Names

Hong Taiji named the Great Qing dynasty in 1636. There are competing explanations on the meaning of Qīng (lit. "clear" or "pure"). The name may have been selected in reaction to the name of the Ming dynasty (明), which consists of the Chinese characters for "sun" (日) and "moon" (月), both associated with the fire element of the Chinese zodiacal system. The character Qīng (清) is composed of "water" (氵) and "azure" (青), both associated with the water element. This association would justify the Qing conquest as defeat of fire by water. The water imagery of the new name may also have had Buddhist overtones of perspicacity and enlightenment and connections with the Bodhisattva Manjusri. The Manchu name daicing, which sounds like a phonetic rendering of Dà Qīng or Dai Ching, may in fact have been derived from a Mongolian word ", дайчин" that means "warrior". Daicing gurun may therefore have meant "warrior state", a pun that was only intelligible to Manchu and Mongol people. In the later part of the dynasty, however, even the Manchus themselves had forgotten this possible meaning.

Early European writers used the term "Tartar" indiscriminately for all the peoples of Northern Eurasia but in the 17th century Catholic missionary writings established "Tartar" to refer only to the Manchus and "Tartary" for the lands they ruled.

After conquering "China proper", the Manchus identified their state as "China" (中国, Zhōngguó; "Middle Kingdom"), and referred to it as Dulimbai Gurun in Manchu (Dulimbai means "central" or "middle," gurun means "nation" or "state"). The emperors equated the lands of the Qing state (including present-day Northeast China, Xinjiang, Mongolia, Tibet and other areas) as "China" in both the Chinese and Manchu languages, defining China as a multi-ethnic state, and rejecting the idea that "China" only meant Han areas. The Qing emperors proclaimed that both Han and non-Han peoples were part of "China". They used both "China" and "Qing" to refer to their state in official documents. In the Chinese-language versions of its treaties and its maps of the world, the Qing government used "Qing" and "China" interchangeably.

History

Formation of the Manchu state

The Qing dynasty was founded not by Han Chinese, who constitute the majority of the Chinese population, but by the Manchu, descendants of a sedentary farming people known as the Jurchen, a Tungusic people who lived around the region now comprising the Chinese provinces of Jilin and Heilongjiang. The Manchus are sometimes mistaken for a nomadic people, which they were not.

Nurhaci

What was to become the Manchu state was founded by Nurhaci, the chieftain of a minor Jurchen tribethe Aisin-Gioroin Jianzhou in the early 17th century. Nurhaci may have spent time in a Chinese household in his youth, and became fluent in Chinese as well as Mongol, and read the Chinese novels Romance of the Three Kingdoms and Water Margin. Originally a vassal of the Ming emperors, Nurhaci embarked on an intertribal feud in 1582 that escalated into a campaign to unify the nearby tribes. By 1616, he had sufficiently consolidated Jianzhou so as to be able to proclaim himself Khan of the Great Jin in reference to the previous Jurchen dynasty.

Two years later, Nurhaci announced the "Seven Grievances" and openly renounced the sovereignty of Ming overlordship in order to complete the unification of those Jurchen tribes still allied with the Ming emperor. After a series of successful battles, he relocated his capital from Hetu Ala to successively bigger captured Ming cities in Liaodong: first Liaoyang in 1621, then Shenyang (Manchu: Mukden) in 1625.

Furthermore, the Khorchin proved a useful ally in the war, lending the Jurchens their expertise as cavalry archers. To guarantee this new alliance, Nurhaci initiated a policy of inter-marriages between the Jurchen and Khorchin nobilities, while those who resisted were met with military action. This is a typical example of Nurhaci's initiatives that eventually became official Qing government policy. During most of the Qing period, the Mongols gave military assistance to the Manchus.

Hong Taiji

The unbroken series of Nurhaci's military successes ended in January 1626 when he was defeated by Yuan Chonghuan while laying siege to Ningyuan. He died a few months later and was succeeded by his eighth son, Hong Taiji, who emerged as the new Khan after a short political struggle amongst other contenders . Although Hong Taiji was an experienced leader and the commander of two Banners at the time of his succession, his reign did not start well on the military front. The Jurchens suffered yet another defeat in 1627 at the hands of Yuan Chonghuan. This defeat was also in part due to the Ming's newly acquired Portuguese cannons.

To redress the technological and numerical disparity, Hong Taiji created his own artillery corps in 1634, the ujen cooha (Chinese: 重军) from his existing Han troops who cast their own cannons in the European design with the help of defector Chinese metallurgists. One of the defining events of Hong Taiji's reign was the official adoption of the name "Manchu" for the united Jurchen people in November 1635. In 1635, the Manchus' Mongol allies were fully incorporated into a separate Banner hierarchy under direct Manchu command. Hong Taiji conquered the territory north of Shanhai Pass by Ming dynasty and Ligdan Khan in Inner Mongolia. In April 1636, Mongol nobility of Inner Mongolia, Manchu nobility and the Han mandarin held the Kurultai in Shenyang, and recommended the khan of Later Jin to be the emperor of the Great Qing empire. One of the Yuan Dynasty's jade seal was also dedicated to the emperor (Bogd Setsen Khan) by the nobility. When he was presented with the imperial seal of the Yuan dynasty after the defeat of the last Khagan of the Mongols, Hong Taiji renamed his state from "Great Jin" to "Great Qing" and elevated his position from Khan to Emperor, suggesting imperial ambitions beyond unifying the Manchu territories. Hong Taiji then proceeded to invade Korea again in 1636.

The change of name from Jurchen to Manchu was made to hide the fact that the ancestors of the Manchus, the Jianzhou Jurchens, were ruled by the Chinese. The Qing dynasty carefully hid the original editions of the books of "Qing Taizu Wu Huangdi Shilu" and the "Manzhou Shilu Tu" (Taizu Shilu Tu) in the Qing palace, forbidden from public view because they showed that the Aisin-Gioro family had been ruled by the Ming dynasty and followed many Manchu customs that seemed "uncivilized" to later observers. The Qing also deliberately excluded references and information that showed the Jurchens (Manchus) as subservient to the Ming dynasty, from the History of Ming to hide their former subservient relationship to the Ming. The Veritable Records of Ming were not used to source content on Jurchens during Ming rule in the History of Ming because of this.

In the Ming period, the Koreans of Joseon referred to the Jurchen-inhabited lands north of the Korean peninsula, above the rivers Yalu and Tumen to be part of Ming China, as the "superior country" (sangguk) which they called Ming China. After the Second Manchu invasion of Korea, Joseon Korea was forced to give several of their royal princesses as concubines to the Qing Manchu regent Prince Dorgon. In 1650, Dorgon married the Korean Princess Uisun.

Meanwhile, Hong Taiji set up a rudimentary bureaucratic system based on the Ming model. He established six boards or executive level ministries in 1631 to oversee finance, personnel, rites, military, punishments, and public works. However, these administrative organs had very little role initially, and it was not until the eve of completing the conquest ten years later that they fulfilled their government roles.

Hong Taiji's bureaucracy was staffed with many Han Chinese, including many newly surrendered Ming officials. The Manchus' continued dominance was ensured by an ethnic quota for top bureaucratic appointments. Hong Taiji's reign also saw a fundamental change of policy towards his Han Chinese subjects. Nurhaci had treated Han in Liaodong differently according to how much grain they had: those with less than 5 to 7 sin were treated badly, while those with more than that amount were rewarded with property. Due to a revolt by Han in Liaodong in 1623, Nurhaci, who previously gave concessions to conquered Han subjects in Liaodong, turned against them and ordered that they no longer be trusted. He enacted discriminatory policies and killings against them, while ordering that Han who assimilated to the Jurchen (in Jilin) before 1619 be treated equally, as Jurchens were, and not like the conquered Han in Liaodong. Hong Taiji recognized that the Manchus needed to attract Han Chinese, explaining to reluctant Manchus why he needed to treat the Ming defector General Hong Chengchou leniently. Hong Taiji instead incorporated them into the Jurchen "nation" as full (if not first-class) citizens, obligated to provide military service. By 1648, less than one-sixth of the bannermen were of Manchu ancestry.

Claiming the Mandate of Heaven

Hong Taiji died suddenly in September 1643. As the Jurchens had traditionally "elected" their leader through a council of nobles, the Qing state did not have a clear succession system. The leading contenders for power were Hong Taiji's oldest son Hooge and Hong Taiji's half brother Dorgon. A compromise installed Hong Taiji's five-year-old son, Fulin, as the Shunzhi Emperor, with Dorgon as regent and de facto leader of the Manchu nation.

Meanwhile, Ming government officials fought against each other, against fiscal collapse, and against a series of peasant rebellions. They were unable to capitalise on the Manchu succession dispute and the presence of a minor as emperor. In April 1644, the capital, Beijing, was sacked by a coalition of rebel forces led by Li Zicheng, a former minor Ming official, who established a short-lived Shun dynasty. The last Ming ruler, the Chongzhen Emperor, committed suicide when the city fell to the rebels, marking the official end of the dynasty.

Li Zicheng then led a collection of rebel forces numbering some 200,000 to confront Wu Sangui, the general commanding the Ming garrison at Shanhai Pass, a key pass of the Great Wall, located northeast of Beijing, which defended the capital. Wu Sangui, caught between a rebel army twice his size and an enemy he had fought for years, cast his lot with the foreign but familiar Manchus. Wu Sangui may have been influenced by Li Zicheng's mistreatment of wealthy and cultured officials, including Li's own family; it was said that Li took Wu's concubine Chen Yuanyuan for himself. Wu and Dorgon allied in the name of avenging the death of the Chongzhen Emperor. Together, the two former enemies met and defeated Li Zicheng's rebel forces in battle on May 27, 1644.

The newly allied armies captured Beijing on 6 June. The Shunzhi Emperor was invested as the "Son of Heaven" on 30 October. The Manchus, who had positioned themselves as political heirs to the Ming emperor by defeating Li Zicheng, completed the symbolic transition by holding a formal funeral for the Chongzhen Emperor. However, conquering the rest of China Proper took another seventeen years of battling Ming loyalists, pretenders and rebels. The last Ming pretender, Prince Gui, sought refuge with the King of Burma, Pindale Min, but was turned over to a Qing expeditionary army commanded by Wu Sangui, who had him brought back to Yunnan province and executed in early 1662.

The Qing had taken shrewd advantage of Ming civilian government discrimination against the military and encouraged the Ming military to defect by spreading the message that the Manchus valued their skills. Banners made up of Han Chinese who defected before 1644 were classed among the Eight Banners, giving them social and legal privileges in addition to being acculturated to Manchu traditions. Han defectors swelled the ranks of the Eight Banners so greatly that ethnic Manchus became a minority—only 16% in 1648, with Han Bannermen dominating at 75% and Mongol Bannermen making up the rest. Gunpowder weapons like muskets and artillery were wielded by the Chinese Banners. Normally, Han Chinese defector troops were deployed as the vanguard, while Manchu Bannermen acted as reserve forces or in the rear and were used predominantly for quick strikes with maximum impact, so as to minimize ethnic Manchu losses.

This multi-ethnic force conquered China for the Qing, The three Liaodong Han Bannermen officers who played key roles in the conquest of southern China were Shang Kexi, Geng Zhongming, and Kong Youde, who governed southern China autonomously as viceroys for the Qing after the conquest. Han Chinese Bannermen made up the majority of governors in the early Qing, and they governed and administered China after the conquest, stabilizing Qing rule. Han Bannermen dominated the post of governor-general in the time of the Shunzhi and Kangxi Emperors, and also the post of governor, largely excluding ordinary Han civilians from these posts.

To promote ethnic harmony, a 1648 decree allowed Han Chinese civilian men to marry Manchu women from the Banners with the permission of the Board of Revenue if they were registered daughters of officials or commoners, or with the permission of their banner company captain if they were unregistered commoners. Later in the dynasty the policies allowing intermarriage were done away with.

The southern cadet branch of Confucius' descendants who held the title Wujing boshi (Doctor of the Five Classics) and 65th generation descendant in the northern branch who held the title Duke Yansheng both had their titles confirmed by the Shunzhi Emperor upon the Qing entry into Beijing on 31 October. The Kong's title of Duke was maintained in later reigns.

The first seven years of the Shunzhi Emperor's reign were dominated by Dorgon's rule. Because of his own political insecurity, Dorgon followed Hong Taiji's example by ruling in the name of the emperor at the expense of rival Manchu princes, many of whom he demoted or imprisoned under one pretext or another. Although the period of his regency was relatively short, Dorgon's precedents and example cast a long shadow over the dynasty.

First, the Manchus had entered "South of the Wall" because Dorgon responded decisively to Wu Sangui's appeal. Then, after capturing Beijing, instead of sacking the city as the rebels had done, Dorgon insisted, over the protests of other Manchu princes, on making it the dynastic capital and reappointing most Ming officials. Choosing Beijing as the capital had not been a straightforward decision, since no major Chinese dynasty had directly taken over its immediate predecessor's capital. Keeping the Ming capital and bureaucracy intact helped quickly stabilize the regime and sped up the conquest of the rest of the country. Dorgon then drastically reduced the influence of the eunuchs, a major force in the Ming bureaucracy, and directed Manchu women not to bind their feet in the Chinese style.

However, not all of Dorgon's policies were equally popular or as easy to implement. The controversial July 1645 edict (the "haircutting order") forced adult Han Chinese men to shave the front of their heads and comb the remaining hair into the queue hairstyle which was worn by Manchu men, on pain of death. The popular description of the order was: "To keep the hair, you lose the head; To keep your head, you cut the hair." To the Manchus, this policy was a test of loyalty and an aid in distinguishing friend from foe. For the Han Chinese, however, it was a humiliating reminder of Qing authority that challenged traditional Confucian values. The order triggered strong resistance to Qing rule in Jiangnan. In the ensuing unrest, some 100,000 Han were slaughtered.

On 31 December 1650, Dorgon suddenly died during a hunting expedition, marking the official start of the Shunzhi Emperor's personal rule. Because the emperor was only 12 years old at that time, most decisions were made on his behalf by his mother, Empress Dowager Xiaozhuang, who turned out to be a skilled political operator.

Although his support had been essential to Shunzhi's ascent, Dorgon had centralised so much power in his hands as to become a direct threat to the throne. So much so that upon his death he was bestowed the extraordinary posthumous title of Emperor Yi (义皇帝), the only instance in Qing history in which a Manchu "prince of the blood" (亲王) was so honored. Two months into Shunzhi's personal rule, however, Dorgon was not only stripped of his titles, but his corpse was disinterred and mutilated. to atone for multiple "crimes", one of which was persecuting to death Shunzhi's agnate eldest brother, Hooge. More importantly, Dorgon's symbolic fall from grace also led to the purge of his family and associates at court, thus reverting power back to the person of the emperor. After a promising start, Shunzhi's reign was cut short by his early death in 1661 at the age of 24 from smallpox. He was succeeded by his third son Xuanye, who reigned as the Kangxi Emperor.

The Manchus sent Han Bannermen to fight against Koxinga's Ming loyalists in Fujian. They removed the population from coastal areas in order to deprive Koxinga's Ming loyalists of resources. This led to a misunderstanding that Manchus were "afraid of water". Han Bannermen carried out the fighting and killing, casting doubt on the claim that fear of the water led to the coastal evacuation and ban on maritime activities. Even though a poem refers to the soldiers carrying out massacres in Fujian as "barbarians", both Han Green Standard Army and Han Bannermen were involved and carried out the worst slaughter. 400,000 Green Standard Army soldiers were used against the Three Feudatories in addition to the 200,000 Bannermen.

Kangxi Emperors reign and consolidation

The sixty-one year reign of the Kangxi Emperor was the longest of any Chinese emperor. Kangxi's reign is also celebrated as the beginning of an era known as the "High Qing", during which the dynasty reached the zenith of its social, economic and military power. Kangxi's long reign started when he was eight years old upon the untimely demise of his father. To prevent a repeat of Dorgon's dictatorial monopolizing of power during the regency, the Shunzhi Emperor, on his deathbed, hastily appointed four senior cabinet ministers to govern on behalf of his young son. The four ministers – Sonin, Ebilun, Suksaha, and Oboi – were chosen for their long service, but also to counteract each other's influences. Most important, the four were not closely related to the imperial family and laid no claim to the throne. However, as time passed, through chance and machination, Oboi, the most junior of the four, achieved such political dominance as to be a potential threat. Even though Oboi's loyalty was never an issue, his personal arrogance and political conservatism led him into an escalating conflict with the young emperor. In 1669 Kangxi, through trickery, disarmed and imprisoned Oboi – a significant victory for a fifteen-year-old emperor over a wily politician and experienced commander.

The early Manchu rulers established two foundations of legitimacy that help to explain the stability of their dynasty. The first was the bureaucratic institutions and the neo-Confucian culture that they adopted from earlier dynasties. Manchu rulers and Han Chinese scholar-official elites gradually came to terms with each other. The examination system offered a path for ethnic Han to become officials. Imperial patronage of Kangxi Dictionary demonstrated respect for Confucian learning, while the Sacred Edict of 1670 effectively extolled Confucian family values. His attempts to discourage Chinese women from foot binding, however, were unsuccessful.

Controlling the "Mandate of Heaven" was a daunting task. The vastness of China's territory meant that there were only enough banner troops to garrison key cities forming the backbone of a defense network that relied heavily on surrendered Ming soldiers. In addition, three surrendered Ming generals were singled out for their contributions to the establishment of the Qing dynasty, ennobled as feudal princes (藩王), and given governorships over vast territories in Southern China. The chief of these was Wu Sangui, who was given the provinces of Yunnan and Guizhou, while generals Shang Kexi and Geng Jingzhong were given Guangdong and Fujian provinces respectively.

As the years went by, the three feudal lords and their extensive territories became increasingly autonomous. Finally, in 1673, Shang Kexi petitioned Kangxi for permission to retire to his hometown in Liaodong province and nominated his son as his successor. The young emperor granted his retirement, but denied the heredity of his fief. In reaction, the two other generals decided to petition for their own retirements to test Kangxi's resolve, thinking that he would not risk offending them. The move backfired as the young emperor called their bluff by accepting their requests and ordering that all three fiefdoms to be reverted to the crown.

Faced with the stripping of their powers, Wu Sangui, later joined by Geng Zhongming and by Shang Kexi's son Shang Zhixin, felt they had no choice but to revolt. The ensuing Revolt of the Three Feudatories lasted for eight years. Wu attempted, ultimately in vain, to fire the embers of south China Ming loyalty by restoring Ming customs but then declared himself emperor of a new dynasty instead of restoring the Ming. At the peak of the rebels' fortunes, they extended their control as far north as the Yangtze River, nearly establishing a divided China. Wu hesitated to go further north, not being able to coordinate strategy with his allies, and Kangxi was able to unify his forces for a counterattack led by a new generation of Manchu generals. By 1681, the Qing government had established control over a ravaged southern China which took several decades to recover.

To extend and consolidate the dynasty's control in Central Asia, the Kangxi Emperor personally led a series of military campaigns against the Dzungars in Outer Mongolia. The Kangxi Emperor was able to successfully expel Galdan's invading forces from these regions, which were then incorporated into the empire. Galdan was eventually killed in the Dzungar–Qing War. In 1683, Qing forces received the surrender of Formosa (Taiwan) from Zheng Keshuang, grandson of Koxinga, who had conquered Taiwan from the Dutch colonists as a base against the Qing. Zheng Keshuang was awarded the title "Duke Haicheng" (海澄公) and was inducted into the Han Chinese Plain Red Banner of the Eight Banners when he moved to Beijing. Several Ming princes had accompanied Koxinga to Taiwan in 1661–1662, including the Prince of Ningjing Zhu Shugui and Prince Zhu Honghuan (朱弘桓), son of Zhu Yihai, where they lived in the Kingdom of Tungning. The Qing sent the 17 Ming princes still living on Taiwan in 1683 back to mainland China where they spent the rest of their lives in exile since their lives were spared from execution. Winning Taiwan freed Kangxi's forces for series of battles over Albazin, the far eastern outpost of the Tsardom of Russia. Zheng's former soldiers on Taiwan like the rattan shield troops were also inducted into the Eight Banners and used by the Qing against Russian Cossacks at Albazin. The 1689 Treaty of Nerchinsk was China's first formal treaty with a European power and kept the border peaceful for the better part of two centuries. After Galdan's death, his followers, as adherents to Tibetan Buddhism, attempted to control the choice of the next Dalai Lama. Kangxi dispatched two armies to Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, and installed a Dalai Lama sympathetic to the Qing.

Reigns of the Yongzheng and Qianlong emperors

The reigns of the Yongzheng Emperor (r. 1723–1735) and his son, the Qianlong Emperor (r. 1735–1796), marked the height of Qing power. Both emperors ruled from within the Hall of Mental Cultivation, a building in the Forbidden City, which not only became the emperor's residence, but was considered to be the political and administrative hub of the Qing dynasty, until the abdication of the Xuantong Emperor. During this period, the Qing Empire ruled over of territory. Yet, as the historian Jonathan Spence puts it, the empire by the end of the Qianlong reign was "like the sun at midday". In the midst of "many glories", he writes, "signs of decay and even collapse were becoming apparent".

After the death of the Kangxi Emperor in the winter of 1722, his fourth son, Prince Yong (雍亲王), became the Yongzheng Emperor. In the later years of Kangxi's reign, Yongzheng and his brothers had fought, and there were rumours that he had usurped the throne – most of the rumours held that Yongzheng's brother Yingzhen (Kangxi's 14th son) was the real successor of the Kangxi Emperor, and that Yongzheng and his confidant Keduo Long had tampered with the Kangxi's testament on the night when Kangxi died, though there was little evidence for these charges. In fact, his father had trusted him with delicate political issues and discussed state policy with him. When Yongzheng came to power at the age of 45, he felt a sense of urgency about the problems that had accumulated in his father's later years, and he did not need instruction on how to exercise power. In the words of one recent historian, he was "severe, suspicious, and jealous, but extremely capable and resourceful", and in the words of another, he turned out to be an "early modern state-maker of the first order".

