the qing dynasty have a long glorious rise to power and they produce some of the best emperors to ever govern any country in east asia now as we've gone over in the other videos on the new chain historiography even suggesting that the term early modern or modern applies to east asian civilization prior to some date in the late 1700s or the 1800s can seriously mess with how we conceive of these civilizations the whole notion of an advance from the distant past towards modernity moving through the ancient classical medieval and then the early modern and then the modern stages okay this was developed initially to explain europe and to explain europe's historical development it was not developed to explain places outside of it so this is part of the reason why japanese historians tend to reject things like you know the term medieval um in the term feudalism when talking about the sengoku jidai and the um ashikaga shogunate it doesn't quite apply but at the same time if as we talked about in the first couple videos you know if we think about the term modern to mean having paper money credit systems you know high rates of urbanization uh market-based economies perhaps resembling something like proto-capitalism and what maybe looks like the start of an industrial revolution well then the chinese song dynasty which lasts between 960 and 1279 looks astonishingly modern well before europe does and if we understand the story military lens what we'd be looking for is you know gunpowder empires and um organized professional militaries not these kind of vassalistic fighting forces these centralized um power blocks of armed soldiers which are controlled by states and if that's the case then the ming dynasty looks like it fits pretty well into that category now the standard way of looking at the end of that dynasty the end of the ming is that the ming basically were corrupt and despite the appearance of a vibrant economy okay the state is going bankrupt pretty quickly and it's starting to break up it's starting to dissolve and by 1644 the ming dynasty had more or less fallen and china becomes conquered by the founders of the chig dynasty the manchu although that conquest doesn't happen all at once that's the key thing the ming ching transitions about 20 25 years but we'll talk more about that later in this video and [Music] despite the conservative reaction that occurs under the early qing in which remove some aspects of what we would really consider to be features of a modern state okay the qing continue in the use of gunpowder and professional armies and they aim to build a centralized polity a centralized state along the general lines of state centralization in the 1600s and the early 1700s which we call the eurasian turn so let's talk about this manchu well prior to 1600 ish there were no manchu as a distinct people they literally did not exist instead living in the land that we today called manchuria uh were a toguzek-speaking people that we called the georgians who had been there for [Music] 1600 they'd been there for at least 500 years by this point and the georgian were broken up into different tribes of varying sizes and in the early 1600s okay one of the local chiefs a man named narachi although in manchester which pronounced something more like he begins to unify the jerseyan tribes and the unification is a great story in and of itself and it warrants videos of its own but to cut this down okay probably the two most important things narachi does is one he orders the adaptation of the mongolian alphabet to suit the needs of the junction and number two the creation of the banners so there were four banners that is military units based around four flags of different colors red yellow blue and white although eventually there are eight mantra banners with the red yellow blue and white being the quarters and then you have a red yellow blue and white um which have a border around the flag but basically okay each banner consists of 10 battalions and each battalion consists of five companies which consists of 300 households each now the banner system unites not only uh the georgians but it unites people of chinese turkic mongolian tibetan and korean origin although this is only after the qing really conquered those regions and these were also their own distinct banner units now there is also one other military unit uh this is the green standard army and the green standard army basically was and this is a cut down form of really looking at this but the green standard but the green standard army essentially were ming troops ethnic chinese troops which surrendered to the ching and then became another branch of the military but what is important about the banners here for the rise of the manchu okay is that it makes these positions hereditary if your family served in the banner system that's your job and that's your only job because it was a closed system and because it was military okay the german banners require a distinctive hairstyle the queue and they were expected to all learn the same language so the result okay is that the manchu experience ethnogenesis transforming the urchin into the manchu whose name becomes used starting around 1615 and by 1635 it really had become the official name for the people in the process of doing this in the process of unifying the tribes into the manchu narachi also found the later jin dynasty which eventually becomes the qing in both his family and the mantra more generally okay they start intermarrying with the neighboring mongolians although the mantra