History of Beijing - Qing Dynasty

Qing Dynasty

Dorgon preserved trappings of imperial power including the bureaucracy, rituals and palaces, and moved the Qing capital to Beijing. In so doing, he positioned the Qing as the political heir to the Ming and legitimate ruler of China. Above, Qing imperial procession at the Forbidden City depicted in an 18th century Jesuit painting.

On May 3, 1644, the Manchus seized Beijing in the name of freeing the city from the bandit Li Zicheng. Dorgon held a state funeral for Ming Emperor Chongzhen and reappointed many Ming officials. In October, he moved the boy emperor Shunzhi from the old capital Shenyang into the Forbidden City and made Beijing the new seat of the Qing Dynasty. In the following decades, the Manchus would conquer the rest of the country and ruled China for nearly three centuries from the city. During this era, Beijing was also known as Jingshi which corresponds with the Manchu name Gemun Hecen. The city’s population, which had fallen to 144,000 in 1644, rebounded to 539,000 in 1647 (the population of the surrounding area rose from 554,000 to 1.3 million).

The Qing largely retained the physical configuration of Beijing inside the city walls. Each of the Eight Manchu Banners was assigned to guard and live near the eight gates of the Inner City. Outside the city, the Qing Court seized large tracts of land for Manchu noble estates. Northwest of the city, Qing emperors built several large palatial gardens. In 1684, Kangxi Emperor built the Shangchun Garden on the site of the Ming Dynasty's Qinghua (or Tsinghua) Garden. In the early 18th century, he began building the Yuanmingyuan, also known as the "Old Summer Palace", which the Qianlong Emperor expanded with European Baroque-style garden pavilions. In 1750, Qianlong built the Yiheyuan, commonly referred to as the "Summer Palace". The two summer palaces represent both the culmination of Qing imperial splendor and its decline. Both were ransacked and razed by invading Western powers in the late Qing.

Manchu rule of Beijing gave rise to the city's local dialect of Mandarin Chinese, which eventually became the official national language for the country. In the early Qing, Han officials serving in the imperial court were required to learn the Manchu language, but most Manchus eventually learned to speak Chinese. In 1728, the Yongzheng Emperor, who could not understand officials from southern China, decreed that all takers of the civil service examination must be able to speak Beijing Mandarin. Though the decree was eventually lifted under the Jiaqing Emperor, the Beijing dialect spread first among officials and then among commoners under subsequent regimes. Shortly after the founding of the Republic of China, the Commission on the Unification of Pronunciation made the Beijing dialect the national standard for spoken Chinese in 1913. After the capital was moved to Nanjing, National Languages Committee reaffirmed the Beijing dialect as the standard in 1932. The People's Republic of China followed suit in 1955.

Longevity Hill and Kunming Lake

The Qing Dynasty maintained a relatively stable supply of food for the population of the capital during the late 17th and early 18th centuries. The government's grain tribute system brought food from the provinces and kept grain prices stable. Soup kitchens provided relief to the needy. The secure food supply helped the Qing court maintain a degree of political stability. Temple fairs such as the Huguo Fair, which are like monthly bazaars held around temples, added to the commercial vibrance of the city. At the height of Emperor Qianlong’s reign in 1781, the city had a population of 776,242 (and another 2.18 million in the surrounding region). Thereafter, Qing authorities began to restrict inward migration to the city. A century later, the census of 1881-82 showed similar figures of 776,111 and 2.45 million.

In 1790, the Qing Court's Nanfu office, which was in charge of organizing entertainment for the emperor, invited the dramatic opera troupes from Anhui to perform for Qianlong. Under Qianlong, the Nanfu had up to a thousand employees, including actors, musicians, and court eunuchs. In 1827, Emperor Daoguang, Qianlong's grandson, changed the name from Nanfu to Shengpingshu, and reduced the number of performances. Nevertheless, the court invited opera troupes from Hubei came to perform. The Anhui and Hubei operatic styles eventually blended together in the mid-19th century to form Peking Opera.