Yongzheng moved rapidly. First, he promoted Confucian orthodoxy and reversed what he saw as his father's laxness by cracking down on unorthodox sects and by decapitating an anti-Manchu writer his father had pardoned. In 1723 he outlawed Christianity and expelled Christian missionaries, though some were allowed to remain in the capital. Next, he moved to control the government. He expanded his father's system of Palace Memorials, which brought frank and detailed reports on local conditions directly to the throne without being intercepted by the bureaucracy, and he created a small Grand Council of personal advisors, which eventually grew into the emperor's de facto cabinet for the rest of the dynasty. He shrewdly filled key positions with Manchu and Han Chinese officials who depended on his patronage. When he began to realize that the financial crisis was even greater than he had thought, Yongzheng rejected his father's lenient approach to local landowning elites and mounted a campaign to enforce collection of the land tax. The increased revenues were to be used for "money to nourish honesty" among local officials and for local irrigation, schools, roads, and charity. Although these reforms were effective in the north, in the south and lower Yangzi valley, where Kangxi had wooed the elites, there were long established networks of officials and landowners. Yongzheng dispatched experienced Manchu commissioners to penetrate the thickets of falsified land registers and coded account books, but they were met with tricks, passivity, and even violence. The fiscal crisis persisted.

Yongzheng also inherited diplomatic and strategic problems. A team made up entirely of Manchus drew up the Treaty of Kyakhta (1727) to solidify the diplomatic understanding with Russia. In exchange for territory and trading rights, the Qing would have a free hand dealing with the situation in Mongolia. Yongzheng then turned to that situation, where the Zunghars threatened to re-emerge, and to the southwest, where local Miao chieftains resisted Qing expansion. These campaigns drained the treasury but established the emperor's control of the military and military finance.

The Yongzheng Emperor died in 1735. His 24-year-old son, Prince Bao (宝亲王), then became the Qianlong Emperor. Qianlong personally led military campaigns near Xinjiang and Mongolia, putting down revolts and uprisings in Sichuan and parts of southern China while expanding control over Tibet.

The Qianlong Emperor launched several ambitious cultural projects, including the compilation of the Siku Quanshu, or Complete Repository of the Four Branches of Literature. With a total of over 3,400 books, 79,000 chapters, and 36,304 volumes, the Siku Quanshu is the largest collection of books in Chinese history. Nevertheless, Qianlong used Literary Inquisition to silence opposition. The accusation of individuals began with the emperor's own interpretation of the true meaning of the corresponding words. If the emperor decided these were derogatory or cynical towards the dynasty, persecution would begin. Literary inquisition began with isolated cases at the time of Shunzhi and Kangxi, but became a pattern under Qianlong's rule, during which there were 53 cases of literary persecution.

Beneath outward prosperity and imperial confidence, the later years of Qianlong's reign were marked by rampant corruption and neglect. Heshen, the emperor's handsome young favorite, took advantage of the emperor's indulgence to become one of the most corrupt officials in the history of the dynasty. Qianlong's son, the Jiaqing Emperor (r. 1796–1820), eventually forced Heshen to commit suicide.

China also began suffering from mounting overpopulation during this period. Population growth was stagnant for the first half of the 17th century due to civil wars and epidemics, but prosperity and internal stability gradually reversed this trend. The introduction of new crops from the Americas such as the potato and peanut allowed an improved food supply as well, so that the total population of China during the 18th century ballooned from 100 million to 300 million people. Soon all available farmland was used up, forcing peasants to work ever-smaller and more intensely worked plots. The Qianlong Emperor once bemoaned the country's situation by remarking, "The population continues to grow, but the land does not." The only remaining part of the empire that had arable farmland was Manchuria, where the provinces of Jilin and Heilongjiang had been walled off as a Manchu homeland. The emperor decreed for the first time that Han Chinese civilians were forbidden to settle. Mongols were forbidden by the Qing from crossing the borders of their banners, even into other Mongol Banners, and from crossing into neidi (the Han Chinese 18 provinces) and were given serious punishments if they did in order to keep the Mongols divided against each other to benefit the Qing. Mongol pilgrims wanting to leave their banner's borders for religious reasons such as pilgrimage had to apply for passports to give them permission.

Despite officially prohibiting Han Chinese settlement on the Manchu and Mongol lands, by the 18th century the Qing decided to settle Han refugees from northern China who were suffering from famine, floods, and drought into Manchuria and Inner Mongolia. Han Chinese then streamed into Manchuria, both illegally and legally, over the Great Wall and Willow Palisade. As Manchu landlords desired Han Chinese to rent their land and grow grain, most Han Chinese migrants were not evicted. During the eighteenth century Han Chinese farmed 500,000 hectares of privately owned land in Manchuria and 203,583 hectares of lands that were part of courrier stations, noble estates, and Banner lands. In garrisons and towns in Manchuria Han Chinese made up 80% of the population.

In 1796, open rebellion broke out among followers of the White Lotus Society, who blamed Qing officials, saying "the officials have forced the people to rebel." Officials in other parts of the country were also blamed for corruption, failing to keep the famine relief granaries full, poor maintenance of roads and waterworks, and bureaucratic factionalism. There soon followed uprisings of "new sect" Muslims against local Muslim officials, and Miao tribesmen in southwest China. The White Lotus Rebellion continued for eight years, until 1804, when badly run, corrupt, and brutal campaigns finally ended it.

Rebellion, unrest and external pressure

At the start of the dynasty, the Chinese empire continued to be the hegemonic power in East Asia. Although there was no formal ministry of foreign relations, the Lifan Yuan was responsible for relations with the Mongol and Tibetans in Central Asia, while the tributary system, a loose set of institutions and customs taken over from the Ming, in theory governed relations with East and Southeast Asian countries. The Treaty of Nerchinsk (1689) stabilized relations with Czarist Russia.

However, during the 18th century European empires gradually expanded across the world, as European states developed economies built on maritime trade, colonial extraction, and advances in technology. The dynasty was confronted with newly developing concepts of the international system and state to state relations. European trading posts expanded into territorial control in nearby India and on the islands that are now Indonesia. The Qing response, successful for a time, was to establish the Canton System in 1756, which restricted maritime trade to that city (modern-day Guangzhou) and gave monopoly trading rights to private Chinese merchants. The British East India Company and the Dutch East India Company had long before been granted similar monopoly rights by their governments.

In 1793, the British East India Company, with the support of the British government, sent a delegation to China under Lord George Macartney in order to open free trade and put relations on a basis of equality. The imperial court viewed trade as of secondary interest, whereas the British saw maritime trade as the key to their economy. The Qianlong Emperor told Macartney "the kings of the myriad nations come by land and sea with all sorts of precious things", and "consequently there is nothing we lack..."

Demand in Europe for Chinese goods such as silk, tea, and ceramics could only be met if European companies funneled their limited supplies of silver into China. In the late 1700s, the governments of Britain and France were deeply concerned about the imbalance of trade and the drain of silver. To meet the growing Chinese demand for opium, the British East India Company greatly expanded its production in Bengal. Since China's economy was essentially self-sufficient, the country had little need to import goods or raw materials from the Europeans, so the usual way of payment was through silver. The Daoguang Emperor, concerned both over the outflow of silver and the damage that opium smoking was causing to his subjects, ordered Lin Zexu to end the opium trade. Lin confiscated the stocks of opium without compensation in 1839, leading Britain to send a military expedition the following year.

The First Opium War revealed the outdated state of the Chinese military. The Qing navy, composed entirely of wooden sailing junks, was severely outclassed by the modern tactics and firepower of the British Royal Navy. British soldiers, using advanced muskets and artillery, easily outmanoeuvred and outgunned Qing forces in ground battles. The Qing surrender in 1842 marked a decisive, humiliating blow to China. The Treaty of Nanjing, the first of the "unequal treaties", demanded war reparations, forced China to open up the Treaty Ports of Canton, Amoy, Fuchow, Ningpo and Shanghai to Western trade and missionaries, and to cede Hong Kong Island to Britain. It revealed weaknesses in the Qing government and provoked rebellions against the regime. In 1842, the Qing dynasty fought a war with the Sikh Empire (the last independent kingdom of India), resulting in a negotiated peace and a return to the status quo ante bellum.

The Taiping Rebellion in the mid-19th century was the first major instance of anti-Manchu sentiment. Amid widespread social unrest and worsening famine, the rebellion not only posed the most serious threat towards Qing rulers, it has also been called the "bloodiest civil war of all time"; during its fourteen-year course from 1850 to 1864 between 20 and 30 million people died. Hong Xiuquan, a failed civil service candidate, in 1851 launched an uprising in Guizhou province, and established the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom with Hong himself as king. Hong announced that he had visions of God and that he was the brother of Jesus Christ. Slavery, concubinage, arranged marriage, opium smoking, footbinding, judicial torture, and the worship of idols were all banned. However, success led to internal feuds, defections and corruption. In addition, British and French troops, equipped with modern weapons, had come to the assistance of the Qing imperial army. It was not until 1864 that Qing armies under Zeng Guofan succeeded in crushing the revolt. After the outbreak of this rebellion, there were also revolts by the Muslims and Miao people of China against the Qing dynasty, most notably in the Miao Rebellion (1854–73) in Guizhou, the Panthay Rebellion (1856–1873) in Yunnan and the Dungan Revolt (1862–77) in the northwest.

The Western powers, largely unsatisfied with the Treaty of Nanjing, gave grudging support to the Qing government during the Taiping and Nian Rebellions. China's income fell sharply during the wars as vast areas of farmland were destroyed, millions of lives were lost, and countless armies were raised and equipped to fight the rebels. In 1854, Britain tried to re-negotiate the Treaty of Nanjing, inserting clauses allowing British commercial access to Chinese rivers and the creation of a permanent British embassy at Beijing.

In 1856, Qing authorities, in searching for a pirate, boarded a ship, the Arrow, which the British claimed had been flying the British flag, an incident which led to the Second Opium War. In 1858, facing no other options, the Xianfeng Emperor agreed to the Treaty of Tientsin, which contained clauses deeply insulting to the Chinese, such as a demand that all official Chinese documents be written in English and a proviso granting British warships unlimited access to all navigable Chinese rivers.

Ratification of the treaty in the following year led to a resumption of hostilities. In 1860, with Anglo-French forces marching on Beijing, the emperor and his court fled the capital for the imperial hunting lodge at Rehe. Once in Beijing, the Anglo-French forces looted the Old Summer Palace and, in an act of revenge for the arrest, torture, and execution of the English diplomatic mission, burnt it to the ground. Prince Gong, a younger half-brother of the emperor, who had been left as his brother's proxy in the capital, was forced to sign the Convention of Beijing. The humiliated emperor died the following year at Rehe.

Self-strengthening and the frustration of reforms

Yet the dynasty rallied. Chinese generals and officials such as Zuo Zongtang led the suppression of rebellions and stood behind the Manchus. When the Tongzhi Emperor came to the throne at the age of five in 1861, these officials rallied around him in what was called the Tongzhi Restoration. Their aim was to adopt Western military technology in order to preserve Confucian values. Zeng Guofan, in alliance with Prince Gong, sponsored the rise of younger officials such as Li Hongzhang, who put the dynasty back on its feet financially and instituted the Self-Strengthening Movement. The reformers then proceeded with institutional reforms, including China's first unified ministry of foreign affairs, the Zongli Yamen; allowing foreign diplomats to reside in the capital; establishment of the Imperial Maritime Customs Service; the formation of modernized armies, such as the Beiyang Army, as well as a navy; and the purchase from Europeans of armament factories.

The dynasty lost control of peripheral territories bit by bit. In return for promises of support against the British and the French, the Russian Empire took large chunks of territory in the Northeast in 1860. The period of cooperation between the reformers and the European powers ended with the Tientsin Massacre of 1870, which was incited by the murder of French nuns set off by the belligerence of local French diplomats. Starting with the Cochinchina Campaign in 1858, France expanded control of Indochina. By 1883, France was in full control of the region and had reached the Chinese border. The Sino-French War began with a surprise attack by the French on the Chinese southern fleet at Fuzhou. After that the Chinese declared war on the French. A French invasion of Taiwan was halted and the French were defeated on land in Tonkin at the Battle of Bang Bo. However Japan threatened to enter the war against China due to the Gapsin Coup and China chose to end the war with negotiations. The war ended in 1885 with the Treaty of Tientsin (1885) and the Chinese recognition of the French protectorate in Vietnam.

In 1884, pro-Japanese Koreans in Seoul led the Gapsin Coup. Tensions between China and Japan rose after China intervened to suppress the uprising. Japanese Prime Minister Itō Hirobumi and Li Hongzhang signed the Convention of Tientsin, an agreement to withdraw troops simultaneously, but the First Sino-Japanese War of 1895 was a military humiliation. The Treaty of Shimonoseki recognized Korean independence and ceded Taiwan and the Pescadores to Japan. The terms might have been harsher, but when a Japanese citizen attacked and wounded Li Hongzhang, an international outcry shamed the Japanese into revising them. The original agreement stipulated the cession of Liaodong Peninsula to Japan, but Russia, with its own designs on the territory, along with Germany and France, in the Triple Intervention, successfully put pressure on the Japanese to abandon the peninsula.

These years saw an evolution in the participation of Empress Dowager Cixi (Wade–Giles: Tz'u-Hsi) in state affairs. She entered the imperial palace in the 1850s as a concubine to the Xianfeng Emperor (r. 1850–1861) and came to power in 1861 after her five-year-old son, the Tongzhi Emperor ascended the throne. She, the Empress Dowager Ci'an (who had been Xianfeng's empress), and Prince Gong (a son of the Daoguang Emperor), staged a coup that ousted several regents for the boy emperor. Between 1861 and 1873, she and Ci'an served as regents, choosing the reign title "Tongzhi" (ruling together). Following the emperor's death in 1875, Cixi's nephew, the Guangxu Emperor, took the throne, in violation of the dynastic custom that the new emperor be of the next generation, and another regency began. In the spring of 1881, Ci'an suddenly died, aged only forty-three, leaving Cixi as sole regent.

From 1889, when Guangxu began to rule in his own right, to 1898, the Empress Dowager lived in semi-retirement, spending the majority of the year at the Summer Palace. On 1 November 1897, two German Roman Catholic missionaries were murdered in the southern part of Shandong province (the Juye Incident). Germany used the murders as a pretext for a naval occupation of Jiaozhou Bay. The occupation prompted a "scramble for concessions" in 1898, which included the German lease of Jiazhou Bay, the Russian acquisition of Liaodong, and the British lease of the New Territories of Hong Kong.

In the wake of these external defeats, the Guangxu Emperor initiated the Hundred Days' Reform of 1898. Newer, more radical advisers such as Kang Youwei were given positions of influence. The emperor issued a series of edicts and plans were made to reorganize the bureaucracy, restructure the school system, and appoint new officials. Opposition from the bureaucracy was immediate and intense. Although she had been involved in the initial reforms, the Empress Dowager stepped in to call them off, arrested and executed several reformers, and took over day-to-day control of policy. Yet many of the plans stayed in place, and the goals of reform were implanted.

Widespread drought in North China, combined with the imperialist designs of European powers and the instability of the Qing government, created conditions that led to the emergence of the Boxers. In 1900, local groups of Boxers proclaiming support for the Qing dynasty murdered foreign missionaries and large numbers of Chinese Christians, then converged on Beijing to besiege the Foreign Legation Quarter. A coalition of European, Japanese, and Russian armies (the Eight-Nation Alliance) then entered China without diplomatic notice, much less permission. Cixi declared war on all of these nations, only to lose control of Beijing after a short, but hard-fought campaign. She fled to Xi'an. The victorious allies drew up scores of demands on the Qing government, including compensation for their expenses in invading China and execution of complicit officials.

Reform, revolution, collapse

By the early 20th century, mass civil disorder had begun in China, and it was growing continuously. To overcome such problems, Cixi issued an imperial edict in 1901 calling for reform proposals from the governors-general and governors and initiated the era of the dynasty's "New Policies", also known as the "Late Qing Reform". The edict paved the way for the most far-reaching reforms in terms of their social consequences, including the creation of a national education system and the abolition of the imperial examinations in 1905.

The Guangxu Emperor died on 14 November 1908 and Cixi died the following day. Rumors held that she or Yuan Shikai ordered trusted eunuchs to poison the Guangxu Emperor, and an autopsy conducted nearly a century later confirmed lethal levels of arsenic in his corpse. Puyi, the oldest son of Zaifeng, Prince Chun, and nephew to the childless Guangxu Emperor, was appointed successor at the age of two, leaving Zaifeng with the regency. This was followed by the dismissal of General Yuan Shikai from his former positions of power. In April 1911 Zaifeng created a cabinet in which there were two vice-premiers. Nonetheless, this cabinet was also known by contemporaries as "The Royal Cabinet" because among the thirteen cabinet members, five were members of the imperial family or Aisin-Gioro relatives. This brought a wide range of negative opinions from senior officials like Zhang Zhidong.

The Wuchang Uprising of 10 October 1911 was a success; by November, 14 of the 15 provinces had rejected Qing rule. This led to the creation of a new central government, the Republic of China, in Nanjing with Sun Yat-sen as its provisional head. Many provinces soon began "separating" from Qing control. Seeing a desperate situation unfold, the Qing government brought Yuan Shikai back to military power. He took control of his Beiyang Army to crush the revolution in Wuhan at the Battle of Yangxia. After taking the position of Prime Minister and creating his own cabinet, Yuan Shikai went as far as to ask for the removal of Zaifeng from the regency. This removal later proceeded with directions from Empress Dowager Longyu. Yuan Shikai was now a dictator—the ruler of China and the Manchu dynasty had lost all power; it formally abdicated in early 1912.

On 12 February 1912, after rounds of negotiations, Longyu issued an imperial edict bringing about the abdication of the child emperor Puyi. This brought an end to over 2,000 years of Imperial China and began an extended period of instability of warlord factionalism. The unorganized political and economic systems combined with a widespread criticism of Chinese culture led to questioning and doubt about the future. Some Qing loyalists organized themselves as "Royalist Party", and tried to use militant activism and open rebellions to restore the monarchy, but to no avail. In July 1917, there was an abortive attempt to restore the Qing dynasty led by Zhang Xun, which was quickly reversed by republican troops. Puyi was allowed to live in the Forbidden City after his abdication until the Beijing Coup happened in 1924, which general Feng Yuxiang forced Puyi to move out from the Forbidden City. Puyi then moved to Japanese concession in Tianjin. In the 1930s, the Empire of Japan invaded Northeast China and founded Manchukuo in 1932, with Puyi as its emperor. After the invasion by the Soviet Union, Manchukuo fell in 1945.

Government

The early Qing emperors adopted the bureaucratic structures and institutions from the preceding Ming dynasty but split rule between Han Chinese and Manchus, with some positions also given to Mongols. Like previous dynasties, the Qing recruited officials via the imperial examination system, until the system was abolished in 1905. The Qing divided the positions into civil and military positions, each having nine grades or ranks, each subdivided into a and b categories. Civil appointments ranged from an attendant to the emperor or a Grand Secretary in the Forbidden City (highest) to being a prefectural tax collector, deputy jail warden, deputy police commissioner, or tax examiner. Military appointments ranged from being a field marshal or chamberlain of the imperial bodyguard to a third class sergeant, corporal or a first or second class private.

Central government agencies

The formal structure of the Qing government centered on the Emperor as the absolute ruler, who presided over six Boards (Ministries), each headed by two presidents and assisted by four vice presidents. In contrast to the Ming system, however, Qing ethnic policy dictated that appointments were split between Manchu noblemen and Han officials who had passed the highest levels of the state examinations. The Grand Secretariat, which had been an important policy-making body under the Ming, lost its importance during the Qing and evolved into an imperial chancery. The institutions which had been inherited from the Ming formed the core of the Qing "Outer Court", which handled routine matters and was located in the southern part of the Forbidden City.

In order not to let the routine administration take over the running of the empire, the Qing emperors made sure that all important matters were decided in the "Inner Court", which was dominated by the imperial family and Manchu nobility and which was located in the northern part of the Forbidden City. The core institution of the inner court was the Grand Council. It emerged in the 1720s under the reign of the Yongzheng Emperor as a body charged with handling Qing military campaigns against the Mongols, but soon took over other military and administrative duties, centralizing authority under the crown. The Grand Councillors served as a sort of privy council to the emperor.

From the early Qing, the central government was characterized by a system of dual appointments by which each position in the central government had a Manchu and a Han Chinese assigned to it. The Han Chinese appointee was required to do the substantive work and the Manchu to ensure Han loyalty to Qing rule.

There was also another government institution called Imperial Household Department which was unique to the Qing dynasty. It was established before the fall of the Ming, but it became mature only after 1661, following the death of the Shunzhi Emperor and the accession of his son, the Kangxi Emperor. The department's original purpose was to manage the internal affairs of the imperial family and the activities of the inner palace (in which tasks it largely replaced eunuchs), but it also played an important role in Qing relations with Tibet and Mongolia, engaged in trading activities (jade, ginseng, salt, furs, etc.), managed textile factories in the Jiangnan region, and even published books. Relations with the Salt Superintendents and salt merchants, such as those at Yangzhou, were particularly lucrative, especially since they were direct, and did not go through absorptive layers of bureaucracy. The department was manned by booi, or "bondservants," from the Upper Three Banners. By the 19th century, it managed the activities of at least 56 subagencies.

Administrative divisions

Qing China reached its largest extent during the 18th century, when it ruled China proper (eighteen provinces) as well as the areas of present-day Northeast China, Inner Mongolia, Outer Mongolia, Xinjiang and Tibet, at approximately 13 million km2 in size. There were originally 18 provinces, all of which in China proper, but later this number was increased to 22, with Manchuria and Xinjiang being divided or turned into provinces. Taiwan, originally part of Fujian province, became a province of its own in the 19th century, but was ceded to the Empire of Japan following the First Sino-Japanese War in 1895.

Territorial administration

The Qing organization of provinces was based on the fifteen administrative units set up by the Ming dynasty, later made into eighteen provinces by splitting for example, Huguang into Hubei and Hunan provinces. The provincial bureaucracy continued the Yuan and Ming practice of three parallel lines, civil, military, and censorate, or surveillance. Each province was administered by a governor (巡抚, xunfu) and a provincial military commander (提督, tidu). Below the province were prefectures (府, fu) operating under a prefect (知府, zhīfǔ), followed by subprefectures under a subprefect. The lowest unit was the county, overseen by a county magistrate. The eighteen provinces are also known as "China proper". The position of viceroy or governor-general (总督, zongdu) was the highest rank in the provincial administration. There were eight regional viceroys in China proper, each usually took charge of two or three provinces. The Viceroy of Zhili, who was responsible for the area surrounding the capital Beijing, is usually considered as the most honorable and powerful viceroy among the eight.