themselves really were more of a seminomatic state or even sedentary um rather than fully nomadic okay the incorporation of mongols into the new state not only lends the mantra with their military strength you know horse archers i love horse archers i'll probably do a video on them at some point god i love horus archers anyway um the incorporation of the mongols into the new jin dynasty it gives the manchu their military strength but it also makes mongolia probably the second most common language in montreal okay with it being spoken frequently in the manchu court and on top of that narachi's successor this guy named huang taiji in 1635 he sends out armies and they conquer a portion of mongolia and he gets his hands on the great jade seal of genghis khan and that allows the manchu okay to start making a claim to an empire even greater than mongol or manchu or han which is part of what the new qing historiography emphasizes this is not just about china it's a multi-ethnic multicultural um celestial empire it incorporates everybody and they use different methods of governance to govern the different people because that's the best way to do it they have an imperialism of their own they have a divine um perhaps kind of universalist imperial justification of their own and eventually the qing themselves aren't quote unquote pure either the kangshi emperor who is the guy who basically um not really conquers but he's the guy who brings stability to bonchuria into china after the qing conquest he's the um third or fourth emperor i cannot remember which off the top of my head of the qing dynasty okay he brings consolidation and stability to it now the kangchi emperor was of mixed manchu han chinese and mongol ancestry owing to the politics of intermarriage and he used this to present himself as like a blend of all the different peoples so once again the point of the new ching historiography stands up pretty well it's not just about china and on top of this um the country emperor's grantham the chiang lang emperor who we'll talk more about in a couple minutes he doesn't just speak manchu he speaks manchu chinese mongolian and he apparently has a passing knowledge of like uyghur other turkic languages um and tibetan so the qing really is a multi-ethnic multicultural empire and they do try to present it as such now as the mantra were uniting okay and as the ming dynasty was collapsing out on the eurasian steps other groups of mongols were also going a transformation of their own now drawn on a newly constructed law code and tribal alliance is bolstered by marriage alliances and a shared united faith in a branch of tibetan buddhism the mongols once more attempt to construct a khanate an empire in a place called zhangaria jungaria is i mean technically it's part of western china now but it really goes beyond that and it's basically like eastern um inner asia okay now the drunkard connect the last step empire to really ever exist was based along the yellow river in wards today like i said western china and it extends into parts of modern-day kazakhstan tajikistan kyrgyzstan and siberia now like most other empires the jungle kane they had a religious backing they had a religious justification for their imperialism and [Music] that religious justification is as follows and it's important that we understand this because it becomes important not only to the qing for this idea of a celestial um universalist empire but also for modern chinese politics and tibetan politics and modern mongolian politics in 1578 one of the mongol leaders this is before the mongols try to construct the uh jungle connect this guy named altan khan a leader of the tumid mongol tribe he invites this tibetan monk named salam gyatso um tibetan monk who believed he was the or who alton anyway believed was the reincarnation of the hindu buddhist deity of allah is a bodhisattva so bodhisattvas are people in buddhism who reach enlightenment but they choose not to go to nirvana they choose to become bodhisattvas beings who reach enlightenment but stay on earth to help others achieve enlightenment so if you see or have ever seen a east asian statue or painting of a guy with like ten thousand arms and ten 000 hands that's avalika tesura his whole thing is that he's uh one of the bodysuckers of compassion and he has ten thousand hands and ten thousand arms to reach out and touch the masses and help them achieve enlightenment so sonam gyatsu is the uh reincarnation of this deity so these people believed and ultan khan invites him to mongolia well sonam yasu goes to mongolia and he tells alton khan look yeah i'm the descendant of avalika tesura but you my friend you are the descendant of kublai khan and thus you are related to his grandfather genghis khan which gives alton khan in theory okay political control over all the mongols and ultan when she hears this he converts to sonam gyatsu's branch of tibetan buddhism and so did most of the mongols and he gives sonam a title meaning something like oceanic teacher the word oceanic and mongol having a cosmic like significance although you know take my explanation with a heavy pinch of salt because this is pretty simplified but in mongolian okay that title for oceanic teacher is dalai lama so right from the get-go the mongols who form the jungle khanate and the tibetan are linked to what's called the patron priest relationship but once the qing dynasty becomes established okay the manchu also claim a special um patron priest relationship with the dalai lama and the tibetans and this is important