History of China The Qing Dynasty

At the height of the Qing Dynasty, the Qianlong Emperor ruled one of the largest and wealthiest empires on earth. Within little more than a century, that confidence would be tested by corruption, rebellion, foreign war, political reform, and a world changing faster than the imperial court could comfortably follow.The Qing Dynasty: A History of China, Part Three follows China from the late Qianlong era through Jiaqing, Daoguang, Xianfeng, Tongzhi, Guangxu, and the final years of Qing rule.The story moves from Heshen's extraordinary rise and fall to the White Lotus Rebellion, Lin Zexu and the Opium crisis, the First and Second Opium Wars, the Taiping upheaval, Prince Gong and Sushun, Empress Dowager Cixi, the Tongzhi Restoration, Zuo Zongtang's western campaigns, the Self-Strengthening Movement, the Sino-French conflict, and the First Sino-Japanese War. It then enters the age of Kang Youwei, Liang Qichao, Yuan Shikai, Sun Yat-sen, constitutional reform, and revolution.Along the way, complicated court politics, military crises, foreign diplomacy, institutional reforms, and larger historical changes are explained in clear, conversational narrative.This is the final stretch of the Qing story: an empire still capable of reform and resistance, yet increasingly forced to confront a difficult question-how does an old political order survive in a new world?