By the mid-18th century, the Qing had successfully put outer regions such as Inner and Outer Mongolia, Tibet and Xinjiang under its control. Imperial commissioners and garrisons were sent to Mongolia and Tibet to oversee their affairs. These territories were also under supervision of a central government institution called Lifan Yuan. Qinghai was also put under direct control of the Qing court. Xinjiang, also known as Chinese Turkestan, was subdivided into the regions north and south of the Tian Shan mountains, also known today as Dzungaria and Tarim Basin respectively, but the post of Ili General was established in 1762 to exercise unified military and administrative jurisdiction over both regions. Dzungaria was fully opened to Han migration by the Qianlong Emperor from the beginning. Han migrants were at first forbidden from permanently settling in the Tarim Basin but were the ban was lifted after the invasion by Jahangir Khoja in the 1820s. Likewise, Manchuria was also governed by military generals until its division into provinces, though some areas of Xinjiang and Northeast China were lost to the Russian Empire in the mid-19th century. Manchuria was originally separated from China proper by the Inner Willow Palisade, a ditch and embankment planted with willows intended to restrict the movement of the Han Chinese, as the area was off-limits to civilian Han Chinese until the government started colonizing the area, especially since the 1860s.

With respect to these outer regions, the Qing maintained imperial control, with the emperor acting as Mongol khan, patron of Tibetan Buddhism and protector of Muslims. However, Qing policy changed with the establishment of Xinjiang province in 1884. During The Great Game era, taking advantage of the Dungan revolt in northwest China, Yaqub Beg invaded Xinjiang from Central Asia with support from the British Empire, and made himself the ruler of the kingdom of Kashgaria. The Qing court sent forces to defeat Yaqub Beg and Xinjiang was reconquered, and then the political system of China proper was formally applied onto Xinjiang. The Kumul Khanate, which was incorporated into the Qing empire as a vassal after helping Qing defeat the Zunghars in 1757, maintained its status after Xinjiang turned into a province through the end of the dynasty in the Xinhai Revolution up until 1930. In the early 20th century, Britain sent an expedition force to Tibet and forced Tibetans to sign a treaty. The Qing court responded by asserting Chinese sovereignty over Tibet, resulting in the 1906 Anglo-Chinese Convention signed between Britain and China. The British agreed not to annex Tibetan territory or to interfere in the administration of Tibet, while China engaged not to permit any other foreign state to interfere with the territory or internal administration of Tibet. Furthermore, similar to Xinjiang which was converted into a province earlier, the Qing government also turned Manchuria into three provinces in the early 20th century, officially known as the "Three Northeast Provinces", and established the post of Viceroy of the Three Northeast Provinces to oversee these provinces, making the total number of regional viceroys to nine.

Military

The Qing dynasty was established by conquest and maintained by armed force. The founding emperors personally organized and led the armies, and the continued cultural and political legitimacy of the dynasty depended on the ability to defend the country from invasion and expand its territory. Therefore, military institutions, leadership, and finance were fundamental to the dynasty's initial success and ultimate decay. The early military system centered on the Eight Banners, a hybrid institution that also played social, economic, and political roles. The Banner system was developed on an informal basis as early as 1601, and formally established in 1615 by Jurchen leader Nurhaci (1559–1626), the retrospectively recognized founder of the Qing. His son Hong Taiji (1592–1643), who renamed the Jurchens "Manchus," created eight Mongol banners to mirror the Manchu ones and eight "Han-martial" (|s=|t=汉军 Hànjūn|labels=no) banners manned by Chinese who surrendered to the Qing before the full-fledged conquest of China proper began in 1644. After 1644, the Ming Chinese troops that surrendered to the Qing were integrated into the Green Standard Army, a corps that eventually outnumbered the Banners by three to one.

The use of gunpowder during the High Qing can compete with the three gunpowder empires in western Asia. Manchu imperial princes led the Banners in defeating the Ming armies, but after lasting peace was established starting in 1683, both the Banners and the Green Standard Armies started to lose their efficiency. Garrisoned in cities, soldiers had few occasions to drill. The Qing nonetheless used superior armament and logistics to expand deeply into Central Asia, defeat the Dzungar Mongols in 1759, and complete their conquest of Xinjiang. Despite the dynasty's pride in the Ten Great Campaigns of the Qianlong Emperor (r. 1735–1796), the Qing armies became largely ineffective by the end of the 18th century. It took almost ten years and huge financial waste to defeat the badly equipped White Lotus Rebellion (1795–1804), partly by legitimizing militias led by local Han Chinese elites. The Taiping Rebellion (1850–1864), a large-scale uprising that started in southern China, marched within miles of Beijing in 1853. The Qing court was forced to let its Han Chinese governors-general, first led by Zeng Guofan, raise regional armies. This new type of army and leadership defeated the rebels but signaled the end of Manchu dominance of the military establishment.

The military technology of the European Industrial Revolution made China's armament and military rapidly obsolete. In 1860 British and French forces in the Second Opium War captured Beijing and sacked the Summer Palace. The shaken court attempted to modernize its military and industrial institutions by buying European technology. This Self-Strengthening Movement established shipyards (notably the Jiangnan Arsenal and the Foochow Arsenal) and bought modern guns and battleships in Europe. The Qing navy became the largest in East Asia. But organization and logistics were inadequate, officer training was deficient, and corruption widespread. The Beiyang Fleet was virtually destroyed and the modernized ground forces defeated in the 1895 First Sino-Japanese War. The Qing created a New Army, but could not prevent the Eight Nation Alliance from invading China to put down the Boxer Uprising in 1900. The revolt of a New Army corps in 1911 led to the fall of the dynasty.

Society

Population growth and mobility

The most significant facts of early and mid-Qing social history was growth in population, population density, and mobility. The population in 1700, according to widely accepted estimates, was roughly 150 million, about what it had been under the late Ming a century before, then doubled over the next century, and reached a height of 450 million on the eve of the Taiping Rebellion in 1850.

One reason for this growth was the spread of New World crops like peanuts, sweet potatoes, and potatoes, which helped to sustain the people during shortages of harvest for crops such as rice or wheat.  These crops could be grown under harsher conditions, and thus were cheaper as well, which led to them becoming staples for poorer farmers, decreasing the number of deaths from malnutrition. Diseases such as smallpox, widespread in the seventeenth century, were brought under control by an increase in inoculations. In addition, infant deaths were also greatly decreased due to improvements in birthing techniques and childcare performed by doctors and midwives and through an increase in medical books available to the public. Government campaigns decreased the incidence of infanticide. Unlike Europe, where population growth in this period was greatest in the cities, in China the growth in cities and the lower Yangzi was low. The greatest growth was in the borderlands and the highlands, where farmers could clear large tracts of marshlands and forests.

The population was also remarkably mobile, perhaps more so than at any time in Chinese history. Indeed, the Qing government did far more to encourage mobility than to discourage it. Millions of Han Chinese migrated to Yunnan and Guizhou in the 18th century, and also to Taiwan. After the conquests of the 1750s and 1760s, the court organized agricultural colonies in Xinjiang. Migration might be permanent, for resettlement, or the migrants (in theory at least) might regard the move as a temporary sojourn. The latter included an increasingly large and mobile workforce. Local-origin-based merchant groups also moved freely. This mobility also included the organized movement of Qing subjects overseas, largely to Southeastern Asia, in search of trade and other economic opportunities.

Statuses in society

According to statute, Qing society was divided into relatively closed estates, of which in most general terms there were five. Apart from the estates of the officials, the comparatively minuscule aristocracy, and the degree-holding literati, there also existed a major division among ordinary Chinese between commoners and people with inferior status. They were divided into two categories: one of them, the good "commoner" people, the other "mean" people who were seen as debased and servile. The majority of the population belonged to the first category and were described as liangmin, a legal term meaning good people, as opposed to jianmin meaning the mean (or ignoble) people. Qing law explicitly stated that the traditional four occupational groups of scholars, farmers, artisans and merchants were "good", or having a status of commoners. On the other hand, slaves or bondservants, entertainers (including prostitutes and actors), tattooed criminals, and those low-level employees of government officials were the "mean people". Mean people were considered legally inferior to commoners and suffered unequal treatments, forbidden to take the imperial examination. Furthermore, such people were usually not allowed to marry with free commoners and were even often required to acknowledge their abasement in society through actions such as bowing. However, throughout the Qing dynasty, the emperor and his court, as well as the bureaucracy, worked towards reducing the distinctions between the debased and free but did not completely succeed even at the end of its era in merging the two classifications together.

Qing gentry

Although there had been no powerful hereditary aristocracy since the Song dynasty, the gentry (shenshi), like their British counterparts, enjoyed imperial privileges and managed local affairs. The status of this scholar-official was defined by passing at least the first level of civil service examinations and holding a degree, which qualified him to hold imperial office, although he might not actually do so. The gentry member could legally wear gentry robes and could talk to officials as equals. Officials who had served for one or two terms could retire to enjoy the glory of their status. Informally, the gentry then presided over local society and could use their connections to influence the magistrate, acquire land, and maintain large households. The gentry thus included not only males holding degrees but also their wives, descendants, some of their relatives.

The gentry class was divided into groups. Not all who held office were literati, as merchant families could purchase degrees, and not all who passed the exams found employment as officials, since the number of degree-holders was greater than the number of openings. The gentry class also differed in the source and amount of their income. Literati families drew income from landholding, as well as from lending money. Officials, of course, drew a salary, which, as the years went by, were less and less adequate, leading to widespread reliance on "squeeze," irrgular payments. Those who prepared for but failed the exams, like those who passed but were not appointed to office, could become tutors or teachers, private secretaries to sitting officials, administrators of guilds or temples, or other positions that required literacy. Others turned to fields such as engineering, medicine, or law, which by the nineteenth century demanded specialized learning. By the nineteenth century, it was no longer shameful to become an author or publisher of fiction.

The Qing gentry were marked as much by their aspiration to a cultured lifestyle as by their legal status. They lived more refined and comfortable lives than the commoners and used sedan-chairs to travel any significant distance. They often showed off their learning by collecting objects such as scholars' stones,

porcelain or pieces of art for their beauty, which set them off from less cultivated commoners.

Qing nobility

Family and kinship

By the Qing, the building block of society was patrilineal kinship, that is, the local family lineage with descent through the male line, often translated as "clan" in earlier scholarship. A shift in marital practices, identity and loyalty had begun during the Song dynasty when the civil service examination began to replace nobility and inheritance as a means for gaining status. Instead of intermarrying within aristocratic elites of the same social status, they tended to form marital alliances with nearby families of the same or higher wealth, and established the local people's interests as first and foremost which helped to form intermarried townships. The Neo-Confucian ideology, especially the Cheng-Zhu thinking favored by Qing social thought, emphasised patrilineal families and genealogy in society.

The emperors and local officials exhorted families to compile genealogies in order to stabilize local society. The genealogy was placed in the ancestral hall, which served as the lineage's headquarters and a place for annual ancestral sacrifice.The genealogy recorded the lineage's history, biographies of respected ancestors, a chart of all the family members of each generation, rules for the members to follow, and often copies of title contracts for collective property as well. A specific Chinese character appeared in the given name of each male of each generation, often well into the future. These lineages claimed to be based on biological descent but when a member of a lineage gained office or became wealthy, he might use considerable creativity in selecting a prestigious figure to be "founding ancestor". Such worship was intended to ensure that the ancestors remain content and benevolent spirits (shen) who would keep watch over and protect the family. Later observers felt that the ancestral cult focused on the family and lineage, rather than on more public matters such as community and nation.

Inner Mongols and Khalkha Mongols in the Qing rarely knew their ancestors beyond four generations and Mongol tribal society was not organized among patrilineal clans, contrary to what was commonly thought, but included unrelated people at the base unit of organization. The Qing tried but failed to promote the Chinese Neo-Confucian ideology of organizing society along patrimonial clans among the Mongols.

Religion

Manchu rulers presided over a multi-ethnic empire and the emperor, who was held responsible for 「All Under Heaven」 or Tian Xia, patronized and took responsibility for all religions and belief systems. The empire's 「spiritual center of gravity" was the "religio-political state." Since the empire was part of the order of the cosmos, which conferred the Mandate of Heaven, the Emperor as 「Son of Heaven」 was both the head of the political system and the head priest of the State Cult. He united political and spiritual roles that in medieval Europe were separated into the roles of emperor and pope and performed the imperial rites that ensured political order, prosperity, and social morality. The emperor and his officials, who were his personal representatives, took responsibility all aspects of the empire, especially spiritual life and religious institutions and practices. The county magistrate, as the emperor's political and spiritual representative, made offerings at officially recognized temples, for instance those dedicated to the God of Walls and Moats, (the so-called 「City God), and local deified heroes. The magistrate lectured on the Emperor』s Sacred Edict to promote civic morality; he kept close watch over religious organizations whose actions might threaten the sovereignty and religious prerogative of the state.

The belief system most widely practiced among Han Chinese is often called local, popular, or folk religion, and was centered around the patriarchal family, the maintenance of the male family line, and shen, or spirits. Common practices included ancestor veneration, filial piety, local gods and spirits. Rites included mourning, funeral, burial, practices. Since they did not require exclusive allegiance, forms and branches of Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism were intertwined, for instance in the syncretic Three teachings. Chinese folk religion combined elements of the three, with local variations County magistrates, who were graded and promoted on their ability to maintain local order, tolerated local sects and even patronized local temples as long as they were orderly, but were suspicious of heterodox sects that defied state authority and rejected imperial doctrines. Some of these sects indeed had long histories of rebellion, such as the Way of Former Heaven, which drew on Daoism, and the White Lotus society, which drew on millennial Buddhism. The White Lotus Rebellion (1796-1804) confirmed official suspicions as did the Taiping Rebellion, which drew on millennial Christianity.

Manchu and imperial religion

The Manchu imperial family were especially attracted by Yellow Sect or Gelug Buddhism that had spread from Tibet into Mongolia. The Fifth Dalai Lama, who had gained power in 1642, just before the Manchus took Beijing, looked to the Qing court for support. The Kangxi and Qianlong emperors practiced this form of Tibetan Buddhism as one of their household religions and built temples that made Beijing one of its centers, and constructed a replica Lhasa's Potala Palace at their summer retreat in Rehe.

Shamanism, the most common religion among Manchus, was a spiritual inheritance from their Tungusic ancestors that set them off from Han Chinese. State shamanism was important to the imperial family both to maintain their Manchu cultural identity and to promote their imperial legitimacy among tribes in the northeast. Imperial obligations included rituals on the first day of Chinese New Year at a shamanic shrine (tangse). Practices in Manchu families included sacrifices to the ancestors, and the use of shamans, often women, who went into a trance to seek healing or exorcism

Christianity, Judaism, and Islam

The Abrahamic religions had arrived from Western Asia as early as the Tang dynasty but their insistence that they should be practiced to the exclusion of other religions made them less adaptable than Buddhism, which had quickly been accepted as native. Islam predominated in Central Asian areas of the empire, while Judaism and Christianity were practiced in well-established but self-contained communities.

Several hundred Catholic missionaries arrived from the late Ming period until the proscription of Christianity in 1724. The Jesuits adapted to Chinese expectations, evangelized from the top down, adopted the robes and lifestyles of literati, becoming proficient in the Confucian classics, and did not challenge Chinese moral values, such as ancestor veneration. They proved their value to the early Manchu emperors with their work in gunnery, cartography, and astronomy, but fell out of favor for a time until the Kangxi emperor』s 1692 edict of toleration. In the countryside, the newly arrived Dominican and Franciscan clerics established rural communities that adapted to local folk religious practices by emphasizing healing, festivals, and holy days rather than sacraments and doctrine. By the beginning of the eighteenth century,a spectrum of Christian believers had established communities. In 1724, the Yongzheng emperor (1678–1735) announced that Christianity was a "heterodox teaching" and hence proscribed. Since the European Catholic missionaries kept control in their own hands and had not allowed the creation of a native clergy, however, the number of Catholics would grow more rapidly after 1724 and local communities could set their own rules and standards. In 1811, Christian religious activities were further criminalized by the Jiaqing Emperor (1760–1820). The imperial ban was lifted by Treaty in 1846.

The first Protestant missionary to China was Robert Morrison (1782–1834) of the London Missionary Society (LMS), who arrived at Canton on September 6, 1807. He completed a translation of the entire Bible in 1819. Liang Afa (1789–1855), a Morrison-trained Chinese convert, branched out the evangelization mission in inner China. The two Opium Wars (1839–1860) marked the watershed of Protestant Christian missions. The 1842 Treaty of Nanjing, the American treaty and the French treaty signed in 1844, and the 1858 Treaty of Tianjin, distinguished Christianity from the local religions and granted it protected status. Chinese popular cults, such as the White Lotus and the Eight Trigram presented themselves as Christian to share this protection.

In the late 1840s Hong Xiuquan read Morrison's Chinese Bible, as well as Liang Afa's evangelistic pamphlet, and announced to his followers that Christianity in fact had been the religion of ancient China before Confucius and his followers drove it out. He formed the Taiping Movement, which emerged in South China as a 「collusion of the Chinese tradition of millenarian rebellion and Christian messianism,」 「apocalyptic revolution, Christianity, and "communist utopianism.」

After 1860, enforcement of the treaties allowed missionaries to spread their evangelization efforts outside Treaty Ports. Their presence created cultural and political opposition. Historian John K. Fairbank observed that "To the scholar-gentry, Christian missionaries were foreign subversives, whose immoral conduct and teaching were backed by gunboats.」 In the next decades, there were 800 some conflicts between village Christians and non-Christians (jiao』an) mostly about non-religious issues, such as land rights or local taxes, but religious conflict often behind such cases. In the summer of 1900, as foreign powers contemplated the division of China, village youths, known as Boxers, who practiced Chinese martial arts and spiritual practices, reacted against Western power and churches, attacked and murdered Chinese Christians and foreign missionaries in the Boxer Uprising. The imperialist powers once again invaded and imposed a substantial indemnity. The Beijing government reacted by implementing substantial fiscal and administrative reforms but this defeat convinced many among the educated elites that popular religion was an obstacle to China』s development as a modern nation, and some turned to Christianity as a spiritual tool to build one.

By 1900, there were about 1,400 Catholic priests and nuns in China serving nearly 1 million Catholics. Over 3,000 Protestant missionaries were active among the 250,000 Protestant Christians in China. Western medical missionaries established clinics and hospitals, and led medical training in China. Missionaries began establishing nurse training schools in the late 1880s, but nursing of sick men by women was rejected by local tradition, so the number of students was small until the 1930s.

Economy

By the end of the 17th century, the Chinese economy had recovered from the devastation caused by the wars in which the Ming dynasty were overthrown, and the resulting breakdown of order. In the following century, markets continued to expand as in the late Ming period, but with more trade between regions, a greater dependence on overseas markets and a greatly increased population. By the end of the 18th century the population had risen to 300 million from approximately 150 million during the late Ming dynasty. The dramatic rise in population was due to several reasons, including the long period of peace and stability in the 18th century and the import of new crops China received from the Americas, including peanuts, sweet potatoes and maize. New species of rice from Southeast Asia led to a huge increase in production. Merchant guilds proliferated in all of the growing Chinese cities and often acquired great social and even political influence. Rich merchants with official connections built up huge fortunes and patronized literature, theater and the arts. Textile and handicraft production boomed.

The government broadened land ownership by returning land that had been sold to large landowners in the late Ming period by families unable to pay the land tax. To give people more incentives to participate in the market, they reduced the tax burden in comparison with the late Ming, and replaced the corvée system with a head tax used to hire laborers. The administration of the Grand Canal was made more efficient, and transport opened to private merchants. A system of monitoring grain prices eliminated severe shortages, and enabled the price of rice to rise slowly and smoothly through the 18th century. Wary of the power of wealthy merchants, Qing rulers limited their trading licenses and usually refused them permission to open new mines, except in poor areas. These restrictions on domestic resource exploration, as well as on foreign trade, are held by some scholars as a cause of the Great Divergence, by which the Western world overtook China economically.

During the Ming–Qing period (1368–1911) the biggest development in the Chinese economy was its transition from a command to a market economy, the latter becoming increasingly more pervasive throughout the Qing's rule. From roughly 1550 to 1800 China proper experienced a second commercial revolution, developing naturally from the first commercial revolution of the Song period which saw the emergence of long-distance inter-regional trade of luxury goods. During the second commercial revolution, for the first time, a large percentage of farming households began producing crops for sale in the local and national markets rather than for their own consumption or barter in the traditional economy. Surplus crops were placed onto the national market for sale, integrating farmers into the commercial economy from the ground up. This naturally led to regions specializing in certain cash-crops for export as China's economy became increasingly reliant on inter-regional trade of bulk staple goods such as cotton, grain, beans, vegetable oils, forest products, animal products, and fertilizer.

Silver

Silver entered in large quantities from mines in the New World after the Spanish conquered the Philippines in the 1570s. The re-opening of the southeast coast, which had been closed in the late 17th century, quickly revived trade, which expanded at 4% per annum throughout the latter part of the 18th century. China continued to export tea, silk and manufactures, creating a large, favorable trade balance with the West. The resulting expansion of the money supply supported competitive and stable markets. During the mid-Ming China had gradually shifted to silver as the standard currency for large scale transactions and by the late Kangxi reign the assessment and collection of the land tax was done in silver. Landlords began only accepting rent payments in silver rather than in crops themselves, which in turn incentivized farmers to produce crops for sale in local and national markets rather than for their own personal consumption or barter. Unlike the copper coins, qian or cash, used mainly for smaller transactions, silver was not reliably minted into a coin but rather was traded in units of weight: the liang or tael, which equaled roughly 1.3 ounces of silver. A third-party had to be brought in to assess the weight and purity of the silver, resulting in an extra "meltage fee" added on to the price of transaction. Furthermore, since the "meltage fee" was unregulated until the reign of the Yongzheng emperor it was the source of much corruption at each level of the bureaucracy. The Yongzheng emperor cracked down on the corrupt "meltage fees," legalizing and regulating them so that they could be collected as a tax, "returning meltage fees to the public coffer." From this newly increased public coffer, the Yongzheng emperor increased the salaries of the officials who collected them, further legitimizing silver as the standard currency of the Qing economy.