not only for the general outline of ching history i'm trying to you know do in this video but it's also important to the broader discussion of the nuchang historiography because again one of the major themes which we touched upon in the second video in that trilogy is that the qing have some form of uh celestial you know grandiose imperial ideology in tibetan buddhism which is not from china okay forms part of the backbone to this so once again and i realize i'm repeating myself now but it's that important to getting a grasp on the entire idea of the new ching historiography is that characterizing the qing as the last dynasty of imperial china okay and referring to the qing simply as a chinese state is beyond inaccurate because the research done since the late 90s especially with specifically manchu documents not just chinese but montreux documents okay has revealed that there's so much more to it than that there's manchuria and then there's china and then there's everywhere else and they try to integrate everybody into one system eventually though the qing do manage to uh politically outmaneuver the junglers and the tibetans fall under the ching zone of influence with ching troops occupying the tibetan capital of lhasa in 1720 although it's only about 100 troops so what happens next is the qing launched another war of conquest against the jungars and i'm saying another okay because this was the second one the first ching chungar war runs about 1690 to 1696 with the second running from 1718 to 1720 and eventually it breaks the power of the jungars and it incorporates them into their empire now this is where we get to one of the nasty sad bits of history because the jungar mongols they rebel one of the most illustrious emperors of the qing was the chianlong emperor he reigned over the qing dynasty during its golden age the haiching era okay between 1683 and 1799 um and he was one of the longest-running monarchs of his dynasty and also one of the most conscientious taking filial piety so seriously that he abdicates actually in favor of his son the qing emperor so that he himself would not govern longer than his grandfather the kangsi emperor but to put down the mongol rebellion in zangaria as well as other uprisings in the western regions like places in tibet um the chiang lang emperor orchestrates a military action known as the 10 great campaigns and he gives the following order concerning the jungar mongols show no mercy at all to these rebels only the old and the weak should be saved our previous military campaigns were far too lenient if we act as before our troops will withdraw and further turmoil for the trouble will occur if a rebel is captured and his followers wish to surrender he must personally come to the garrison prostrate himself before the commander and request surrender if he only sends someone to request submission it is undoubtedly a trick telson goonje one of the generals to massacre the crafty jungaras do not believe what they say it's estimated that maybe 40 of the drunkards die of smallpox during these wars with some others fleeing the borders now the majority though they're either enslaved or they're killed outright the jungler mongols were wiped out so utterly that scholars often refer to this as the jungle genocide and here i use that word because it's perhaps not incorrect because we do have the surviving orders we do know that a lot of the stuff was intentional now with the further expansion of russia and the kazakhanet okay the step becomes closed for the first time in the history of inner asia and the jungles were obliterated man woman and child there were further atrocities committed against the tibetans and the jinchuan hill peoples with the qing forces breaking finally against the kingdoms of southeast asia they could not get through the jungles once the qing simply maintained a heavy frontier garrison all along the frontiers what is today you know basically central asia mongolia western china that area the qing used decentralized methods of governance orchestrating their rule through a government office called the bureau of colonial affairs and using native turks and mongols to control the steppe regions and organizing them into banners of their own so that's what's going on with the rise of the qing in mongolia in the step now let's return to china proper so by the early 1600s okay the chinese ming dynasty was experiencing a myriad of problems and by 1640 the state was um essentially bankrupt this led to a ming peasant dizi chang to raise forces in northeast china and rebel in commanding a strategic pass between the great wall of china and the sea a ming general this guy named he refuses to submit to what he sees um as a peasant upstart and cut off as he is from ming forces to the south he sent a request for aid to the manchu and the mantra obliged and on the 5th of june 1644 the banner armies entered beijing where they found the last main emperor the trung zen emperor had taken his own life by hanging the manchu claiming the mandate of heaven this idea that celestial forces back dynasties or withdrawal said support bury the last ming emperor with full ceremony and they present themselves as the legitimate heirs to the ming by issuing tax cuts and generally trying to rally um ethnic chinese support for the manchu but why did general wu side with the mantra in the first place well like i said a moment ago he was cut off from ming forces but there's a little more to it than that lee was ethnically chinese not a manchu who the chinese despised as uh