Most of Beijing’s oldest business establishments date to the Qing era. Tongrentang, opened in 1669 by a royal physician, became the sole supplier of herbal medicine to the Qing court in 1723. Baikui Laohao, the Hui Muslim restaurant serving traditional Beijing cuisine, opened its first store next to the Longfu Temple in 1780. The roast duck dish was part of the imperial menu dating back to the Yuan Dynasty and restaurants serving Anas peking to the public opened as early as the 1400s, but it was Quanjude, which opened in 1864 and introduced the “hung oven,” that made Peking Duck world famous.

In 1813, some 200 adherents of the White Lotus sect launched a surprise siege on the Forbidden City but were repelled. In response, authorities imposed the baojia system of social surveillance and control.

Lord Macartney's mission to China arrived in Beijing in 1792, but failed to persuade the Qianlong Emperor to ease trade restrictions or to permit a permanent British Embassy in the city. Nevertheless, Macartney observed weaknesses within the Qing regime, which informed later, more forceful British efforts to enter China.

Left:Illustration by Godefroy Durand on December 22, 1860 depicting the looting of a Baroque-style hall in the Old Summer Palace by Anglo-French forces. Right: The ruins of the Old Summer Palace Left: U.S. Army depiction of the assault on Beijing's city wall at Dongbianmen on August 14, 1900. Right: Foreign armies of the Eight-Nation Alliance assemble inside the Forbidden City after capturing Beijing.

In 1860, during the Second Opium War, Anglo-French forces annihilated the Qing army at Baliqiao east of Beijing. They captured the city and looted the Summer Palace and Old Summer Palace. The British consul Lord Elgin ordered the burning of the Old Summer Palace in retaliation of Qing mistreatment of Western prisoners. He spared the Forbidden City, saving it as a venue for the treaty-signing ceremony. Under the Convention of Peking that ended the war, the Qing government was forced to allow Western powers to establish permanent diplomatic presence in the city. The foreign embassies were based southeast of the Forbidden City in the Beijing Legation Quarter.

Faculty of the Imperial Capital University, the institutional predecessor of Peking University. Grand Auditorium of Tsinghua University, established by the Boxer Indemnity Scholar Program. The Peking Union Medical College, founded in 1906 by the American and British missionaries, remains one of China's top medical schools.

In 1886, the Empress Dowager had Summer Palace rebuilt using funds originally designated for the imperial navy. After the Qing government was defeated by Japan in the First Sino-Japanese War and forced to sign the humiliating Treaty of Shimonoseki, Kang Yuwei assembled 1,300 scholars outside Xuanwumen to protest the treaty and drafted a 10,000 character appeal to the Guangxu Emperor. In June 1898, Guangxu adopted the proposals of Kang Yuwei, Liang Qichao and other scholars and launched the Hundred Days' Reform. The reforms alarmed the Empress Dowager who, with the help of her cousin Ronglu and Beiyang military commander Yuan Shikai, launched a coup. Guangxu was imprisoned, Kang and Liang fled abroad, and Tan Sitong and five other scholar reformers were publicly beheaded at Caishikou outside Xuanwumen. One legacy of the short-lived reform era was the founding of Peking University in 1898. The university would have a profound impact on the intellectual and political history of the city.

In 1898, a millenarian group called the Righteous Harmony Society Movement rebelled in Shandong Province in reaction to Western imperialist expansion into China. They attacked Westerners especially missionaries and converted Chinese, and were called the "Boxers" by Westerners. The Qing court initially suppressed the Boxers but the Empress Dowager attempted to use them to curtail foreign influence and permitted them to gather in Beijing. In June 1900, they tried to storm the Legation Quarter, which sheltered several hundred foreign civilians and soldiers and about 3,200 Chinese Christians. An international army of the Eight-Nation Alliance eventually defeated the Boxers and Qing troops and lifted the siege. The foreign armies looted the city and occupied northern China. The Empress Dowager fled to Xian and did not return until after the Qing government had signed the Boxer Protocol which compelled it to pay reparations of 450 million taels of silver with interest at 4 percent. The Boxer indemnities stripped the Qing government of much of its tax revenues and further weakened the state.