Urbanization and the proliferation of market-towns

The second commercial revolution also had a profound effect on the dispersion of the Qing populace. Up until the late Ming there existed a stark contrast between the rural countryside and city metropoles and very few mid-sized cities existed. This was due to the fact that extraction of surplus crops from the countryside was traditionally done by the state and not commercial organizations. However, as commercialization expanded exponentially in the late-Ming and early-Qing, mid-sized cities began popping up to direct the flow of domestic, commercial trade. Some towns of this nature had such a large volume of trade and merchants flowing through them that they developed into full-fledged market-towns. Some of these more active market-towns even developed into small-cities and became home to the new rising merchant-class. The proliferation of these mid-sized cities was only made possible by advancements in long-distance transportation and methods of communication. As more and more Chinese-citizens were travelling the country conducting trade they increasingly found themselves in a far-away place needing a place to stay, in response the market saw the expansion of guild halls to house these merchants.

Full-fledged trade guilds emerged, which, among other things, issued regulatory codes and price schedules, and provided a place for travelling merchants to stay and conduct their business. Along with the huiguan trade guilds, guild halls dedicated to more specific professions, gongsuo, began to appear and to control commercial craft or artisanal industries such as carpentry, weaving, banking, and medicine. By the nineteenth century guild halls worked to transform urban areas into cosmopolitan, multi-cultural hubs, staged theatre performances open to general public, developed real estate by pooling funds together in the style of a trust, and some even facilitated the development of social services such as maintaining streets, water supply, and sewage facilities.

Trade with the West

In 1685 the Kangxi emperor legalized private maritime trade along the coast, establishing a series of customs stations in major port cities. The customs station at Canton became by far the most active in foreign trade and by the late Kangxi reign more than forty mercantile houses specializing in trade with the West had appeared. The Yongzheng emperor made a parent corporation comprising those forty individual houses in 1725 known as the Cohong system. Firmly established by 1757, the Canton Cohong was an association of thirteen business firms that had been awarded exclusive rights to conduct trade with Western merchants in Canton. Until its abolition after the Opium War in 1842, the Canton Cohong system was the only permitted avenue of Western trade into China, and thus became a booming hub of international trade by the early eighteenth century. By the eighteenth century the most significant export China had was tea. British demand for tea increased exponentially up until they figured out how to grow it for themselves in the hills of northern India in the 1880s. By the end of the eighteenth century tea exports going through the Canton Cohong system amounted to one-tenth of the revenue from taxes collected from the British and nearly the entire revenue of the British East India Company and until the early nineteenth century tea comprised ninety percent of exports leaving Canton.

Science and technology

Chinese scholars, court academies, and local officials carried on late Ming dynasty strengths in astronomy, mathematics, and geography, as well as technologies in ceramics, metallurgy, water transport, printing. Contrary to stereotypes in some Western writing, 16th and 17th century Qing dynasty officials and literati eagerly explored the technology and science introduced by Jesuit missionaries. Manchu leaders employed Jesuits to use cannon and gunpowder to great effect in the conquest of China, and the court sponsored their research in astronomy. The aim of these efforts, however, was to reform and improve inherited science and technology, not to replace it. Scientific knowledge advanced during the Qing, but there was not a change in the way this knowledge was organized or the way scientific evidence was defined or its truth tested. Those who studied the physical universe shared their findings with each other and identified themselves as men of science, but they did not have a separate and independent professional role with its own training and advancement. They were still literati.

The Opium Wars, however, demonstrated the power of steam engine and military technology that had only recently been put into practice in the West. During the Self-Strengthening Movement of the 1860s and 1870s Confucian officials in several coastal provinces established an industrial base in military technology. The introduction of railroads into China raised questions that were more political than technological. A British company built the Shanghai—Woosung line in 1876, obtaining the land under false pretenses, and it was soon torn up. Court officials feared local public opinion and that railways would help invaders, harm farmlands, and obstruct feng shui. To keep development in Chinese hands, the Qing government borrowed 34 billion taels of silver from foreign lenders for railway construction between 1894 and 1911. As late as 1900, only were in operation, with a further in the planning stage. Finally, of railway was completed. The British and French after 1905 were finally able to open lines to Burma and Vietnam.

Protestant missionaries by the 1830s translated and printed Western science and medical textbooks. The textbooks found homes in the rapidly enlarging network of missionary schools, and universities. The textbooks opened learning open possibilities for the small number of Chinese students interested in science, and a very small number interested in technology. After 1900, Japan had a greater role in bringing modern science and technology to Chinese audiences but even then they reached chiefly the children of the rich landowning gentry, who seldom engaged in industrial careers.

Arts and culture

Under the Qing, inherited forms of art flourished and innovations occurred at many levels and in many types. High levels of literacy, a successful publishing industry, prosperous cities, and the Confucian emphasis on cultivation all fed a lively and creative set of cultural fields.

By the end of the nineteenth century, national artistic and cultural worlds had begun to come to terms with the cosmopolitan culture of the West and Japan. The decision to stay within old forms or welcome Western models was now a conscious choice rather than an unchallenged acceptance of tradition. Classically trained Confucian scholars such as Liang Qichao and Wang Guowei read widely and broke aesthetic and critical ground later cultivated in the New Culture Movement.

Fine arts

The Qing emperors were generally adept at poetry and often skilled in painting, and offered their patronage to Confucian culture. The Kangxi and Qianlong Emperors, for instance, embraced Chinese traditions both to control them and to proclaim their own legitimacy. The Kangxi Emperor sponsored the Peiwen Yunfu, a rhyme dictionary published in 1711, and the Kangxi Dictionary published in 1716, which remains to this day an authoritative reference. The Qianlong Emperor sponsored the largest collection of writings in Chinese history, the Siku Quanshu, completed in 1782. Court painters made new versions of the Song masterpiece, Zhang Zeduan's Along the River During the Qingming Festival, whose depiction of a prosperous and happy realm demonstrated the beneficence of the emperor. The emperors undertook tours of the south and commissioned monumental scrolls to depict the grandeur of the occasion. Imperial patronage also encouraged the industrial production of ceramics and Chinese export porcelain. Peking glassware became popular after European glass making processes were introduced by Jesuits to Beijing.

Yet the most impressive aesthetic works were done among the scholars and urban elite. Calligraphy and painting remained a central interest to both court painters and scholar-gentry who considered the four arts part of their cultural identity and social standing. The painting of the early years of the dynasty included such painters as the orthodox Four Wangs and the individualists Bada Shanren (1626–1705) and Shitao (1641–1707). The nineteenth century saw such innovations as the Shanghai School and the Lingnan School, which used the technical skills of tradition to set the stage for modern painting.

Traditional learning and literature

Traditional learning flourished, especially among Ming loyalists such as Dai Zhen and Gu Yanwu, but scholars in the school of evidential learning made innovations in skeptical textual scholarship. Scholar-bureaucrats, including Lin Zexu and Wei Yuan, developed a school of practical statecraft which rooted bureaucratic reform and restructuring in classical philosophy.

Philosophy and literature grew to new heights in the Qing period. Poetry continued as a mark of the cultivated gentleman, but women wrote in larger and larger numbers and poets came from all walks of life. The poetry of the Qing dynasty is a lively field of research, being studied (along with the poetry of the Ming dynasty) for its association with Chinese opera, developmental trends of Classical Chinese poetry, the transition to a greater role for vernacular language, and for poetry by women. The Qing dynasty was a period of literary editing and criticism, and many of the modern popular versions of Classical Chinese poems were transmitted through Qing dynasty anthologies, such as the Quan Tangshi and the Three Hundred Tang Poems. Although fiction did not have the prestige of poetry, novels flourished. Pu Songling brought the short story to a new level in his Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio, published in the mid-18th century, and Shen Fu demonstrated the charm of the informal memoir in Six Chapters of a Floating Life, written in the early 19th century but published only in 1877. The art of the novel reached a pinnacle in Cao Xueqin's Dream of the Red Chamber, but its combination of social commentary and psychological insight were echoed in highly skilled novels such as Wu Jingzi's Rulin waishi (1750) and Li Ruzhen's Flowers in the Mirror (1827).

Cuisine

Cuisine aroused a cultural pride in the richness of a long and varied past. The gentleman gourmet, such as Yuan Mei, applied aesthetic standards to the art of cooking, eating, and appreciation of tea at a time when New World crops and products entered everyday life. Yuan's Suiyuan Shidan expounded culinary aesthetics and theory, along with a range of recipes. The Manchu–Han Imperial Feast originated at the court. Although this banquet was probably never common, it reflected an appreciation of Manchu culinary customs. Nevertheless, culinary traditionalists such as Yuan Mei lambasted the opulence of the Manchu Han Feast. Yuan wrote that the feast was caused in part by the "vulgar habits of bad chefs" and that "displays this trite are useful only for welcoming new relations through one's gates or when the boss comes to visit". (皆恶厨陋习。只可用之于新亲上门，上司入境)

History and memory

Nationalism

After 1912, writers, historians and scholars in China and abroad generally deprecated the failures of the late imperial system. However, in the 21st century, a favorable view has emerged in popular culture. Building pride in Chinese history, nationalists have portrayed Imperial China as benevolent, strong and more advanced than the West. They blame ugly wars and diplomatic controversies on imperialist exploitation by Western nations and Japan. Although officially still communist and Maoist, in practice China's rulers have used this grassroots settlement to proclaim that their current policies are restoring China's historical glory. Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping has sought parity between Beijing and Washington and promised to restore China to its historical glory.

New Qing History

The New Qing History is a revisionist historiographical trend starting in the mid-1990s emphasizing the Manchu nature of the dynasty. Earlier historians had emphasized the power of Han Chinese to "sinicize" their conquerors, that is, to assimilate and make them Chinese in their thought and institutions. In the 1980s and early 1990s, American scholars began to learn Manchu and took advantage of newly opened Chinese- and Manchu-language documents in the archives. This research found that the Manchu rulers manipulated their subjects and from the 1630s through at least the 18th century, emperors developed a sense of Manchu identity and used Central Asian models of rule as much as they did Confucian ones. According to the new school the Manchu ruling class regarded "China" as only a part, although a very important part, of a much wider empire that extended into the Inner Asian territories of Mongolia, Tibet, the Manchuria and Xinjiang.

Ping-ti Ho criticized the new approach for exaggerating the Manchu character of the dynasty and argued for the sinification of its rule. Some scholars in China accused the American group of imposing American concerns with race and identity or even of imperialist misunderstanding to weaken China. Still others in China agree that this scholarship has opened new vistas for the study of Qing history.

The "New Qing History" is not related to the New Qing History, a multi-volume history of the Qing dynasty that was authorized by the Chinese State Council in 2003.

国号

名称来源

1616年努尔哈赤建立后金政权，1636年皇太极改国号为「大清」，入关后成为元朝以来中国历史上第三个（也是最后一个）把「大」字加入正式国号之中的大一统皇朝。皇太极改国号的原因未有史料明确记载，有说法认为是为了掩盖女真曾臣服于明的历史以鼓舞士气；「清」之国号，或云是金的谐音，而且满人尚青，加水字边以符合五德终始说，用水免去朱明（朱是指明朝皇帝的姓氏，明是明朝国号）之「火」；另有一种观点认为「大清」这一国号并非来自汉语，而是满语中的一个蒙古借词「」（），原意为「善战者，战士」，故「大清国」的意思是「上国」或「善战之国」；但此论述存有争议，有学者从语言与文献考证等反驳，指出清朝统治者编撰的语言辞书皆无此用法。

对「中国」一词的重塑

清朝以前「中国」的词义基本上为地理、民族、政治区域和文化意义，而现代国体意义上的「中国」，直至1689年9月7日《中俄尼布楚条约》签订后才首次正式出现于外交文件上。

自入主中原之后，清朝皇帝正式以「中国」（ᡩᡠᠯᡳᠮᠪᠠᡳᡤᡠᡵᡠᠨ|z=dulimbai gurun）称呼全境。1689年，清朝康熙帝在与俄国签订的具有现代国际法水准的边界条约——《尼布楚条约》中，首次将「中国」作为正式国家名称使用，与「俄罗斯」相对，该「中国」指包括蒙古以及中国东北等地在内的整个清帝国。

中西史学家如黄兴涛博士及新清史学派学者、东亚史学家欧立德（）认为，康雍乾之后的中国，是被清朝皇帝、满人、汉人等其他族群共同认同并加以再造过的中国。现代「中国」的概念，正是来自于清朝所塑造的中国观。

历史

后金立国

15世纪初期，位于东北亚的女真族大致分成三部分，其中以建州女真最为强大。建州女真源自于辽金时代生女真完颜部的附属五国部，居于牡丹江与松花江汇流地方，在元代组成为五个女真万户府，元末因受野人女真及朝鲜滋扰不断，以及明朝的招抚等因素，其残馀部族选择归附明朝。明朝将其部迁至原渤海地（今绥芬河流域）设置为他们新的聚居地。

1403年明朝依据原渤海建州的地名称呼为建州女真，并设置了卫所这一地方军事行政机构，册封阿哈出（赐名李承善）为建州卫指挥使，猛哥帖木儿为建州卫左都督。其后1416年又建立建州左卫，以猛哥帖木儿为指挥使，并赐姓童。建州卫早期归属奴儿干都司，奴儿干都司废除后改属辽东都司。

猛哥帖木儿在被野人女真所杀后，其弟凡察与子董山被迫率众南移，最后定居赫图阿拉（今辽宁新宾），并入建州卫内。1442年，明朝又从建州左卫分立出右卫，以凡察领导右卫、董山领导左卫，形成建州三卫，三卫首领也是世袭制，但须经明朝政府认可后方生效。

由于建州三卫对明朝过度干预女真产生不满，因而逐渐不遵守朝廷命令。而此时女真各部也因嫌隙已四分五裂。1467年明朝联合朝鲜削弱建州三卫（即成化犁庭），并且于辽东边界兴建长城。明朝万历初年，董山的后代觉昌安与其子塔克世偕同明朝辽东总兵李成梁，以建州右卫王杲叛乱为由攻灭王杲与其子阿台，然而觉昌安同其子塔克世在入城劝降叛明的阿台时发生混战，觉昌安父子也在混战中被明军误杀死亡。1586年明廷袭封塔克世之子努尔哈赤为指挥使，世袭建州卫作为补偿。

努尔哈赤深觉被明朝背叛，以祖、父遗留的十三副遗甲崛起，统一建州女真后陆续并吞女真各部，并与漠南蒙古友好。

建州女真势力日盛，1595年明朝授予努尔哈赤龙虎将军的称号，其势力更加强大。1603年努尔哈赤在赫图阿拉筑城，两年后致辽抚赵楫、总兵李成梁的呈文中说：「我奴儿哈赤收管我建州国之人，看守朝廷九百五十馀里边疆」，以守疆名义索要更高权利，地位仍与过去相同，声势则已不同以往。一直到1616年，努尔哈赤在建立八旗制度后于赫图阿拉（后称兴京）称汗立国，即后金汗国。两年后他以「七大恨」为由起兵反明。檄文中俨然以「北朝」自居。努尔哈赤在1619年的萨尔浒之战中，击败杨镐指挥的明军、朝鲜与叶赫联军；接连占领渖阳、辽阳、抚顺等辽东城市，战无不胜的他更坚定了入主中原之志，随后战事集中于辽西地区。1626年，在与明袁崇焕交战的宁远战役中受挫，数月后逝世。第八子皇太极历经权力斗争后继位。

皇太极即位之后，针对努尔哈赤时期的社会矛盾进行一系列改革，史称「天聪新政」。皇太极改文馆为内国史院、内秘书院、内弘文院，这是清朝内阁的雏形。还继续完善和扩大蒙古八旗、汉军八旗，设立理藩院管辖蒙古等地事务。1634年，将都城渖阳易名「盛京」，更改「女真」族名为「满洲」。1635年，多尔衮于征伐漠南蒙古时，声称得到元顺帝离开中原时带走的传国玉玺

，皇太极亲率其子与诸官出城迎接，拜天行礼。1636年，漠南诸部尊皇太极为「博格达彻辰汗」，皇太极在盛京称帝，改年号为崇德，改国号为大清。当时明朝在关外的势力尚有袁崇焕守备的锦州、宁远与松山等三城。皇太极为绕道避开此防线，首先稳定根据地。他先胁迫明朝求和未果，随后成功降伏西边蒙古察哈尔部和东边朝鲜。接著，皇太极经察哈尔绕道入侵明朝首都北京。最后崇祯帝（有人认为他中了反间计），处决援救北京的袁崇焕，史称己巳之变。这种藉由绕道入侵的作法后来又执行五次，与明朝内部的流寇一同消耗明朝的经济力。1642年，清军于松锦之战击溃明军并收降洪承畴等人，夺取明朝在关外的所有堡垒，明朝防线移至山海关及长城沿线。1643年皇太极病死，第九子福临继位，是为顺治帝，由其叔多尔衮摄政。

入关一统

明朝崇祯末年，民变势力（史称「流寇」）如李自成于陕西西安建国大顺，张献忠于四川成都建国大西。1644年李自成经河南、山西顺利地攻入北京，明思宗在煤山上吊自杀，明亡。同年山海关守将吴三桂不愿投降大顺。面对李自成的顺军，吴三桂引清兵入关，于一片石战役击败顺军，史称甲申之变。李自成放弃北京，率军退回陕西。清朝摄政王多尔衮成功迎顺治帝入关，顺治在北京天坛圆丘行祭天之礼，祝文宣布受天命、建王朝，名称仍用大清国号，并将首都迁到北京。同一时间，明朝马士英拥护福王在明朝陪都南京应天府称帝，即弘光帝，南明成立。然而弘光朝因为党争与宦官之乱而混乱分裂。

多尔衮先派阿济格、吴三桂与多铎、孔有德分陕北、河南二路攻打陕西李自成，李自成最后于湖北灭亡；派豪格攻灭四川张献忠，其馀部投降南明以抗清。多尔衮接著对付位于江南、内斗分裂的南明诸势力。1645年，多铎率清军攻破史可法驻守的扬州，弘光帝逃至芜湖被逮，送到北京杀害。明朝鲁王朱以海与唐王隆武帝分别在浙江与福建建立势力，然而双方不和，不久被清军各个击破，拥护隆武帝的郑芝龙也宣布投降。之后桂王于广东的肇庆即位为永历帝，期间瞿式耜、李定国、郑成功及其他明将先后收复华南各省，最后因为距离互相难以照应，内部又发生叛变而节节败退。1661年，清军攻入云南，逃亡缅甸的永历帝最后被吴三桂杀死，南明亡。此时只剩下台湾的明郑（郑成功势力）和缅甸果敢的明军，清朝基本占领明朝全部领地。由于华南反清势力较大，清帝册封吴三桂、耿仲明与尚可喜为王以镇守云南、广东与福建等地，史称三藩。

多尔衮在清军攻入关内后推行剃发易服政策，导致关内汉人对清廷态度骤变，甚至极力反抗，如「入关之初，严禁杀掠，故中原人士无不悦服，及有剃头之举，民皆愤怒，或见我人泣而言曰，我以何罪独为此剃头乎？」，而明朝官员左懋第亦言「我头可断、发不可断，我早办一死矣。」。清军对反抗者进行镇压，重要事件如扬州十日、嘉定三屠与庚寅之劫等。清廷制定的圈地和投充政策使人民放弃土地，增加更多流民。为此又制定严禁奴仆逃亡的逃人法，激化京畿地区的民族与阶层矛盾。

但后续清廷下令停止这些政策，并实行奖励垦荒、减免捐税的政策。并且正式开科取士，追尊崇祯帝与明朝忠臣。

1661年，顺治帝英年早逝，其子8岁的玄烨即位，即康熙帝，由索尼、遏必隆、苏克萨哈与鳌拜四大臣辅政。康熙帝于继位之初即运用计谋消灭跋扈的权臣鳌拜以稳固皇权。三藩势力如吴三桂、耿精忠与尚之信等涵盖全国之半，他们先后请求撤藩以试探清廷。当时部分大臣担忧三藩叛变而反对。最后，孝庄太皇太后与康熙帝无惧三藩而同意撤除。这使得三藩与陕西王辅臣、广西孙延龄与台湾明郑的郑经联合发动三藩之乱。在这九年期间，反清势力遍及华中、华南，吴三桂更于后期称帝建国周。然而清军采取积极防御，进军陕西、江西以切割叛军。加上吴三桂没有积极北伐，反清联军因占领地与吴三桂过度干涉而发生纠纷，最后王辅臣、耿继忠与尚之信先后投降，占领福建沿岸的郑经被击败。1681年清军攻入云南，继承吴三桂之位的吴世璠在昆明自杀，三藩之乱最终在1681年被完全扑灭，国家遭受较大的损失，在四川、云南以及江西等地有不少人被杀害，从许多记载来看，在三藩之乱时，清军，叛军，土匪等曾造成屠杀平民事件，不仅仅在川滇，其他相关地区也遭受类似的厄运，比如江西百姓遭受屠戮的数量就不少，「剿洗，玉石难分，老幼死于锋镝，妇子悉为俘囚，白骨遍野，民无噍类」。同年，郑经之子郑克塽继位，明郑因内乱不断导致不少将领降清。清朝派明郑降将施琅率领水师攻打台湾。施琅占领澎湖，逼近东宁（今台湾台南），郑克塽率领大臣降清，至此明郑亡。

