Manchu banners built China's last and largest empire
China's final imperial house was not Han but Manchu. From a Jurchen confederation that proclaimed the Later Jin in 1616, the Qing seized Beijing in 1644, finished southern resistance by 1683, and at their height ruled more land than any earlier Chinese dynasty—only to abdicate in 1912.
Nurhaci of the Aisin Gioro, once a Ming border vassal fluent in Chinese and Mongolian, unified Jurchen clans, built the Eight Banners (Manchu, Han, and Mongol), and in 1616 styled himself Khan of the Later Jin. In 1618 he listed "Seven Grievances" and broke with Ming overlordship, shifting capitals from Hetu Ala to Liaoyang (1621) and Mukden/Shenyang (1625). His son Hong Taiji, after Ming Portuguese cannon stung the Jurchens in 1627, cast European-style guns with defecting metallurgists, adopted the ethnonym "Manchu" in November 1635, folded Mongol allies into a separate Banner hierarchy, and in 1636 proclaimed the Great Qing and took the imperial title—possibly playing water against the Ming's fiery "Ming" in correlative cosmology.
As Ming rule collapsed, Shun rebels held Beijing until general Wu Sangui opened Shanhai Pass to Qing forces; under the Shunzhi Emperor the capital fell in 1644. Ming remnants and the Revolt of the Three Feudatories delayed full conquest until 1683, opening the High Qing. Kangxi (1661–1722) played Confucian patron and Buddhist sponsor while population and economy grew. Qianlong (1735–1796) led the Ten Great Campaigns and staged cultural projects. By 1790 the empire was, by one ranking, the world's fourth-largest to that date; peacetime population later approached 400 million while tax receipts stayed frozen, breeding fiscal strain. Emperors defined "China" as a multi-ethnic whole—Northeast, Xinjiang, Mongolia, Tibet included—not Han provinces alone.
Hong Taiji's six Ming-style boards (1631) mattered little until conquest neared completion. He staffed offices with surrendered Han yet kept Manchu quotas at the top; after Nurhaci's harsh post-1623 turn against Liaodong Han, Hong wooed defectors such as Hong Chengchou. By 1648 fewer than one-sixth of bannermen were Manchu by ancestry. Later shocks—Opium Wars and unequal treaties, Taiping and other revolts, defeat by Japan, aborted Hundred Days' Reform, Boxer catastrophe—ended with the 1911 Wuchang rising and the last emperor's February 1912 abdication. The territorial shell of modern China largely follows Qing frontiers.
Source: Qing dynasty
