China's longest-reigning emperor took the throne at seven and ruled 61 years
Enthroned as a small boy while regents governed in his name, the Kangxi Emperor was barely a teenager when he had the most overbearing of them arrested. He then ruled China for more than half a century, and later blamed himself for a war his own stubbornness had started.
Born Xuanye in the Forbidden City in 1654, the third son of the Shunzhi Emperor became emperor in 1661. Four regents appointed in his father's name held power, until one of them, Oboi, had a rival executed and made himself sole regent. In 1669, helped by the grandmother who had raised him, the young emperor had Oboi arrested and began ruling himself. He named three priorities: taming floods on the Yellow River, repairing the Grand Canal, and dealing with three powerful feudal lords in the south. A contemporary description pictures a tall man with bright eyes and a face scarred by smallpox, who spent three months a year hunting.
The third priority went badly at first. Those southern domains had been handed to Ming generals who helped the Qing take China in 1644. Against most of his advisers, Kangxi told the three lords to surrender their domains and withdraw to Manchuria, which set off an eight-year rebellion in which Wu Sangui's forces overran much of the southwest. Kangxi won, largely with Han Chinese troops of the Green Standard Army, offered clemency to civilians caught in the fighting, and spent years reflecting on his share of the blame for the deaths.
Other frontiers followed. In 1683 Admiral Shi Lang's fleet of some 300 ships defeated the Ming loyalist Zheng regime off Penghu, and its ruler surrendered and joined the Qing nobility. Clashes with Russia along the Amur ended in the 1689 Treaty of Nerchinsk, which fixed a border between the two empires. Campaigns brought Mongol groups under Qing rule.
At home his reign brought stability and relative prosperity after decades of war, opening the High Qing era continued by his son and grandson. His court compiled the Kangxi Dictionary and an anthology of all known Tang poems. He first welcomed Jesuit missionaries, then turned against Catholicism over the Chinese Rites controversy. A bitter succession dispute clouded his final years, and when he died in 1722 his fourth son took the throne as the Yongzheng Emperor.
Source: Kangxi Emperor