扩张与改制

康熙帝平定三藩后，清朝进入康雍乾时期，这段时期是清朝发展的高峰时期，史学界通常称为「康雍乾盛世」。康熙帝为政宽仁，留心民间疾苦，在他亲政不久后，便宣布停止圈地，放宽垦荒地的免税年限。他还著手整顿吏治，恢复京察、大计等考核制度。受康熙帝的「滋生人丁，永不加赋」（摊丁入亩）政策以及外来农作物的引进等影响，清朝人口大大提升。他先后任用靳辅和于成龙治理黄河与大运河，得到很大的成绩。在他六次南巡期间，考察民情习俗之外，更是亲自监督河工。康熙中期以后，因战乱而遭到严重破坏的手工业逐步得到恢复和发展。为安定社会秩序，他颁行十六条圣谕，要地方人士循循告诫乡民。他又派心腹包衣（即家奴）如曹寅、李熙等人打探地方物价、人民收入与官绅不轨之事，并以密褶奏报。此即密摺制度的萌芽，到雍正时期趋于完善。康熙帝重视对汉族士大夫的优遇，他多次举办博学鸿儒科，创建南书房制度，并且向来华传教士学习西方科学与文化。

清初蒙古分为四大部。其中准噶尔汗国与俄罗斯沙皇国友好，其可汗噶尔丹先灭领叶尔羌汗国与青海和硕特，又占领喀尔喀蒙古，喀尔喀三部南下投靠清朝。康熙帝首先派萨布素于雅克萨战役驱除入侵黑龙江的沙俄军队，与沙俄所签订的《尼布楚条约》以确立东北疆界并获得沙俄的中立。接著于1690年至1697年间乌兰布通之战与三征噶尔丹使噶尔丹战死，进行多伦会盟以将喀尔喀蒙古纳入直接统治。青藏地区的和硕特汗国协助黄教达赖五世击败红教统一全藏，之后分裂成青海与西藏和硕特。达赖六世时，藏区政事交由第巴（理事大臣）桑结嘉错管理，他联合准噶尔对抗西藏和硕特的拉藏汗，拉藏汗先下手杀桑结嘉错并废除达赖六世。1717年噶尔丹的侄子策妄阿拉布坦入侵西藏，攻杀拉藏汗，并且占领拉萨。清军多次被准军击败，最后于1720年由胤禵率军驱除成功，协助达赖七世入藏，以拉藏汗旧臣管理藏区。

康熙晚期，由于官员薪资过低以及法律过宽，导致官吏贪污，吏治败坏，并发生南山案文字狱事件，到雍正与乾隆时期这种情况加重。康熙帝本来按照中国立嫡立长的传统封胤礽为太子，由于太子本身的素质问题及其在朝中结党而废太子，使得诸皇子为皇位互相结党倾轧。故太子一度复立，但康熙帝仍无法容忍其结党而废除。最终在1722年临终时传位于胤禛，即雍正帝。

雍正帝获得隆科多的协助继位，赖年羹尧平定青海乱事以稳固政局，然而后来因故赐死年羹尧、幽禁隆科多。雍正帝在位时期，针对康熙时期的弊端采取补救措施，以延续康雍乾盛世。他设置军机处加强皇权，废杀与他对立的王公并削弱亲王势力。注重皇子教育，采取秘密立储制度以防止康熙晚年诸皇子争位的局面再度发生。将丁银并入地赋，减轻无地贫民的负担。废止贱民政策，令世代受到奴役且地位低贱的贱户被解放。为解决地方贪腐问题使火耗归公，耗羡费用改由中央政府计算；设置养廉银以提高地方官员的薪水。

对外方面，雍正初年青海亲王罗卜藏丹津意图复兴和硕特汗国而乱，隔年年羹尧与岳锺琪等人平定。为此雍正帝占领部分西康地区，又在西宁与拉萨分置办事大臣与驻藏大臣以管理青藏地区。听从鄂尔泰建议推行改土归流，废除具自治性质的土司，以地方官管理少数民族。将喀尔喀蒙古并入清朝；于1727年与俄罗斯帝国签订恰克图条约，确立塞北疆界。1729年听从张廷玉建议，以傅尔丹与岳锺琪兵分二路于科布多对抗准噶尔汗噶尔丹策零，最后于和通泊之战战败。1732年噶尔丹策零东征喀尔喀蒙古，兵至杭爱山，被喀尔喀亲王策棱击败。1734年清准和谈，以阿尔泰山为界，西北大致和平。

雍正帝勤于政事，自诩「以勤先天下」、「朝乾夕惕」。他在位期间的奏摺大多由他亲自批改，军机处的谕旨也由他再三修改。他所亲信的内外臣僚如张廷玉、鄂尔泰、田文镜与李卫等人也都以干练、刻覆著称。他所派遣的特务遍即天下以监控地方事务，密摺制度至此完善，然而屡兴文字狱打压异己。1735年雍正帝于工作时去世，其子弘历继位，即乾隆帝。

盛极趋衰

乾隆帝继位之初，获得张廷玉与鄂尔泰的协助，稳定政局。他以「宽猛相济」理念施政，介于康熙帝的仁厚与雍正帝的严苛之间。人口不断增加使乾隆末年突破三亿大关，约占当时世界人口的三分之一。江南与广东等地的丝织业与棉织业都很发达，景德镇的瓷器都达到历史高峰。与此同时，银号亦开始在山西出现。中国的国库库存亦从雍正十三年（1735年）的34,530,485银两上升至乾隆三十九年（1774年）的73,905,610银两。然而乾隆晚期多从宽厚，宠信贪官和珅，官员腐化使政治大坏；六次下江南以蠲赋恩赏、巡视河工、观民察吏、加恩士绅、培植士族、阅兵祭陵，有学者认为供张过盛，扰民有馀的批评。美国哈佛大学教授欧立德指出乾隆六次南巡诚然耗资巨大，但相对于当时国库收入而言尚在可承受的范围之内。

乾隆帝鸿讲学术，然而由于限制过多，所得人才不如康熙词科。此时期有许多书籍出版，例如《续三通》、《皇朝三通》与《大清会典》等史书；著名小说《红楼梦》、《聊斋志异》和《儒林外史》等；1773年更下令考据补遗，编纂《四库全书》，与《古今图书集成》成为全世界最庞大的类书，这些都成为盛世的文化标志。然而为维护统治却严厉控制思想，编书期间藉机对不符其思想的书籍进行禁毁与秘藏。此外大兴文字狱使如戴名世等人被株连杀害或者流放。有学者认为这些都让文人思想受到严厉阻碍，迟滞文化的发展，另有学者认为此举扼杀中国人的思想活力。梁启超则认为，清朝二百多年，对文化发展有相当程度的贡献，是「中国之文艺复兴时代」。清朝盛行的辑佚学亦救亡不少大量早已失传的中国古籍。另外，史学家郭成康、林铁钧指出清代有些包括「反满」内容的书籍多次在作者没被追究的情况下合法出版，例如王夫之的《读通鉴论》和顾炎武的诗文集。在清初年间的思想界、学术界，都相当活跃。康熙规定：「凡旧刻文卷，有国讳勿禁；其清、明、夷、虏等字，则在史馆奉上谕，无避忌者」，表现出比历代封建统治者都较为开明和宽容的态度，史学家喻大华指出不应该将清朝查禁「反清」言论与「文字狱」混为一谈，因为号召推翻现政权的言论不属于文字问题，而是政治问题。

西方传教士将中国文化介绍给欧洲人，引发18世纪「中国风」热潮。欧洲人追崇中国文化、思想与艺术，在1769年更有人写道：「中国比欧洲本身的某些地区还要知名」。佩雷菲特笔下与乾隆帝不欢而散的英国特使马戛尔尼认为清朝已经衰落，然而马戛尔尼在其日记著作中写道：「中国政府的行政机制和权力是如此地有组织和高效，有条件能够迅即排除万难，创造任何成就」，马戛尔尼访华团的成员之一爱尼斯·安德逊亦对当时期的清朝有相当的正面评价。

对外方面，乾隆十年（1745年）准噶尔汗噶尔丹策零去世，国内诸子争位。乾隆十七年（1752年）冬，达瓦齐袭夺准噶尔汗国汗位，阿睦尔撒纳在随后的内斗中被击败，不得不归附清廷。乾隆帝乘机于乾隆二十年（1755年）派其为引导，以定北将军班第率军平定准噶尔，攻下伊犁。而后阿睦尔撒纳想要成为新一代准噶尔之主，由于没有获得乾隆帝支持而叛变。乾隆帝派兆惠西征，阿睦尔撒纳战败逃亡哈萨克汗国，后因为哈萨克汗归降于乾隆，又逃亡帝俄，乾隆以《尼布楚条约》规定之中俄引渡逃人的条款要求俄方引渡，而阿睦尔撒纳本人已于乾隆二十二年（1757年）出天花病死在托波尔斯克附近的库杜斯克酒厂。随著阿睦尔撒纳的死去，天山北路遂告平定，准噶尔亡，其族在乾隆的屠杀令下惨遭灭绝。然而在天山南路，脱离准噶尔统治的回部领袖大小和卓兄弟起兵反清，史称大小和卓之乱。其领袖布拉尼敦（大和卓）与霍集占（小和卓）占据喀什噶尔与叶尔羌，意图自立。乾隆二十三年（1758年）乾隆帝再命兆惠西征，兆惠率轻军渡沙漠围攻叶尔羌（今新疆莎车），反被包围于黑水营。隔年清将富德率军解围，兆惠与富德最终攻灭大小和卓，并让帕米尔高原以西的中亚各国成为藩属国。乾隆末年，尼泊尔的廓尔喀王国两次入侵西藏。1793年清廷派福康安与海兰察领兵入藏，击退廓尔喀入侵，不丹与哲孟雄（今锡金）亦为藩属国，加强驻藏大臣的权力。

西南方面，乾隆初年派张广泗平定贵州苗民之乱，随后清军前往平定大渡河上游的大小金川（今四川金川县与小金县）动乱，史称大小金川之役。1747年到1749年期间发生大金川之战，清军于此吃尽苦头。1771年第二次金川之战爆发，大小金川的诺木与僧桑格均叛，清将温福战死，阿桂历经多次作战，直到1776年方平定。期间缅甸贡榜王朝与清朝爆发清缅战争，清军四次进攻皆失败。1769年乾隆帝派傅恒、阿桂入缅未果，双方最后停战。1784年暹罗却克里王朝派使朝贡，1788年缅甸为应付暹罗威胁，也派使朝贡。1789年安南发生西山朝统一后黎朝、郑主与广南国的事件。清军入安南击败西山朝，护送黎帝黎愍帝复位，但途中遭西山军的伏击而败，史称清越战争。西山朝阮惠遣使向清廷谢罪，清廷封为安南国王。

乾隆期间清朝疆域达1300万馀平方公里，东方的朝鲜与琉球国也早就成为藩属国之一。但只有德川幕府统治的日本处于锁国时期，与清朝来往甚少。乾隆帝以「十全武功」自誉，他平定准噶尔与回疆大小和卓之乱，使四川、贵州等地继续改土归流，然而其馀战事皆小题大作使国库严重损耗，让清朝国力衰退，全国范围内开始爆发民变。乾隆时期的户部存银最高达8,000万两，常年保持在6,000-7,000万两左右，足以应付政府的各项日常开支、重大工程、战争，而虽然清朝的赋税较为轻，且于康乾时期多次对外用兵、大兴各项工程，但每年国家财政都会有馀，国库储备逐年上升。当时人口暴增与乡村土地兼并严重，使得许多农民失去土地；加上贪官和珅等官员腐败，于乾隆晚期到嘉庆时期陆续爆发民变。白莲教于1770年代举兵，后来又于1796年爆发川楚教乱，八年后被清军镇压，领袖王三槐被处死。台湾天地会领袖林爽文于1787年发动林爽文事件，历时一年多。在乾隆年间，平定大小金川之乱、消灭准噶尔汗国等各威胁，将新疆正式重新纳入中国版图，并且颁布被视为西藏属于中国领土的最有力的证据《钦定藏内善后章程》二十九条，加强中央政府对西藏的管治，最终奠定现代中国的版图。

1795年，乾隆帝照其誓言禅位于子顒琰，即嘉庆帝。乾隆虽为太上皇，但依然「训政」至1799年去世，嘉庆帝方得以亲政。然而嘉庆帝未能解决弊端，清朝继续走向衰退。

近代开启

嘉庆帝在当太子时痛恨贪官和珅，亲政后将其赐死，并抄收其家产。然而嘉庆并没有藉此全面整顿政风，加上地方出现卖官以平衡开支的现象，使得贪污腐败的风气更加扩大，加重地方人民的负担。另外还有河道与漕运淤塞的难题。针对乾隆时期过度开销的弊端，嘉庆帝提倡节俭，缩减朝廷与宗室的开支，把贫穷的旗民送到关外开垦。然而，最后因为朝野强烈的反弹声浪而妥协。此时八旗兵与绿营军纪腐败不可堪用，只能靠地方地主势力的团练平定乱事，而后期更由此形成湘军与淮军等地方军。当时民乱不断，有白莲教的川楚教乱、东南有海盗侵袭，华北又有天理教之乱。道光之后又有太平天国之乱、捻乱以及陕甘回变与云南回变，再加上鸦片战争等外患，一度使清廷摇摇欲坠。

1820年，嘉庆帝崩，旻宁继位，即道光帝。此时，朝廷暮气沉沉，满朝文武只知迎合贪污谎报。道光帝提倡俭朴，所穿龙袍是宫内旧料所制，满朝文武故意在朝服补丁，以示简朴。大臣奏章大多报喜不报忧。曹振镛是当时第一重臣，奉行「多磕头，少说话」哲学。继起的穆彰阿，人称「在位二十年，亦爱才，亦不大贪，惟性巧佞，以欺罔蒙蔽为务」。鸦片战争时，前方将帅不断撒谎，败将奕山竟被钦命交部优叙。道光时期稍可称善的政绩是陶澍改革盐法，成功地防止商贩垄断。

19世纪上半叶，西方各国为使通商正常化，多次派使者前往中国协商。然而清政府以天朝上国自居，不愿与西方各国平起平坐，屡次不了了之。当时不列颠帝国对中国茶叶与丝绸的需求庞大，对华贸易成逆差状态。为此，英国将成瘾剂鸦片大量输入中国以改善本身经济。1838年鸦片猛增到四万零二百箱，人民健康被削弱，清朝经济发生通货膨胀，国力也持续衰退。道光帝为解决此弊端，派林则徐到外贸口岸广州宣布禁菸，此即虎门销烟。为此，1840年中英两国爆发鸦片战争，清军战败后和英国签订第一个不平等条约——《南京条约》，开启中国近代史。当时道光帝与耆英不了解国际法，认为给予英人贸易之便以换取国家长存，所以割让许多影响甚远的权力。清朝后期被迫和各国签订不平等条约，除割地、开港、赔款之外，还让外国派驻军队于首都，中国主权逐渐流失。

1850年，道光帝崩，子奕詝继位，即咸丰帝。西方各国迫使清政府开港通商，加上地方官吏地主兼并土地，使得传统农村经济受到破坏。各地乘机纷纷起事，其中华北以捻乱为主，华中华南以洪秀全的太平天国与云南杜文秀、马如龙的云南回变为主。洪秀全改造基督教教义，1851年于广西金田起义，联和天地会、三合会北伐。两年后攻陷并定都江宁，并且发动两次西征；不久又发动北伐，最远达天津近郊。后来曾国藩、左宗棠与李鸿章为保护儒家文化，纷纷组织湘军与淮军抵抗太平天国。太平天国发生天京事变后国力衰退，部分势力转入捻军。

1864年7月，曾国藩弟曾国荃率湘军攻陷首都天京，随后湘军屠城，许多当地平民和太平军人被杀，太平天国也因此失败。中央研究院院士、中央研究院近代史研究所创所所长郭廷以在其所著《近代中国史纲》引赵烈文《能静居日记》记载曾国荃率湘军攻入南京城后的情景：「湘军『贪掠夺，颇乱伍。中军各勇留营者皆去搜括』，……『沿街死尸十之九皆老者。其幼孩未满二、三岁者亦被戳以为戏，匍匐道上。妇女四十岁以下者一人俱无（均被虏），老者负伤或十馀刀，数十刀，哀号之声达于四方。』凡此均为曾国荃幕友赵烈文目睹所记，总计死者约二、三十万人（死亡人数有争议）。」是为湘军版的「南京大屠杀」。

此期间英国与法国因为和清廷修约不成，趁中国发生内乱之际，于1858年发动英法联军之役。清军于八里桥之战战败，联军攻陷北京，放火烧毁圆明园，签订《天津条约》及《北京条约》。同时帝俄以调停有功逼清廷签订《瑷珲条约》，取走外东北领地。1864年帝俄强迫清廷订立《勘分西北界约记》，割占外西北。面对内外交迫的局面，清廷为使国力恢复而发起自强运动。

双改无果

1861年，咸丰帝崩，其六岁之子载淳继位，即同治帝。咸丰帝本任命肃顺等八大臣赞襄政务，两宫太后与恭亲王奕欣发动辛酉政变，两宫垂帘听政，最后由两宫之一的慈禧太后获得实权。被称为洋务派的奕欣与部分汉臣在消灭太平军时认识到西方的船坚炮利，并且鉴于两次鸦片战争的失败，以「师夷长技以制夷」、中体西用为方针展开自强运动（又称洋务运动）。当时总理各国事务衙门与随后的北洋通商大臣负责对外关系与自强运动的策划与推行，先后引入国外科学技术，建立现代银行体系、现代邮政体系、铺设铁路、架设电报网。建立翻译机构同文馆、新式教育（新学），培训技术人才并派遣留学生到欧美日等先进工业国家，培育出唐绍仪与詹天佑等人才。开设矿业、建立轮船招商局、江南制造总局与汉阳兵工厂等制造工厂与兵工厂，同时也建立新式陆军与北洋舰队等海军。洋务运动使得中国社会出现较安定的局面，史称「同治中兴」。其间太平天国于1864年灭亡。1865年，僧格林沁的满蒙骑兵（八旗兵）中捻军埋伏后全歼，赖洋务派左宗棠与李鸿章分别灭西、东捻，捻乱到1868年为止。1862年至1878年间，左宗棠先后平定陕甘回变，平定新疆回乱，并收回伊犁。云南回变也于1867年由马如龙投降清朝岑毓英，以及1872年杜文秀自杀而止。西方各国的租借地也将西方思想带入中国，推动中国革命与民主制度的发展。1875年，同治帝去世，慈禧太后立载湉为帝，即光绪帝。

对外方面，1884年，清朝和法国为越南（安南）主权爆发中法战争，最终法国战术性胜利，清朝失去藩属国越南，越南成为法国殖民地，台湾也宣布建省。1885年英国入侵缅甸，清朝驻英公使曾纪泽向英国抗议无效，隔年被迫签订《中英缅甸条约》，承认缅甸为英国所有。日本在明治维新后国力大增，1872年日本强迫清朝藩国琉球改属日本，清朝拒不承认，中日交恶。1894年为朝鲜主权清朝和日本发生甲午战争，期间日军攻陷旅顺，执行旅顺大屠杀，对城内进行4天3夜的抢劫、屠杀和强奸，超过二万人遇害。两个推行西化运动的亚洲国家的战争最后以清军落败而告终。战后签《马关条约》，清朝割让台湾和澎湖，失去藩属国朝鲜和租界。洋务派李鸿章建立的北洋舰队全面瓦解，也宣告自强运动最终失败。

甲午战争后，维新派康有为与梁启超于1895年公车上书光绪帝，要求深入改革政府架构、教育、经济体制与军事制度等多个层面，期望清廷从制度面革新。1898年光绪帝在康有为的帮助下实施维新运动（戊戌变法），然而由于做法和态度过于激进而激起旧有保守派和原本的中立群体的反抗，康有为的弟弟康广仁评道：「伯兄规模太广，志气太锐，包揽太多，同志太孤，举行太大。当地排者，忌者、挤者、谤者盈衢塞巷，而上又无权，安能有成？」，导致原本支持变革的慈禧太后以「听信逆臣蛊惑，改变祖宗成法」为由软禁光绪帝，处决谭嗣同、康有溥等多人。由于维持103天就结束，被称为「百日维新」。

1896年清廷为连俄制日，签订《中俄密约》。后来密约泄露，外国鉴于清朝已无力自卫，纷纷划分在中国的势力范围以维护为各自利益，而美利坚合众国提出门户开放政策以平衡列强在华势力。中国长期受列强欺辱，使地方产生义和团之类仇洋排外的民族主义团体。慈禧太后藉此排外而发生义和团事变，义和团屠杀洋人、奸淫妇女、抢夺店铺、破坏各国使馆、烧毁与西洋有关的东西。慈禧太后不理会各国抗议，更曾半正式向十一国宣战，引发八国联军报复。俄军于黑龙江海兰泡越境，悉数屠杀清民六千多人，史称海兰泡惨案。北京被联军占领，慈禧太后率光绪皇帝西逃西安。1901年签订《辛丑条约》，清廷赔偿重款，列强派兵驻守北京一带、划定租借地和势力范围，加深中国的半殖民化。1904年日俄两国更因在东北的利益冲突爆发日俄战争。义和团事变时，李鸿章、张之洞、刘坤一、袁世凯等东南各行省之总督巡抚为保护华中华南，自行宣布中立，不服从朝廷对外一律宣战的敕命（即东南自保）；从此清廷权威低落，地方各省自主性提高。

光绪年间中国发生了不少天灾，有些天灾甚至造成人口损失。光绪元年至四年（1875-1878年）河南、山西、陕西、直隶、山东等地发生特大旱灾饥荒，尤以山西最严重，太原府100万人死95万。总死亡数计950万-2000万不等，也就是清朝人口的约2-4%，史称丁戊奇荒。光绪十三年（1887年）河南郑州下汛十堡（今惠济区花园口镇石桥村）发生黄河决口，致使200多万（一说93万；一说最保守估计150万；一说700万）人罹难。

末改难为

清朝于太平天国战争、甲午战争、八国联军后国势大坠，各界人士及知识分子莫不提出各种方法拯救中国，主要分成立宪派与革命派两种主要改革路线。立宪派主张效仿英德等国实行君主立宪制，而革命派则坚决主张推翻帝制，实行共和制。