The United States used its portion of the proceeds to fund scholarships for Chinese students studying in America. In 1911, the Boxer Indemnity Scholar Program established the American Indemnity College in the Qinghua Gardens northwest of Beijing as a preparatory school for students planning to study abroad. In 1912, the school was renamed Tsinghua University, and remains to this day, one of the finest institutions of higher learning in China.

After the Boxer Rebellion, the struggling Qing Dynasty accelerated the pace of reform and became more receptive to foreign influence. The centuries-old imperial civil service examination was abolished in 1905, and replaced with a Western-style curriculum and degree system. Public education for women received greater emphasis and even drew support from reactionaries like the Empress Dowager. Beijing's school for girls in the late Qing period made unbound feet an entrance requirement. The Beijing Police Academy, founded in 1901 as China's first modern institution for police training, used Japanese instructors and became a model for police academies in other cities. The Peking Union Medical College, founded by missionaries in 1906 and funded by the Rockefeller Foundation from 1915, set the standard for the training of nurses. The Metropolitan University Library in Beijing, founded in 1898, was China's first modern academic library devoted to serving public higher education.

Also in 1905, the Board of Revenue and private investors founded the Hubu Bank, China's first central bank and largest modern bank. This bank was renamed the Bank of China after the Xinhai Revolution and began Beijing's tradition as the center of state banks in China. Large foreign banks including the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corp. (HSBC), National City Bank (Citibank), Deutsch-Asiatische Bank and Yokohama Specie Bank opened branches in the Legation Quarter. The building of railroads was capital intensive and required large-scale financing and foreign expertise. Beijing's earliest railroads were designed, financed and built under the supervision of foreign concerns.

The city's first commercial railway, Tianjin-Lugouqiao Railway, was built from 1895 to 1897 with British financing. It ran from the Marco Polo Bridge to Tianjin. The rail terminus was extended closer to the city to Fengtai and then to Majiapu, just outside of Yongdingmen, a gate of the Outer City wall. The Qing court resisted the extension of railways inside city walls. To secure the support of the Empress Dowager for railway construction, Viceroy Li Hongzhang imported a small train set from Germany and built a narrow-gauge railway from her residence in Zhongnanhai to her dining hall in Beihai. The Empress, concerned that the locomotive's noise would disturb the geomancy or fengshui of the imperial city, required the train be pulled by eunuchs instead of steam engine. Foreign powers who seized the city during the Boxer Rebellion extended the railway inside the outer city wall to Yongdingmen in 1900 and then further north to Zhengyangmen (Qianmen) just outside the Inner City wall in 1903. They built an eastern spur to Tongzhou to carry grain shipped from the south on the Grand Canal. This extension breached the city wall at Dongbianmen. The Lugouqiao-Hankou Railway, financed by French-Belgian capital and built from 1896 to 1905, was renamed Beijing-Hankou Railway after it was routed to Qianmen from the west. This required the partial demotion of the Xuanwumen barbican. The completion of the Beijing-Fengtian Railway in 1907 required a similar break in Chongwenmen's fortification. Thus, began the tearing down of city gates and walls to make way for rail transportation. The first railway in China built without foreign assistance, the famous Imperial Beijing-Zhangjiakou Railway designed by Jeme Tien Yow, was built from 1905 to 1909 and terminated just outside Xizhimen. By the late Qing Dynasty, Beijing had rail connection to Hankou (Wuhan), Pukou (Nanjing), Fengtian (Shenyang) and Datong, and was a major railway hub in North China.

Left: Qianmen Railway Station in 1900s. Right: The old railway station is now the China Railway Museum (Zhengyangmen).