Chinese History

The Yuan dynasty was destroyed by the indigenous Ming dynasty, which initially was very successful in its programme of political change and land reform. The Ming built the forbidden city in Beijing, into which only eunuchs and women (the emperor's relatives and concubines) were allowed to enter. A huge service of eunuchs duly emerged to do the day to day business of the court. and it was a eunuch Ming admiral who began exploring the world a couple of centuries before Europeans began their voyages to Asia and the Americas. These Chinese fleets even reached the east coast of Africa, from where their ships brought back giraffes and other animals to amuse the emperor. These vessels were far larger and more powerful than European ships of their time, and some historians believe that if these voyages had been allowed to continue and a fleet had sailed to Europe, European military forces at the time would have been able to put up very little resistance to these giant vessels. Court in-fighting and massive corruption amongst the eunuchs led to these voyages being curtailed, and to fatal inaction on the issue of 'barbarians' attacking from the north. In fact, much of the Great Wall that exists today was built by the Ming, as it was the only measure that the court could agree on to deal with the problem. Eventually the Ming were overwhelmed by the superior military organisation of the Manchurian armies, leading to the establishment of the non-Chinese Qing dynasty.

Although the Qing were not ethnically Chinese, they rapidly became highly sinicised, utilising and improving upon existing Chinese bureaucratic and economic structures to rule. It is from the this period that the famous 'queue' hairstyle came to be worn by Chinese men. Chinese men were obliged as a sign of subjugation to the Manchu people to shave their heads and grow a long pony-tail at the back, known as a queue. Ironically, this later became a symbol of Chinese tradition, and many Chinese officials resented having to give these up at the dawn of the Republican era in China. Strangely for a non-Chinese group, the Qing were the most staunchly conservative of Chinese dynasties in terms of traditional Confucian morals. Conservative attitudes to marriage and male-female relationships, the arts, and the relationship between ruler and subjects which are often thought of as traditionally Chinese result partly from this period, and contrast starkly with the relatively liberal attitudes of the Tang, for example. Perhaps as a consequence of this, relatively little Qing era high culture is studied today, with the exception of early vernacular Chinese works which were frowned upon in their time, and only came to be valued in the modern era. The later years of the Qing were characterised by corruption and a refusal to reform or deal with the emerging modern world. Military and economic harassment by European colonial powers and later by a rapidly modernising Japan, coupled with domestic anti-Manchu and anti-government rebellions weakened the Qing until an almost bloodless revolution removed them from power in 1911.

For more on later Chinese history please see the other articles on Chinese history in the Asian Absolute Directory of Useful Information.

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