barbarians but by all accounts lee was a brute and he was boorish and poorly educated so when his peasant armies attacked and took pay king modern day beijing the city and its people were massacred now lee also had supposedly taken wu's concubine and because there were reports of lenient treatment of chinese by the manchu who had you know surrendered to the manchu wu decided that the lesser of two evils was probably the better option here so led by the prince um dorgan the banners marched south now the transition from the ming to the qing was approximately a 20-year process and it involved much heavy fighting not only against rebels but also against being loyalists and ming pretenders to the south just because one ming general decided to throw in his lot with the manchu okay didn't mean that everyone did and many being loyalists still believe that the dynasty had a fighting chance it was still worth fighting for so lee and his peasant armies were harried by the mantra forces as he fled south uh towards sean and he was then chased out of xi'an towards the city of wu chong and in the process he's caught in the mountains of jiangxi in the summer of 1645 he was killed he was either killed by the manchu or he was beaten to death by peasants for trying to take the food we don't really know as that was happening though the mantra faced another rebellion um this time by a leader named zhang xian zhong who was based in sichuan province there he challenges the mantra not just militarily but ideologically as well claiming the mandate of heaven for himself and proclaiming the great western kingdom centered on the city of chengdu now john was certainly over ambitious perhaps he was potentially insane there were plans to launch you know wars of conquest not only against the manchu but to subdue china korea taiwan vietnam mongolia and eventually the philippines but you know failing at this and sinking further into debauchery and cruelty zhang raised chengdu and he conducts a burnt earth campaign of increasing ferocity before he's captured and killed in 1647. and with that okay the time had now come to address the ming remnants in full so the prince of phu a member of the ming royal family he attempts to rally support in the south and he's proclaimed emperor in the city of non king and realizing that the manchu have the upper hand okay he sends a message to dorgan the mantra regent and he offers to work together but doragon counter offers saying that you know if you renounce your um imperial protections you can reign over a small bit of territory and you can keep your life naturally this was rejected so the prince of foo's court okay was plagued by petty-powered politics and other squabbles so that while the mantra banner army has advanced southward his court bickers and the end result is that the garrison you know it only holds out for about a week and then the printer foo was captured and sent north to pay king where he dies the next year several other claimants also arose and fell pretty quickly before the last claimant to make an effort to revive the ming you know shows up in 1653 and this last claimant was the prince of gui so the prince of gui as the last descendant of the wan lee emperor who was really like the last major emperor of the ming okay he's the last hope of the ming loyalists but he lacks experience and he had been pampered his whole life so one would think he would fall fairly quickly and he does after about a year about a year and a half but the ming were active in guangxi province this massive area um the manchu were only ever able to conquer only partly in the beginning and it was populated by fierce chinese resistance fighters to the manchu eventually though you know the qing dynasty they do gain the upper hand and they force the prince of gui out of the country across the border um into burma and in 1661 the qing launched a final attack into the burmese kingdom and in 1662 the prince of gui is handed over and he's killed by strangulation okay the qing finally had come into their own and the new power was rising in east asia so now the chain more or less of domination le manchu asserted themselves over the chinese as a distinct ruling elite and throughout the empire okay banner troops were posted and garrisoned to key cities and fortresses and manchu and chinese were legally kept separate with one of the key distinctions okay being that manchu women they don't practice foot binding nevertheless though the ching dynasty quickly enacted policies to address the fact that due to the geographical spread of the state it really was a multicultural empire the qing had three official languages mongol manchu and chinese and although the court was conducted initially in a mixture of manchu and mongol and although there were periods where it was now exclusively manchu before long chinese makes appearances with increasing frequency and eventually chinese becomes the lingua franca of the empire by about eighteen hundred although that doesn't stop the chiang lang emperor from attempting to learn and reportedly be fluent in montreal mongol chinese tibetan uyghur and tango basically all of the major languages and after the establishment of the qing dynasty and the end of the ming ching transition embassies from europe came fairly quickly as did embassies from vietnam korea and japan and one stability was arrived at and centralization more or less achieved under the kanji emperor the empire of the great qing led by the house of ashin gyorio the celestial empire's glory had only just begun