1901年，立宪派康有为、梁启超等推动立宪运动，梁启超发表《立宪法议》，希望让光绪帝成为立宪君主。而慈禧太后为挽清朝衰落危局，有意效仿欧日的改革而推行清末新政。新政除了推行君主立宪外，还有诸如建立清朝新军、废除科举、整顿财政等一系列改革。而革命派对清廷的改革失望，他们鼓励推翻清朝，建立中华共和。1894年，孙文等于夏威夷檀香山建立兴中会；1904年，黄兴等于长沙成立的华兴会；1904年，蔡元培等于上海成立光复会；此外，还有其他革命团体。1905年，孙文在日本联合兴中会、华兴会、光复会，成立中国同盟会，并提出「驱除鞑虏、恢复中华、创立民国、平均地权」纲领。革命派联合旧有反清势力如三合会、洪门等，在华南地区发起十次起事，并将势力渗入华中、华南的清朝新军。

当时立宪派与革命派为改革方式发生争执，起初立宪派占上风，清廷也承诺实行立宪。1907年清廷筹设资政院，预备立宪，并筹备在各省开办谘议局。1908年7月颁布《各省谘议局章程及议员选举章程》，命令各省在一年之内成立谘议局。同年颁布《钦定宪法大纲》，以确立君主立宪制政体，成立代议会。在立宪派成员的请愿下，清廷宣布把预备立宪缩短三年，预定在1913年召开国会。同年光绪帝与慈禧太后皆去世，溥仪继位，即宣统帝，其父载沣担任监国摄政王。1911年5月清廷组成由庆亲王奕劻领导的「责任内阁」，这是中国历史上首次君主立宪。不过，该内阁中的很多成员为皇族身份，故被称为「皇族内阁」，引发立宪派的不满和失望，很多转向于革命派合作。

1910年10月末，东北爆发鼠疫，波及69个县（大连、北京、天津、保定、旅顺、芝罘、济南等地先后都曾出现鼠疫患者），共死亡6万馀人，除了造成大量人口死亡之外，还严重影响经济。在奉天出现了挤兑风潮。在铁岭、锦州、营口、安东等地，因交通阻断，市面缺货，大量商铺倒闭，商品价格疯涨。在哈尔滨，因货物减少，关税的徵收受到影响。学校和工矿也纷纷停课和停产。

走向灭亡

1911年5月，四川等地爆发保路运动，清廷急派新军入川镇压，湖北空虚。10月，湖广总督瑞澄斩杀彭楚藩、刘尧澄、杨洪圣等三个革命党士兵，参加文学社与共进会等反清团体的士兵，人心惶惶，两名革命分子金品臣、程定国夜间与排长陶启圣龃龉，一怒之下，射杀排长，发起武昌起义，南方各省随后纷纷宣布独立，是为辛亥革命。

清廷任命北洋新军统帅袁世凯为内阁总理大臣，成立内阁并统领清朝的北洋军。袁世凯一方面于阳夏战争压迫革命军，另一方面却暗中与革命党人谈判，形成南北议和，1912年1月1日中华民国政府于江宁成立，改称南京，孙文在南京就任临时大总统，1月26日清室优待条件达成，孙文也承诺只要袁世凯赞成清帝退位，自己即让位于袁世凯，由袁世凯出任民国大总统，袁世凯与革命党人的意见达成一致。

在袁世凯授意下，段祺瑞等五十位北洋军将领，发布了《北洋五十将乞共和电》，要求宣统退位。段祺瑞不久又发《乞共和第二电》，以发动兵变要胁朝廷。2月12日，隆裕太后代表宣统帝溥仪，颁布退位诏书，将权力交给中华民国政府，清朝灭亡，标志著中国五千多年来的君主制度正式结束。随后孙文让位予袁世凯，南北统一。3月6日，南京参议院正式决议同意袁世凯在北京就职，袁世凯就任大总统，定都北京。

因正统观使然，清亡时不少汉臣如郑孝胥等依旧忠于大清，终身以满清遗老自居，甚至有人舍身殉国。后来，1917年张勋组织辫子军，于北京拥护宣统帝溥仪，复辟清朝（史称张勋复辟），但只持续12天而终。1924年，冯玉祥驱逐溥仪，溥仪和他的随从只好由紫禁城移往天津租界居住。

疆域

发源与扩张

清朝发源于东北地区，努尔哈赤在与明朝决裂前，已领有建州之地，自称「收管我建州国之人，看守朝廷九百五十馀里边疆」。经努尔哈赤与皇太极时期的发展后领有今东北地区、外东北地区与内蒙古地区。1644年多尔衮偕同顺治帝率军入关，随后指挥清军占领全明朝领地，统一中原，领有内地十八省。

1661年，南明亡。然而当时尚有以吴三桂为首，镇守华南的三藩；以及奉明朝为正朔，领有台湾台南、澎湖的明郑。三藩之乱与施琅攻台后，康熙帝完全掌控华南地区与台湾西部及澎湖地区。此时准噶尔汗国的可汗噶尔丹与俄罗斯沙皇国（沙俄）友好，噶尔丹南征青海和硕特，东征喀尔喀蒙古。而沙俄为在远东寻找出海口，向东移民侵略黑龙江上游。康熙帝先是于雅克萨战役击败俄军，与其划定边疆；之后率军三征噶尔丹，协助喀尔喀蒙古收复其领土。喀尔喀蒙古其后在多伦会盟后并入清朝，外蒙古地区正式归清朝所有。1727年雍正帝与帝俄签订恰克图条约，确立塞北疆界。

1717年准噶尔汗国新可汗策妄阿拉布坦入侵青藏地区，灭和硕特汗国，并且占领拉萨。清军多次被准军击败，最后于1720年由胤禵率军驱除成功，协助第七世达赖喇嘛入藏，以拉藏汗旧臣管理藏区，这是清朝经营青海、西藏地区之始。雍正时期，平定青海亲王罗卜藏丹津之乱后，雍正帝又在西宁与拉萨分置办事大臣与驻藏大臣以控管青藏地区。

新疆地区方面，1755年乾隆帝乘准噶尔汗国噶尔丹策零去世的机会，派将领率军西征，军势直达准国首都伊犁。在平定阿睦尔撒纳之乱与大小和卓之乱后彻底掌控准噶尔地区与回疆，并且获得帕米尔高原以西诸国的朝贡。

极盛疆域

康熙年的《尼布楚条约》和雍正年的《恰克图界约》后清朝与俄罗斯帝国确定了北部边界，乾隆时期灭亡准噶尔后清朝的疆域最为稳定，一般将乾隆乾隆三十四年淸缅合约之后疆域定为淸朝的最大范围：东北与俄罗斯帝国（帝俄）分界额尔古纳河、格尔必齐河与外兴安岭，这条疆线直到鄂霍次克海与库页岛。正北与帝俄分界萨彦岭、沙毕纳依岭、恰克图与额尔古纳河。西北与哈萨克汗国等西北藩属国分界萨彦岭、斋桑泊、阿拉湖、伊塞克湖、巴尔喀什湖至帕米尔高原。西南与印度的蒙兀儿帝国、喜马拉雅山诸国家分界喜马拉雅山至野人山，正南大致上与现今中华人民共和国与东南亚国家的分界相同，但清朝尚获得缅甸北部的南坎、江心坡等地。东与日本、琉球国分界日本海与东海，与朝鲜王朝沿图们江、鸭绿江分界，清朝还领有台湾、澎湖、海南及南海的南海诸岛（时称千里石塘、万里长沙、曾母暗沙）。

衰退

进入19世纪，由于清朝的衰落，列强于鸦片战争后以不平等条约掠夺许多领土与藩属国。俄罗斯帝国藉由1858年瑷珲条约与1860年北京条约获得外东北，包括库页岛等地。1900年趁八国联军的机会又强占黑龙江以北的江东六十四屯。1864年藉由中俄勘分西北界约记与1881年的伊犁条约获得外西北，并且陆续占领中亚诸藩属国。19世纪末大博弈时期英俄两国签订英俄协定，私自划分帕米尔地区。不列颠帝国藉由1842年的南京条约、1860年的北京条约与1898年的展拓香港界址专条获得现今香港地区，并且侵占藩属国缅甸与喜马拉雅山诸国家。法兰西第三共和国于中法战争占领藩属国安南、南掌。葡萄牙帝国于中葡和好通商条约永居管理澳门。明末时萨摩藩已对藩属国琉球国实施以军事占领为后盾的遥控统治，而日本帝国明治时代更于1872年将其正式吞并，并于1895年的马关条约获得台湾与澎湖列岛，并强迫清朝放弃藩属国朝鲜，而原先亦被割让的辽东半岛则因三国干涉而重回清朝之手，朝鲜后来被日本吞并。甲午战争后，列强认为清朝无自卫能力，为自身利益划分在中国势力范围，使得重要港口如旅顺、大连被帝俄与后来的日本领有、威海卫被英国领有、胶澳被德国领有、广州湾被法国领有等。部分清朝末期建立的租界到1945年二战结束后中国才得以收回主权，而清朝割让给英国的香港岛、九龙和租借地新界则要到1997年才得以被收回主权。

行政区划

清朝版图辽阔，民族众多，在行政区划上也「因时顺地、变通斟酌」。在汉族地区沿用明朝旧制，实行「省—府—县」三级制。在东北地区，为满洲八旗制、汉人「省—府—县」三级制与渔猎部落的「姓长制」并行。在藩部地区则因俗而治，并根据中央集权统治的需要加以改革：蒙古实行「旗盟制」、「札萨克制」；西藏实行「宗溪制」，新疆回部实行伯克制。全国分为内地十八省、五个驻防将军辖区、两个办事大臣辖区共二十五个一级行政区域和内蒙古等旗、盟。

清末，在列强蚕食鲸吞的形势下，边疆各地依靠旧有的行政体制已无法维持有效的统治。光绪年间，新疆、奉天、吉林、黑龙江相继建省，实行与内地相同的行政体制。蒙古、西藏也有建省之议，但在清朝灭亡之前未能实行。光绪三十四年（1908年），清朝分为二十二省，以及西藏、外蒙古、内蒙古、青海等边疆地方。

内地政区

清代山海关以内、长城以南的汉族地区被称为「内地」、「关内」或「汉地」，又继承明代「两直十三省」的称谓合称「直省」。内地的行政区划承袭明代「省—府（州）—县」的层级体制。一级政区为省，又俗称「行省」，本布政使司，但随著承宣布政使逐渐沦为督抚的属官，「布政使司」的名称逐渐被「省」取代，至嘉庆朝《一统志》编纂时「省」已成为一级政区的正式称呼。二级政区为府、直隶州。府管辖的州（散州、属州）不再领县，形成单式的三级制。清代初年，原为临时差官的巡抚取代布政使，成为一省的长官。在一些民族杂居之处及战略要地，设置新型政区「厅」，分为省直辖的直隶厅和府辖的散厅。少数直隶厅下辖县。

明代承宣布政使司、提刑按察使司派出的差官「道员」，在清代也保留下来。道员的统辖区域是「道」，介于省与府之间，有分巡道、分守道、粮储道、盐法道、兵备道等名目。清初的道并不是行政区，道员亦无品级。乾隆以后，定道员秩品为正四品，分巡道、分守道的职权也渐趋一致。有的道下直接领县。有人认为清末的道实际上已成为省、府之间的一级政区，之后北洋政府更有废省置道之计画，后因被国民政府取代而未实施。清朝行政区划层级为：

行省

在行省设置方面，清代基本沿袭明代所置的两京与十三布政使司，设山东、山西、河南、陕西、浙江、福建、江西、广东、广西、湖广、四川、云南、贵州。顺治元年（1644年）定鼎北京，以盛京为留都。二年（1645年）改北直隶为直隶省，改南直隶为江南省。康熙三年（1664年），分湖广为湖北、湖南二省。康熙六年（1667年），江南省正式分为江苏、安徽二省。康熙七年，设立甘肃省，自此形成所谓「内地十八省」的格局。

• 直隶省

• 江苏省

• 安徽省

• 山西省

• 山东省

• 河南省

• 陕西省

• 甘肃省

• 浙江省

• 江西省

• 湖北省

• 湖南省

• 四川省

• 福建省

• 广东省

• 广西省

• 云南省

• 贵州省

光绪十一年（1885年），分福建省台湾府置台湾省。两年后台湾正式建省，称「福建台湾省」。光绪二十一年（1895年），因甲午战争战败，台湾省被割让予日本。光绪三十年十二月（1905年1月），分江苏江宁、淮安、扬州、徐甘肃省四府及通州、海州二直隶州置江淮省，旋即裁撤。此后至清末，内地仍为十八省，与东三省、新疆省合为二十二省。

各省以总督巡抚为长贰，掌管一省军政大权及吏僚考察，号曰「封疆大吏」。乾隆直省辖区确定后，计有辖省总督八员，除直隶、四川两督辖一省，两江总督辖三省外，余均辖两省，而山西、山东、河南三省不设总督；辖省巡抚十五员，直隶、四川、甘肃三省以总督兼巡抚事。清季新疆、东北设省，又新设巡抚每省各一员，奉天、吉林、黑龙江三省巡抚由新设东三省总督统辖，新疆巡抚由陕甘总督统辖，同时内地八督全部兼领驻省巡抚，至是计有辖省总督九员，辖省巡抚十四员。

督抚以下，以布政使（俗称「藩台」）与按察使（俗称「臬台」）各置官司（俗称「藩司」「臬司」），分管一省行政与司法，雍正后又有提督学政一员开衙建署，负责管理教育事务，以上三员均受督抚节制。原则上每省三使均各设一员，唯江苏省民事繁重，分设江宁苏州两藩司，分管省事。

清末新政，针对省级政区实施现代化改革，其中江苏等总督驻省不复设巡抚，而以总督兼巡抚事；撤消咸同以来各省新设的新式财务机关，统归藩司属下的度支公所；按察使改提法使，遵循司法审判与司法行政分离的原则，专管司法行政与监督，审判等权分归各级审判厅和检察厅；学政改提学使，强化其教育管理职能以适应新式教育；新设交涉使，专门负责与外国通商交往事宜；每省于藩司外另设巡警道及劝业道，分管一省民政警务与农工商业事务。唯东三省因系新政时初建，不徇故例，故无藩司及巡警道，而设度支使与民政使，东三省当时发展程度低，实业事务轻，故亦无劝业道缺。

各省军队虽为督抚节制，但八旗驻防军不在其列。驻防八旗由各省驻防将军统领，直接向皇帝负责。

以下为各直省对应的统治军民的封疆大吏简表：

冲繁疲难

清代的府、州、厅、县，按照「冲、繁、疲、难」的考语分为不同等次。考语字数越多，地位就越重要。一般以四字俱全者为「最要缺」，三字者（冲繁难、冲疲难、繁疲难）为「要缺」，二字者（冲繁、繁难、繁疲、疲难、冲难、冲疲）为「中缺」、一字或无字者为「简缺」。

• 冲：地当孔道者为冲

• 繁：政务纷纭者为繁

• 疲：赋多逋欠者为疲

• 难：民刁俗悍，命盗案多者为难

土司

云南、贵州、广西、四川、湖南、湖北、甘肃等省设有土司，分为宣慰司、宣抚司、招讨司、安抚司和长官司（长官为武职），与土府、土州、土县（长官为文职）。土司的长官以当地各族头人充任，可以世袭，由朝廷或地方官府颁给印信，归所在地方之督抚、驻扎大臣管辖。宣慰等司的长官隶属于兵部、土知府、土知州等官隶属于吏部。雍正年间，云南、贵州、广西等省的土司开始改行流官制，史称「改土归流」。光绪、宣统之际，赵尔丰出任川滇边务大臣，四川西部的藏人土司、西藏东部的宗也开始改土归流。

东三省

中国东北为清朝「龙兴之地」。顺治年间入关后，以驻防八旗留守盛京渖阳。康熙至乾隆年间，逐渐形成三个相当于行省的将军辖区：盛京、吉林和黑龙江。将军之下设专城副都统分驻各城，并管理各城的临近地区。副都统下有总管统领各旗。在汉民聚居之处，置府、州、县、厅，如同内地。居于黑龙江、嫩江中上游的巴尔虎、达斡尔、索伦（鄂温克）、鄂伦春、锡伯等族，编入八旗，由布特哈总管、呼伦贝尔总管管辖。黑龙江、乌苏里江下游及库页岛的赫哲、费雅喀、库页、奇楞等渔猎部落则分设姓长、乡长，由三姓副都统管辖。

• 盛京，由盛京将军统辖

　• 奉天府 / 盛京副都统

　• 锦州府 / 锦州副都统

　• 熊岳副都统

　• 金州副都统

　• 兴京副都统

• 吉林，由吉林将军统辖

　• 宁古塔副都统

　• 伯都讷副都统

　• 三姓副都统

　• 吉林副都统

　• 阿勒楚喀副都统

　• 拉林副都统

　• 珲春副都统

• 黑龙江，由黑龙江将军统辖

　• 黑龙江副都统

　• 墨尔根副都统

　• 齐齐哈尔副都统

　• 布特哈副都统

　• 呼兰副都统

　• 呼伦贝尔副都统

　• 通肯副都统

光绪末年的甲午战争、八国联军之役与日俄战争严重动摇清朝在东北地区的统治，迫使其废除满洲的旗民分治制度，设立行省。光绪三十三年（1907年），废除盛京、吉林、黑龙江三地将军衙门，改设奉天省、吉林省、黑龙江省；随后裁撤各城副都统、总管，改为府、厅、州、县。宣统三年（1911年），奉天省领八府、八厅、六州、三十三县；吉林省领十一府、一州、五厅、十八县；黑龙江省领七府、六厅、一州、七县。

藩部

清代蒙古、西藏、青海、新疆与黑龙江布特哈（达呼尔、索伦、鄂伦春等族）被称为藩部，由理藩院管理。

蒙古

明清之际，蒙古分为众多部落（蒙古语称为「艾马克」），部落首领为「部长」（鄂拓克）或「汗」。清太宗时，依照满洲八旗的组织形式，将蒙古各部落编为旗，是为蒙古的基本行政单位，其长官为札萨克或总管。旗下设「佐」（苏木），相当于乡。自此蒙古各部落被纳入统一的行政体系之中。在地域上，蒙古地区大致分为察哈尔、内蒙古、西套蒙古、外蒙古（包括土谢图汗部、赛音诺颜部、车臣汗部、札萨克图汗部）、科布多与唐努乌梁海。

清代蒙古又分为内属蒙古与外藩蒙古。内属蒙古包括八旗察哈尔、归化城土默特、唐努乌梁海、阿尔泰乌梁海等部，各旗由朝廷派遣官员（一般为总管）治理，与内地的州、县无异。外藩蒙古各旗则由当地的世袭札萨克管理，处于半自治状态。在外藩蒙古，以若干旗合为一盟，设正、副盟长，掌管会盟事宜，对各旗札萨克进行监管。清代的盟是监察机构，并不能视为一级政区。

外藩蒙古又按其归附清朝的先后分为内札萨克蒙古与外札萨克蒙古。内札萨克蒙古又被称为内蒙古，于天命至康熙初年陆续归附清朝。乾隆以后定为二十四部，共四十九旗，设六盟。内札萨克各旗不但政治地位很高，还保留一定的兵权。康熙中期以后归附清朝的各部落称为外札萨克蒙古，包括漠北的喀尔喀四部、西套蒙古二旗、青海蒙古各部、科布多各札萨克旗、新疆旧土尔扈特部及中路和硕特部。外札萨克各旗无兵权，隶属于当地的将军、都统、驻扎大臣（西套蒙古二旗除外）。其中喀尔喀四部后来演变为外蒙古。

新疆

清代新疆分为天山北路的准部和天山南路的回部，统属于伊犁将军。其中的蒙古游牧地区实行盟旗制。维吾尔、布鲁特、塔吉克等族地区则实行伯克制。蒙古旧土尔扈特部与中路和硕特部设立旗、盟：旧土尔扈特部为南北东西四路乌讷恩素珠克图盟，和硕特部为巴图塞特奇勒图盟。准部地方设乌鲁木齐都统，统辖乌鲁木齐（迪化州）、库尔喀喇乌苏、吐鲁番、哈密、古城、巴里坤（镇西府）等城。其中迪化州、镇西府由新疆与甘肃省双重管辖。塔尔巴哈台由塔尔巴哈台参赞大臣管辖。伊犁及其以西地方由伊犁将军、领队大臣管理。回部设总理回疆事务参赞大臣（一般为喀什噶尔参赞大臣），统辖喀什噶尔、叶尔羌、和阗、阿克苏、乌什、库车、喀喇沙尔等城。光绪十年（1884年），新疆建省，实行与内地相同的府、厅、州、县体制。

青海

清代的青海不包括今西宁、海东、黄南以及部分青海省边缘地区。统辖青海地方的官员为西宁办事大臣，常驻西宁（当时属甘肃省）。青海大致以黄河为界，分为青海蒙古和玉树等四十族土司。黄河以北主要为蒙古人，有和硕特、辉特、绰罗斯（准噶尔）、土尔扈特、喀尔喀五大部落。雍正三年（1725年），编青海蒙古为二十七旗，后增至二十九旗，由西宁办事大臣主持会盟。另有察汉诺门罕牧地，实际上单独为一喇嘛旗。道光三年（1823年），分黄河以北二十四旗为左、右翼二盟，每盟设正、副盟长各一人。黄河以南主要为藏人，设有四十个土司，其中以玉树土司最大，故称玉树等四十族土司。土司以下有土千户、土百户。嘉庆、道光年间，藏人不断越过黄河向北迁徙，形成环青海湖一带的环海八族。

西藏

西藏在清代又称「唐古忒」、「图伯特」，分为卫、喀木（康）、藏、阿里四部，以及霍尔三十九族地区。西藏地方的行政长官为驻藏大臣，驻喇萨，会同达赖喇嘛、班禅额尔德尼办理藏内政务。其政令由噶厦（西藏官府）执行。西藏的基层政区是宗，大致相当于内地的县，但规模很小。一些贵族、寺庙的庄园领地称为溪卡，地位比宗低或者平级。宗的长官为「宗本」，溪的长官为「溪堆」，一般由噶厦委派，也有的由特定寺庙委任。后藏札什伦布附近的几个宗，由班禅直接管理。今那曲地区、昌都地区北部的各部落统称霍尔三十九族，简称三十九族，为蒙古人后裔，由驻藏大臣的属员夷情章京管辖。驻扎于达木（今当雄）的达木蒙古八旗，每旗设一佐领，不设总管，直属于驻藏大臣。

