Qing Dynasty

The Qing dynasty was China's last imperial system of government, an absolute monarchy under the Qing emperor administered through a distinct Manchu banner military and social structure layered over a retained Chinese civil bureaucracy and imperial examination system. Founded by the Manchu Aisin Gioro clan, who proclaimed the Qing in Manchuria in 1636 and conquered Beijing in 1644 after the Ming dynasty's collapse, the regime governed as an ethnic-minority elite that deliberately preserved existing Han Chinese administrative institutions while imposing distinct Manchu customs on its subjects, a governance strategy comparable in structure, though not in origin, to indirect rule elsewhere. Qing territorial and administrative reach was greatest under the Kangxi, Yongzheng and Qianlong emperors in the eighteenth century, encompassing Mongolia, Tibet, Xinjiang and Taiwan alongside China proper. Military defeats in the Opium Wars, the Taiping Rebellion and further nineteenth-century conflicts forced a series of unequal treaties and foreign concessions that badly weakened central authority, and the system collapsed in the 1911 Revolution, ending formally with the abdication of the child emperor Puyi in February 1912.