政治

决策机关

清朝的政治体制基本上沿袭明朝的君主集权制度，但略有不同。官员等级分「九品十八级」，每等有「正」、「从」之别。不在十八级别以内的叫做未入流，在级别上附于从九品。清朝制定内国史院、内秘书院与内宏文院等内三院为内阁，作为中央最高决策机关。设大学士满、汉各二人，协办大学士满、汉各一人，学士满六人、汉四人，下辖中央执行机关六部。内阁的地位虽高，但实际权力比明朝小，实际掌握权力的机关会随时代不同而改变。后金时期，议政王大臣会议是皇帝与王公贵族讨论国事之处。1631年皇太极为了中央集权，仿明朝制度设立六部与内阁以分议政王大臣会议的权力。入关之后，1677年康熙帝设立南书房，削弱议政王大臣会议权力，同时将外朝内阁的某些职能移归内廷，实施高度集权。雍正帝为了西征准噶尔准备设置军需处，雍正十年改称军机处。军机处机构精简，行政效率高，能迅速处理军国大事，进一步加强君主专制主义中央集权。鸦片战争之后，为推行自强运动，先后于1861年与1870年成立总理各国事务衙门与北洋通商大臣，负责对外关系与自强运动的策划与推行，成为自强运动期间最高行政机关。实施清末新政之后，1911年5月18日清廷宣布废除军机处，仿西方国家与日本实行内阁制，内阁总理大臣和诸大臣组成的内阁成为最高行政机关。

清初康熙帝一方面则通过各种手段限制满洲贵族的权力，如剥夺各旗王公干预旗务的权力，破除「军功勋旧诸王」统兵征伐的传统，削弱议政王大臣会议的政治影响等；另一方面提出要建立由皇帝个人独裁的专制政体，「天下大权当统于一」，「天下大小事务，皆朕一身亲理，无可旁贷。若将要务分任于人，则断不可行」，亦表示：「天下大事，皆朕一人独任」，康熙要掌管「用人之权」，以阻止朋党的形成，免得鳌拜掌权时期「结党专权」和「罔上行私」的情况再度发生，也为了防止不同派别党派之间互相斗争。康熙帝确立的君主专制制度主要包括三方面：

• 「用人之权」、「奖惩之权」由皇帝亲自控制，不许臣僚干预；

• 通过特务统治、密奏制度，对臣僚实行严密的监督和防范；

• 反对朋党，严防臣僚结党对抗皇权。

在明代，文人结社超出了文学和学术的领域而成为政治上的一支重要力量。清朝统治认为前朝文人团体的庞大和干政是明亡的重要原因之一。有见及此，清初统治者吸取前朝教训，于顺治九年（1652年）下令「生员不许纠党多人，立盟结社」和「所作文字不许妄行刊刻，违者听提调官治罪」。康有为对此作出评论，指出中国数千年来的党派皆为君主所深恶，又以汉代党锢之祸，唐代清流，宋代元佑党籍碑和明朝东林党为例。近代日本学者宗方小太郎评论：「（清朝）建国之初便多方预防弊政，防止祸乱于未萌状态，其中如以法令严禁组织会党，故在三百年之治世中党祸颇少者即系此故。」

康熙帝确立的君主专制原则，被雍正、乾隆二帝继承和发展，雍正帝的专制体现在他私派特务人员监视全国各地地方长官一切活动，许多地方官的私生活，连家里的琐事都瞒不过他。

学者钱穆从传统「夷夏之辨」与近代民族主义相结合的角度强调清朝的「断裂性」，在界定清朝的性质时以汉人文明的尺度衡量其价值的优劣，认为是满人只有接受汉人的先进文化才能步入文明的境界，才具有延续前代王朝正统的资格，是近代史学中「汉化论」的表现。钱穆的论证基于传统汉化的历史观，对满人的统治评价负面。他引据革命家邹容的《革命军》的内容认为中国由汉唐等朝代的「士人政权」在清代变为「部族政权」，认为蒙古人和满洲人变为中国内的特权阶级或特殊分子。亦认为清朝政权始终是维护和偏袒满洲人，须满洲人在后拥护，才能控制牢固，以及清朝的政治，制度的意义很少，法术的意义多，批评清朝政府发布最高命令的手续，比如他认为「寄信上谕」是清朝特有的，不按照中国向来的程序，而是直接由皇帝军机处寄给受命令的人，旁人都不知道。他亦认为，清朝在政治上还限制发言权、结社和出版自由。在清朝，除了六部尚书和侍郎可以向皇帝讲话，其他的不论什么人都不许向皇帝讲话，而一直得到中央重视的翰林院等，向来他们可以向政府讲话的，但是到了清朝也不准专折言事。在地方上，只有总督、巡抚、藩台、臬台可以向政府讲话，其他的府县均不可，又认为在明代的「布衣」也可以直接向皇帝讲话。他又批评在地方上，清朝也不允许民间有公开发言权。在顺治五年立在府学、县学明伦堂里的卧碑就足可以证明。在当时府学、县学都有明伦堂，清朝在每一个明伦堂里都设置一个石碑，而这个石碑不是竖立的，而是横躺在那里，所以叫「卧碑」。在卧碑上有三条禁令：第一，生员不得言事；第二，不得立盟结社；第三，不得刊刻文字。然而史学家徐复观指出钱穆的「士人政权」说并不正确，因为政府的性质必须就权力根源之地是由谁来运用而言。他亦指出通过《二十四史》一直到现代，都证明凡是站在平民的立场进入到仕途的人地位愈高，与皇帝愈接近，命运性的困扰、艰难必定来自专制的机构与专制的观念。他批评钱穆对专制下的必然产物例如「外戚宦官」和汉代统治者的暴行视而不见，以及把中国「历史中成千上万的残酷地帝王专制的实例置之不顾」，且根据《报任安书》，凡是皇帝亲自交下与皇帝自己有关的案子，承办的官吏决不敢问是非。

新清史学派认为，满人采取的政治制度在明代的基础下有所创新。比如军机处就从带有临时性的纯粹军事咨询组织转变成了一种常规的政治治理机构，由此提高了统治效率。密折制度的建立完全改变了君臣之间相互沟通的传统方式，使得君主控制臣下的能力大大增强。八旗驻防各地使汉人人口占绝大多数的城市染上了颇为浓厚的异族色彩。内务府的设置与运行，严格了宫廷内部的礼仪规范，与明代的内廷制度有了本质的区别，宦官外戚干政的现象也由此完全绝迹。

西方传教士如南怀仁等人记载康熙经常亲身到各地巡视，以便了解百姓的生活情况和官吏们的施政状况，亦会允许「最卑贱的工匠和农夫」接近自己，谕令卫兵们不许阻止百姓靠近，康熙会向百姓提出各种问题，包括询问百姓对当地的官吏的满意度，以便对官员作出奖励或处分。另外，在清朝敢言且未被追究的学者有反对专制思想的袁枚、著书批评君权的唐甄、一道反朝廷的黄宗羲以及顾炎武等学者。

南书房

南书房于康熙十六年（1677年）设立，起初是康熙帝为了与翰林院词臣们研讨学问，吟诗作画而设。因在乾清宫西南角特辟房舍故名南书房。由于南书房「非崇班贵檩、上所亲信者不得入」，所以它完全是由皇帝严密控制的一个核心机要机构，随时承旨出诏行令，这使南书房「权势日崇」。南书房地位的提高，是康熙帝削弱议政王大臣会议权力，同时将外朝内阁的某些职能移归内廷，实施高度集权的重要步骤。

军机处

军机处原称军需处，历来被视为清朝的最高决策部门。雍正八年（1730年），清军在西北与准噶尔激战，为及时处理军报雍正皇帝始立，雍正十年改称军机处。军机大臣以下设章京等官，从六部员司和内阁中书里选用。章京的任务是缮写谕旨、记载档案、查核奏议，作军机大臣的辅助人员。章京也是满、汉人员各两班，每班八人，各设一领班。章京参与机要，草拟圣旨，俗称「小军机」。

乾隆皇帝即位后服孝，安排数位「总理事务王大臣」进入军机处，故改名总理事务处。乾隆二年（1737年）乾隆服满亲政，总理事务王大臣等自请罢职，恢复军机处名称，自此遂成定制，军机处成为直接对皇帝负责的核心权力机构，满洲议政王大臣会议的地位更被削弱至几乎可忽略不计，政治权力全部掌握在皇帝手中，成为清代中央集权制度的顶峰。

《清史稿》记载，乾隆时军机处虽然只有两名汉人，但汉人的地位都很高，张廷玉是太保、大学士、三等伯，徐本是太子太保、大学士，高于除了鄂尔泰之外的所有同僚。至于鄂尔泰的地位之所以稳居军机大臣之首，则与他在「改土归流」、「混一华夷」过程中曾立下的功业恰成正比。到了清季，军机处仍不改诸族合作之传统，吴郁生、荣庆和世续等军机大臣，在国势陵夷的光绪与宣统时期，依然在默契地合作。

宣统三年（1911年）四月初十清廷宣布成立「责任内阁」，军机处废止。

责任内阁

宣统三年四月初十（1911年5月18日），清政府宣布废除军机处，实行内阁制，任命内阁总理大臣和诸大臣组成内阁。由庆亲王奕劻组成中国历史上第一个现代意义上的责任内阁。由于阁员中过半数为皇族，时人讥之为「皇族内阁」。当时的内阁学士李家驹指出：

• 当时中国唯一具有宪法性质的《钦定宪法大纲》并没有规定皇族不能组织内阁；

• 日本宪法也没有类似规定（李家驹曾充驻日公使和出使日本考察宪政大臣）；

• 奕励内阁只是暂行阁制，具有过渡性质。

中国历史学博士李细珠指出，与其说奕勘内阁是因皇族亲贵太多，不如说是因清朝皇族亲贵为满族，满汉矛盾才是问题的焦点。该内阁在辛亥革命后倒台，由袁世凯组成的新内阁所取代。

执行机关

与汉地地方行政制度一样，清朝中央执行机关基本沿袭明朝体制，只有少量机构调整，大致上可以总结为七部院五寺察院两府。

七部院包括六部（吏部、户部、礼部、兵部、刑部、工部）与理藩院，为清朝最高执行机关，各部长官称尚书，副长官称侍郎，以前尚书均由满人担任，顺治元年（1644年）规定尚书及侍郎满、汉各一，只有新设的理藩院因为与汉地事务无关而多涉及旗务，始终不设汉缺。

清朝以前的政治，因为政治的公开性和六部尚书是全国行政首长的关系，由外部送到内部的公事，都是先送到六部；而皇帝拿出来的公事，六部也一定要得先看，例如有关教育的公事一定要经过礼部，而不能由皇帝私下决定，到了清朝却非如此。清朝的六部虽然沿袭明朝，但是清朝的六部的权力不如前朝，六部尚书更不能直接对部下发命令，而六部尚书也不是行政首长。六部的权限权力集中到皇帝手里，同时还有满汉之分，有一个汉人尚书，就必须有一个满洲尚书，并且始终以满尚书为主。

五寺包括大理寺、太常寺、光禄寺、太仆寺、鸿胪寺。大理寺与刑部和都察院合为三法司，其职权与今日之最高法院相似。大理寺的首长称为大理寺卿，也是九卿之一。其馀四个寺的卿职权较低。太常寺负责祭祀；太仆寺管理马匹；光禄寺负责寿宴；鸿胪寺负责接待外宾。

都察院是最高监察机关，架构基本沿袭明制，以左院察京畿，右院刺外藩（故直省督抚均领右都御史或右副都御史衔），所不同者，随著君主专制的高度加强，都察院的谏诤职能遭到空前削弱。因为同样的原因，明朝具有批驳权和言官职能的六科也只馀下分察六部的监察职能，故于雍正年间被并入都察左院。为加强监督管理，凡天下文武官员，都要定期进行考察。规定三载考绩，以定升降奖惩。京官叫「京察」，外官叫「大计」。对武官的考察，每五年一次，称为「军政」，由兵部主持。但是，不论「京察」、「大计」还是「军政」，在实行中都是瞻徇情面，弊端丛生。后来更成为故事具文，走走过场而已。

内廷事务方面，鉴于明朝太监乱国，清朝皇帝独创内务府以管理宫禁事务。其成员由内务府三旗（正黄旗、镶黄旗、正白旗）的15个包衣佐领、18个旗鼓佐领、两个朝鲜佐领、一个回子佐领和30个内管领的包衣及太监组成，其机构组织兼容清初内务府和十三衙门两种制度的内容和特点，并最终形成以七司三院为主干兼辖其他40馀衙门的庞大的宫廷服务机构。

宗室管理方面，清朝仍设宗人府管理宗室觉罗事务，但与明朝宗人府人浮于事只用于优待亲王的状况不同，由于八旗制度的存在，数量庞大的宗室觉罗成为清廷的核心军事力量，管理他们的宗人府也成为重要的实权部门。

清末新政中，对此前的制度进行大量的改革，此前的七部院被改革为十一部，长官（国务大臣）均为责任内阁阁僚；大理寺改组为大理院，根据司法独立原则不再是刑部的覆审机关，而是全国最高审判机关，与最高监察机关都察院同为全国最高司法机关；下四寺进行省革而归入新官司，内务宗人两府尽管保有旧时职权，但随著军制改革，权力也大为下降。

刑律

顺治四年（1647年），《大清律例》编修完成。《大清律》基本上承袭《明律》的内容。后经康熙、雍正两朝屡次增删，并于雍正五年公布。但清朝最经常起作用的是例，而不是律。胡林翼说：「《大清律》易遵，而例难尽悉。」，胥吏都谙熟例案，常可执例以压制长官。清廷对各少数民族地区还有各种特订的法律，如对蒙古族有「蒙古律」，对维吾尔族有「回律」，对藏族有「番律」等等。

清朝皇帝为打压汉人反清复明运动与防止散播不利皇帝的消息，屡兴文字狱以控制士大夫的思想。文字狱之案件常是无中生有，小人造谣所为。较大规模的文字狱甚至可以牵连多人受害。柳诒徵称「前代文人受祸之烈，殆未有若清代者。故雍乾以来，志节之士，荡然无存。……稍一不慎，祸且不测。」。顺治四年（1647年），发生第一起文字狱「函可案」。一位法号函可的和尚因藏有「逆书」《变记》而被逮捕，后来流放到渖阳。顺治末年又发生庄廷鑨明史案，并惊动朝廷中的辅政大臣鳌拜等人。清朝诸例文字狱中，有名的有康熙时期的南山案、雍正时期的查嗣庭试题案和吕留良案等。

《剑桥中国史》评价：「清代文字狱中禁止的大多数作品一直被保存下来，而大多数遗失的作品不在被禁之列。这可能是直到今天在许多国家看到的现象的又一种说明。一本被列入禁书名单的书，被认为有特殊价值，从而被小心地保存下来。禁令实际上是最有效的广告形式。」。

军事

清朝武装力量主要有八旗军、绿营、地方义勇与团练、湘军、淮军与清末新军。

八旗

八旗制度是清朝特有的一种组织形式和军事制度，是清朝军队之核心。原先采取军政合一、兵民合一的方式。入关后专门以兵为业，世代为兵。包括旗下士兵和户籍被编制在八旗军队中的家庭成员，由各地八旗驻防将军或都统管辖。1601年，努尔哈赤将建州女真分为四旗。1615年时扩建为八旗，八旗制度至此成形。皇太极在征服漠南蒙古察哈尔部，以及收降明朝降将后，又建立起蒙古八旗与汉军八旗。尽管八旗有满洲、蒙古、汉军之分，但他们都是基于同一套制度之下，因此差异不大。旗人拥有一定的社会地位，绝大多数情况下终身不变，所属旗籍亦基本世代固定。旗人因战功而获得的职位可以世代承袭，例如，每旗下属的众佐领通常都是世袭职位。旗人居住地大多是固定的。在各地的驻防军（分布在如杭州、成都等大城市）更设立「八旗驻防城」（俗称「满城」）供旗人居住，与平民所居住之地相隔离。旗人不得务农或经营工商业，每月钱粮由朝廷供给，号称「旱涝保收」的「铁杆庄稼」。旗人不受当地总督、巡抚管辖，犯罪时由特定机关审理。

绿营

绿营是顺治帝入关后招降明军、招募汉人组织的军队，以协助少量的八旗兵镇守广大的疆土。当时由八旗军守备京师、华北地区与各地要冲，绿营守备华中与华南地区。华南更交由三藩镇守，以压制当地反清势力。绿营以绿旗为标志，以营为单位，兵制继承明朝，编有标、协、营及汛。绿营由汉人统帅，最上位的提督统领一省绿营，受文官总督、巡抚所节制，各省兵力大小不一，由万馀到六七万不等；提督之下为总兵，管辖一镇兵力，约几千人至一万五千人。直属兵力镇标由参将统领，约千人至两三千人不等。再下面的为副将，管理一协兵力，约数千人左右。副将以下就是参将、游击、都司与守备，统辖一营兵力，兵员数量各有不同。最下面的为千总与把总，负责统领一汛，也就是一个驻地。士兵为世兵制，父死则子继。将兵由兵部直接统辖，将领无法直接统兵，有效地防止军人拥兵自重。随著八旗军的腐化，绿营的重要性就日益加强，例如三藩之乱时即以绿营为主力。乾隆嘉庆两朝，绿营总兵六十馀万，成为军事主力。然而由于太平已久，绿营本身随著种种弊端而逐渐腐化。乾隆帝阅兵时，所见已是「射箭，箭虚发；驰马，人堕地」。1796年川楚教乱时，绿营已无力对付擅长游击战的白莲教徒，部分将领甚至屠杀平民以换战功。到了鸦片战争和太平天国之乱时，绿营上阵一触即溃，作战主力也改交由湘军、淮军等地方团练负责。同治年间多次裁减绿营，绿营的重要性逐渐减弱，清末新军成立后绿营同名存实亡。至民国初年，绿营被改编为警察性质的地方治安卫戍部队，成为民国时期警察的滥觞。

义勇与团练

义勇与团练于川楚教乱后逐渐成为清朝武装力量之一，由于清军不善游击战，所以鼓励地方建立义勇与团练协助清军镇压，1799年清廷正式同意组建团练。太平天国之乱与捻乱时，由于清廷的正规军腐败无能，且不善游击战，地方官员曾国藩整合江忠源、胡林翼与罗泽南义勇，成立湘军。湘军作战能力强，屡次击败太平军。监视太平天国天京的江南大营被攻破后，湘军成为清廷唯一抵御太平军的力量。1860年曾国藩的门生李鸿章于安徽一带建立淮军。平定捻乱时，僧格林沁率领的八旗军中捻军埋伏全灭，后来有赖淮军才平定之。当时如豫军、东军、滇军、川军等义勇也陆续建立起来。这些地方军成为清朝晚期平定内乱、抵御外侮的主要力量。然而不管是湘军或淮军皆以「兵随将转，兵为将有」为方针，与后来的北洋军形成听命于个人的军阀势力，这个作风深刻影响著民国军事。

当时湘军与淮军采用西方新式枪炮，火力强大。而由外国人协助建立的常胜军、常捷军更是让曾李等将领印象深刻，使他们意识到西方军事技术的重要性。例如李鸿章目睹常胜军用4个小时即攻破太仓城，事后写信给曾国藩，宣称「若火器能与西洋相埒，平中国有馀，敌外国亦无不足」，这成为自强运动的起因之一。为建立现代化清军，洋务派聘请外国教官来训练八旗军、绿营和守卫首都的神机营，一些兵工厂也建立起来。然而淮军的地位仍然不可动摇，例如发生天津教案时，尽管守卫首都的神机营已有三万之众，清廷仍然调集淮军来加强京师的防务。

清末新军

自强运动随中法战争与甲午战争而失败，而清廷守旧派利用义和团抵御西方列强的策略也随八国联军而落幕。八国联军之后，清政府决定实施改革，即「清末新政」。为建立现代化清军，早在维新运动时即建议成立一支现代化的陆海军，组织团练并建立保甲制度。清末新政时，袁世凯在华北组建新建陆军（即北洋军），张之洞在南方组建自强军。1904年清廷正式建立由36个镇组成的常备军的计划，而绿营在1901年即开始裁减。同时取消武举，在各省建立武备学堂，以培养新式军官。负责军事改革的中央机构是1903年成立的练兵处，它在1906年被并入新立的陆军部，其尚书和左右侍郎都是满人。清廷试图削弱地方军阀力量，1907年袁世凯和张之洞就在明升暗调中被剥夺军权。1908年宣统帝的摄政王载沣决定进一步加强对军队的控制，在1909年的一道上谕中，他宣布自己（代表年幼的皇帝）对军队行使最高统帅权，他还把自己的兄弟任命为海军处和军咨府的管理大臣。到清帝国灭亡前夕，其陆军可以号称100万，但大概只有60万战斗人员，其中只有17.5万人是现代化的正规军。并非所有新军均效忠清廷，部分是暗中支持革命军的。参谋机制上，在1907年即仿照西制成立参谋部门军咨处，隶属陆军部之下。为把军事管理和军事指挥分开，1911年决定把它升格为独立于陆军部外的军咨府。

海军

清朝视水师为陆军之辅。加之满洲以骑射为本，故不善水战。入关初期，在对抗郑成功等海上抗清势力时，往往力不从心。1636年皇太极征满洲瓦尔喀部，即开始造战船。1651年顺治帝令沿江沿海各省循明制，各设水师，此为清朝水师之始。内河防务以长江为主体，沿岸各设水师。海防上，清朝为封锁明郑的经济力量，实施海禁。即使在平定明郑后，仍受海禁影响，水师多以防御为主，缺乏攻击性战舰。嘉庆时由于东南沿海海盗泛滥，就有学者开始注意海防，如湖南的严如煜写有《海防辑要》。鸦片战争后在面对西方炮舰时，清朝水师一战即溃的事实让魏源、郑复光等人意识到东西方的差距，纷纷提倡建立现代化海军。太平天国兴起时，英国协助清朝建立中英联合指挥的阿思本舰队，然而指挥权的问题使得舰队解散。

直到自强运动时，清朝才有新建海军的动作。为建立船舰自制能力，1866年清廷在福州马尾成立总理船政事务衙门，以沈葆祯为船政大臣。同年，李鸿章要求其江南制造局建造炮舰。1868年8月，第一艘中国制造的蒸汽军舰，「恬吉」号下水。然而自制船舰与外国舰队相比较差也较贵，李鸿章等官员仍然从国外购舰为主。其中最有名的即是由德国建造定远与镇远，这两艘是北洋舰队的主力舰。人事上，早在1867年即建立福州船政学堂以培养海军军官，1872年和1876年分别派使团前往海外学习。沈葆桢和丁日昌离开后，福州船政局开始衰落。1880年李鸿章在天津成立天津水师学堂，张之洞在广州成立水陆师学堂（1887年），曾国荃在南京开办南洋水师学堂（1890年）。1885年10月清政府宣布成立海军衙门，以醇亲王为总理大臣。

清朝先后建立四支舰队：受北洋大臣节制的北洋舰队，受南洋大臣节制的南洋舰队，受福州船政局节制的福建水师，受两广总督节制的广东水师。其中北洋舰队在当时被评论为世界第八、亚洲第一的海军舰队。然而四只舰队资源独立，互不统属，也不互相合作。财政上，1891年慈禧太后挪用海军预算于兴建颐和园。到1890年后，守卫黄海、东海的北洋舰队即已「停购船械」。李鸿章也称「自光绪十四年（1888年）后，并未添购一船。操演虽勤，战舰过少」。随后的中法战争南洋水师、福建水师遭受重创，甲午战争中北洋水师全军覆没，这也标志自强运动的失败。随后旅顺、大连、威海卫、胶澳与广州湾等海军基地相继丧失，八国联军后大沽等地沿海炮台又被列强下令摧毁，清朝已无海防可言。1909年，清廷决定成立海军处，并将残馀的战舰重编成巡洋和长江两舰队。1910年改海军处为海军部，力图重振海军。

民族

清朝统治者根据实地情况的差异采取不同的政策。在中原地区基本沿袭明代的统治方式，包括开科举等，以赢得汉族知识分子的支持，并根据清朝的实际情况实行旗民分治；在边疆地区则采取加派驻防大臣与当地贵族共同治理。

清朝统治合法性建立的基础与前朝有所不同，清朝统治在巩固满洲自我认同的同时，兼容其他族群的信仰和习俗，使之拥有远超前代的疆域和领土。清朝皇帝本身拥有各种政治与宗教头衔，具备不同文化象徵意义的多维品格，体现出对各类臣民复杂多样之宗教信仰的认可。因为清朝对不同地域和族群的宗教信仰采取了更多的包容政策，使各种异质文化因素能够共存。

汉族政策

清初入关之后有「六大弊政」之说，剃发（或剃发）、易服、圈地、占房（侵占房舍）、投充（抢掠汉人为奴隶）、逋逃（逃人法），延续时间最长的，是逃人法。顺治七年六月，广西巡抚郭肇基等人因为「擅带逃人五十三名」，被处死。清初曾颁令谕：一、八旗制度移入关内，全族皆兵。二、鼓励满人入关。三、圈地，使近畿五百里内全属旗人所有。四、禁止旗汉通婚；禁止满人自由择业。弊政中的投充和逋逃皆为圈地所造成的直接结果。康熙帝亲政后即立即下令永远停止圈地，并逐步放宽对逃人的禁令并最终裁撤督捕衙门。随后康熙开始采取一系列与民休息的政策。

剃发易服

清军入关之前，为易于辨识顺逆，就已要求被征服或投效的汉人改变发式。顺治元年（1644年），多尔衮率清军入关。山海关之战后，多尔衮下令沿途州县官员按满人风俗，剃头留辫。清军驱逐李自成，定鼎北京，汉人强烈反对剃发，降清之汉族官员剃发者亦寥寥无几。多尔衮见满清统治尚未稳固，便下旨收回成命，命「天下臣民照旧束发，悉从其便」。明朝降臣孙之獬却全家主动剃发迎降，更令妻子不再缠足，并上疏标榜「臣妻放足独先，閤家剃发效满制」，得授礼部左侍郎，兼翰林院侍读学士。清初笔记《研堂见闻杂记》称，孙之獬入朝后，列于满班，满臣认为他是汉人而不受；归入汉班，汉臣又因为他从满俗而不容，孙之獬于是羞愤上疏，称「陛下平定中国，万里鼎新，而衣冠束发之制，独存汉旧，此乃陛下从中国，非中国从陛下也」，言辞激烈。顺治二年（1645年）五月，大顺与南明弘光政权相继被清军摧毁，多尔衮认为大局已定，于六月重新下剃发令。七月，又下令「衣冠皆宜遵本朝之制」，规定清军所到之处，成年男子无论官民，限十日内尽行剃头，削发垂辫，不从者斩，以恫吓抵抗军民。江南地区不少人反抗剃发令，嘉定三屠等亦由此引发。

当时一些在华传教士曾描述过当时一些城市的屠城情况。20世纪的法兰西学院院士阿兰·佩雷菲特认为：「建国后的最初几年，整批整批的百姓遭到屠杀。强迫留辫子引起骚乱，结果都被杀害而倒卧在血泊之中。」

被指带有「传统汉化的历史观」和「近代反满兴汉民族主义」观点，且对满人统治者的统治评价负面的钱穆认为：「清人又想讨好民众，又存心压迫知识分子，他们只需要有服服帖帖的官员，不许有正正大大的人，结果造成了政治上的奴性、平庸、敷衍、腐败、没精神」。

汉臣与汉军

清朝统治者为能使自己的王朝更长久，按历代汉人王朝的传统开设科举，大力尊崇儒学，从中选拔统治精英以赢得汉族知识分子的支持。早在后金时期，努尔哈赤和皇太极就曾起用范文程、宁完我等汉八旗人士。崇德年间，又先后招降洪承畴、吴三桂、孔有德、尚可喜、耿仲明及其统领的汉族军队。后来，这些前明将领在消灭南方反清势力的过程中起到重要作用。另外，康熙年间带兵攻克台湾的水师将领施琅也是前明降将中为清朝立功的代表人物之一。晚清时期，汉族官员逐渐成为清王朝的中流砥柱，有虎门销烟的林则徐；还有在消灭太平天国和捻军中立下大功的曾国藩、李鸿章、左宗棠；又如在洋务运动中起到关键作用的张之洞、刘坤一；实行新式练军的袁世凯等。

清太宗皇太极即汗位后改变努尔哈赤对汉人的政策，释放掠夺来的汉人奴隶，编庄别居，将加入汉军八旗的明朝官员或后金提拔的汉人官员来管理。1633年皇太极下令从所属的满洲八旗的汉人壮丁中每十名抽出一名，组成一旗汉军，这是皇太极组成汉军的开始，并成为汉八旗的前身。

随著军队的发展，崇德二年（1637年），即皇太极称帝改后金为大清的第二年，又分汉军旗为两旗。又过五年，崇德七年（1642年），把汉军扩为八旗。至此，汉军八旗正式出现，成为清朝三军之一。所使用的旗帜和满洲、蒙古相一致，即正黄、镶黄，正白、镶白，正红、镶红，正蓝、镶蓝。由于汉军编成八旗，所有旗下成员都是旗人，也称汉军旗人。汉八旗中的原汉人后代与满人同样享受世袭待遇，亦有很多世袭佐领之职。汉军旗人在司法上和满洲旗人一样，与民人同罪不同罚。乾隆年间，由于财政原因，汉军八旗曾大量出旗为民，仅剩在后金时期便跟随满洲统治者汉军勋旧之后。雍正元年（1723年），汉军与汉人家奴壮丁共计44万馀人，约占当时八旗人丁总额的72%。至出旗后嘉庆元年（1796年）的再度统计，已降至总人口的43%，可见汉军出旗之规模是巨大的。到宣统末年，汉军旗人共有21596人，约占旗人总数的6%。

满汉文化

一般认为，清朝统治者在保持满族优先前提下，很大程度上采取汉化政策。但一些研究辽金元清史的日本学者认为，清和辽金元一样属于中国的征服王朝，汉化深度和速度均逊于北魏等渗透王朝；清室只推行对自己有利的汉化措施，并尽可能保留本族文化，而非全盘汉化。

所有施政文书都以满汉两种文字发布。自康熙起大力推行以儒学为代表的汉文化，汉传统经典成为包括皇帝在内的满族人必修课。满族皇帝也纳有汉族嫔妃，详见满汉通婚。尽管满汉通婚的现象早已普遍存在，不过真正解除满汉通婚禁令，是直到1902年清末新政才完全落实。到乾隆中期，满人几乎全部以汉语为母语，满文渐渐成为仅用于官方历史记载用的纯书面文字，并在使用中逐步为汉文所取代。部分史学者认为，正因满人自动汉化才没有在短时期之内覆灭，甚至反被汉人奴化。若无法汉化，则如南北朝的胡族政权一样，无法吸收汉族先进的文化而灭亡。支持儒化说者则认为，清朝皇帝只是有选择尊儒，儒家的一些思想清朝皇帝也没有完全接受，而儒家只是汉文化的内容之一，汉文化不仅仅只包括文字和儒家，还有衣冠、风俗礼仪、各种宗教信仰等。

西南土司

土司制度是在唐宋时期羁縻州县制的基础上发展而成的，其实质是「以土官治土民」，承认各少数民族的世袭首领地位，给予其官职头衔，以进行间接统治，朝廷中央的敕诏实际上并没有能够得到真正的贯彻。有些土官以世袭故，恣肆虐杀百姓，为患边境，「汉民被其摧残，夷人受其荼毒。」。

康雍乾盛世时期，国力强盛，中央政府已经有足够的力量加强对少数民族地区的统治。雍正四年（1726年），鄂尔泰大力推行改土归流政策，即由中央政府选派有一定任期的流官直接管理少数民族地区的政务，「改流之法，计擒为上策，兵剿为下策，令其投献为上策，敕令投献为下策。」，「制苗之法，固应恩威并用」。

乾隆后期学者魏源通过《圣武记》的编写，认同清朝所代表的正统地位。至于地方上的士大夫们，还透过他们编写于乾隆、道光和光绪等不同时期的《凤凰厅志》，逐步确证了民间对国家及其民族平等政策的认同。日本东亚史学家安部健夫指出，改土归流是一个借苗族的汉化，证明「夷性华化」能够实现的「活广告」，中国史学家王柯指出，至迟到道光皇帝在位的十九世纪前半，在清朝的帝国构造中，西南部的非汉民族地区就已经被完全当作「内地」来对待。

首崇满洲

清朝皇帝强调「满汉一体」，在实行一些政策时会考虑到要平衡各族的心理，例如在康熙晚年的内阁大学士中经常在五至六人中保持一两个南方人的名额，令南北地主共同参政。在康熙二十年（1681年）的内阁新加入的成员当中，有两名满人，四名汉人，而在四名汉人当中南人北人各半。此外，康熙亦重点选拔升迁较快的汉族士大夫，这些士大夫同时是内阁的候补成员，亦容许有「反清」思想的学者严绳孙担任官职。有学者指出，「满汉一体」实际上是以「首崇满洲」为前提，清朝统治者的满汉畛域观念始终根深蒂固。作为统治族群和八旗军队中的主要组成部分，满洲人尤其被清朝历代君主视为国家根本、朝廷柱石。满洲将士为清朝定鼎中原、以及之后平三藩、灭准部等战役中立下汗马功劳。故终清一代，「首崇满洲」（又称「满洲根本」）是清朝的既定国策。雍正帝曾明言，「惟望尔等习为善人，如宗室内有一善人，满洲内亦有一善人，朕必先用宗室；满洲内有一善人，汉军内亦有一善人，朕必用满洲；推之汉军、汉人皆然，苟宗室不及满洲，则朕定用满洲矣。」。

清朝时期，八旗子弟（以满洲为主，也包含蒙汉八旗子弟）在政治或生活领域主要在教育、科考、补缺、律法、生活待遇等方面享有一定特权待遇。清廷特为宗室子弟特设宗学，觉罗子弟有觉罗学，普通八旗子弟有咸安宫官学等八旗官学，内务府子弟有景山官学等。在文武科举之外，还提供笔帖式、翻译士、皇帝侍卫等方式供旗人子弟进入仕途。高层官职也一向有旗缺与汉缺之分。旗人可酌任汉缺，反之除极个别情况外，理论上是不可能的。能力不足以登科做官的旗人可以从参与最基本的挑选八旗兵丁做起，旗人子弟中的未成年者还可以参与类似于预备役制度的「养育兵」选拔，按月可得一定薪资。清代旗汉亦不同刑，若正身旗人犯充军、流刑罪者有免发遣以枷号代替的特权。满洲人的司法权也独立于汉人之外。例如，驻防旗人触法不归当地督抚管制，而由该地区驻防将军、都统负责。京旗子弟则由步军都统衙门负责处理、宗室则由宗人府全权裁决。清廷还分拨旗地和营房给八旗子弟居住生活，不必承担任何赋税。旗地和营房受国家保护，不得私自买卖。清廷在全国各处八旗驻防地实施旗民分治，驻防地俗称「满城」，专供兵丁居住，非旗人不得随意出入满城。

东北满洲故地无满城之分，清初设置柳条边，防止汉人及外藩蒙古进入「龙兴之地」。然而在康熙、乾隆、嘉庆年间有多次汉人移居中国东北地区的记载：「其吉林宁古塔、伯都讷、阿勒楚喀、拉林等地方，乾隆二十七年定例不准无籍流民居住。及三十四年，吉林将军傅良奏：「阿勒楚喀、拉林地方流民二百四十二户，请限一年尽行驱逐。」上曰：「流寓既在定例之前，应准入籍垦种，一例安插，俾无失所。」嘉庆中，郭尔罗斯复有内地新来流民二千三百三十户，吉林有千四百五十九户，长春有六千九百五十三户，均经将军奏令入册安置。其山东民人徙居口外者，在康熙五十一年已有十万馀人。圣祖谕：「嗣后山东民人有到口外及由口外回山东者，应查明年貌籍贯，造册稽查，互相对核。」其后直隶、山西民人亦多有出口者。」

诸多优待政策的初衷主要是为了保证兵源、加强八旗的军事职能。同时，这也导致满族受到束缚，居所不能远离本佐领之所在；八旗兵役也使得许多人在各大战争中战死疆场，一定程度上阻碍满族人口的发展；经济方面，满族也过于依赖八旗制度，清廷除兵差外，仅允许旗人在所属旗地务农，这使得以京旗为主、已经适应城居生活的满族在清朝中期开始出现生计问题。几代皇帝都曾尝试解决八旗生计问题，但终因不肯放任旗人自行谋生而均告失败。此外，东北满族因保持八旗兵农合一的习俗，始终没有产生严重的生计问题。自乾隆末年，清朝开始走向衰落，并且在之后一系列与外国侵略者的战争中接连失败，陷入内忧外困。这期间，在与汉人的交流中，满族逐渐接受汉文化，被视为立国根本的国语骑射遭到废弛。清末民初时，仅有黑龙江齐齐哈尔和瑷珲一带还有满语使用者。1911年，辛亥革命爆发，清帝逊位，民国建立，「首崇满洲」之国策也随之寿终正寝。

美国达特茅斯学院历史学教授认为，在清帝国统治者所构建的天下秩序观中，皇权的表达具有「共主性」（Simultaneities），清帝国成功地将几种不同的统治方式糅入皇权之中，并在不同的地域空间和价值体系中发挥不同的作用，在这样的天下秩序观之下，谈论「满族中心观」并没有意义，清朝皇帝在绝大多数时间里仅仅把满洲人看作是多民族帝国的一份子，认为一个真正的帝国不是隶属于某一个文化的，而是超越文化的存在，帝国的皇权也是如此。她又说，乾隆皇帝作为清帝国的最高统治者，拥有征服者、家族首领、神权领袖、道德典范、律令制定者、军事统帅、文化艺术赞助者等多重身份，这多种身份既相互联系又具有混杂性，但是又集中统一于乾隆帝一身，乾隆帝不仅仅是满洲人的大汗，更是全天下的共主。

清朝统治者对满洲民族意识的梳理和重塑有重要的政治层面的考虑，清代边疆的少数民族主要是通过对「满洲」的认同来体认中华「大一统」，故有「崇满洲以安藩部」，从而有效联系「大一统」政治格局的切实需要。「崇满」所针对的主要是日渐兴起的蒙古和回疆势力的挑战，及其所触发的「胡虏无百年之运」的思想异动，这种异动在清朝国内和属国朝鲜有所反映，雍正时期出使清朝的朝鲜使臣回国后给朝鲜国王的上疏中说：「自古夷狄之主中国，非有仁义德礼，服天下之心而臣之也。华夷杂处，祸变层生，苟无圣人之应期，则漠北诸种，必将因其衰而代之。盖今胡运之穷，不十数年可决，而蒙古强盛，异时吞倂，必至之理也。」这种情况在朝隆时期进一步深化，并且从准噶尔蒙古和大小和卓之乱可见。在这种历史背景下，清朝统治者通过对满洲部众的精神整合与「国语骑射」传统的张扬，威服和结合边疆地区。

蒙古政策

清朝在外藩蒙古地区建立盟旗制和札萨克制，对蒙古部落采取因俗而治、多封众建的政策。旗是分解原来的部落而组成。每盟设盟长、副盟长各一人，掌管盟务。盟长先由各旗会盟时，从旗长即札萨克中推选。后来改为清朝理藩院开列盟内札萨克，由皇帝任命。其外每盟各设备兵札萨克一人，管理军务。有的盟还设帮办一二人，协理盟务。旗是军政合一的地方政权机构，每旗设旗长一人，即札萨克，掌全旗要务，可以世袭。又设协理台吉襄赞旗务。其属有管旗章京、副章京及参领、佐领、骁骑校等。旗盟官员多是原蒙古各部落的贵族，并被册封为札萨克亲王、郡王、贝勒、贝子、公、台吉等爵位。另外，清朝统治者在一些方面较为优待蒙古人，只有蒙古人可得到亲王封号的待遇。

盟是由各部定期会盟而形成的机构，主要职能是监督各旗札萨克。若干相邻的旗为一盟，盟有盟长，由朝廷直接任命，多选旗长中势力大、威望高、与中枢关系亲密者任之。盟为监察区，不属行政单位。当时主要有哲里木、昭乌达、锡林郭勒等盟。各盟旗直接对朝廷负责，受理藩院的管理。另外，在内蒙古地区设热河都统、察哈尔都统和绥远副将军，率军驻防要地，以加强军事控制。但各都统、将军不干涉行政事务。如科尔沁部一类可以自治，察哈尔与土默特则被取缔。

清朝对外札萨克蒙古盟旗的管辖，中央有理藩院的典属、柔远清吏司等机构，地方上有驻扎大臣。定边左副将军即乌里雅苏台将军，为漠北蒙古地区的最高官员，下设乌里雅苏台参赞大臣二人，与将军共同管辖喀尔喀诸部盟旗。科布多参赞大臣及帮办大臣管辖杜尔伯特、辉特、新土尔扈特等盟旗及札哈沁、阿明特、乌梁海等旗。库伦办事大臣掌中俄交涉事务，其属恰克图办事司员等人，负责监督中俄贸易。

清王朝统一蒙古各部后，对蒙古的统治策略是，既要使其不再成为朔方边患的势力，又要笼络当地领袖们统治当地人民，使蒙古成为清政府统治全国的一支重要军事力量和清帝国北部疆域不设防的屏障。包括在蒙古大力扶植推广藏传佛教，有效地收服人心，维护蒙古地区安定局面。蒙古人一向信藏传佛教中的黄教，满人一直重视笼络大喇嘛，如哲布尊丹巴与章嘉呼图克图；与此同时，蒙古八旗亦成为清朝军队的一支生力军，在征讨噶尔丹的过程中曾发挥过重要作用。外藩蒙古旗下的军事力量（不属八旗）也曾发挥重要作用，如清中期的喀尔喀的超勇亲王策棱和晚清时的博多勒噶台亲王僧格林沁的部队。

藏族政策

清代西藏地方官府为噶厦。清朝将西藏纳入版图后为加强对西藏的治理曾采取一系列重大措施，建立政教分离的制度。当时清政府的治藏政策有设置驻藏大臣，订立治藏章程；派驻官兵，整顿藏军；设立台站，厘定疆域等。乾隆十六年（1751年），清政府平息颇罗鼐之子珠尔默特那木札勒叛乱后决定废除札萨克郡王监政的权力，设立噶厦衙门，由驻藏大臣与达赖喇嘛共同领导。噶厦为总管藏务衙门，设三品官噶伦四人。下设商上，为分管财政的机构，除以噶伦一人管理外，设四品仔琫（孜本）三人，商卓特巴二人。还有专掌粮务的叶尔仓巴、管理拉萨城的朗仔辖、掌刑名的协尔帮、掌马厂的达琫及第巴等四至七品的各种名目官员。后藏也设四品商卓特巴、叶尔仓巴，五品达琫等官员，掌管相应的政务。武官则有四至七品的戴琫（代本）、如琫、甲琫、定琫，从几人至百多人。凡前后藏皆有营寨，按其地理险易和大中小，各设边营官及营官，总计一百六十馀人。佛教在西藏盛行，喇嘛很多，有的喇嘛在噶厦、商上任职，而僧官又分国师、禅师、札萨克大喇嘛、札萨克喇嘛、大喇嘛、副喇嘛等，专掌教事。

乾隆五十八年（1793年）清政府出兵打败入侵西藏的廓尔喀（尼泊尔）后颁行《藏内善后章程》二十九条，对西藏的宗教事务、外事、军事、行政和司法等做出详细的规定，并加强驻藏大臣的权力。驻藏大臣与达赖、班禅的地位是平等的，而达赖与班禅之间则互为师徒。驻藏大臣作为清政府的代表，可直接向皇帝上奏。达赖、班禅上奏事宜必须通过驻藏大臣转奏。此外，达赖、班禅及以下呼图克图十八人、沙布隆十二人等活佛转世，称为「呼毕勒罕」，即奔巴金瓶掣签，均由驻藏大臣监督。

清朝治藏期间，清政府振兴西藏经济的措施有改革乌拉、租赋、钱法、贸易制度；活跃民族贸易；创报、兴学、发展农牧工矿业和加强交通、邮电事业的开发等。清末时为防止英国殖民者对西藏的渗透，川滇边务大臣赵尔丰等决定在川边藏区进行改土归流、建置州县等，以继续加强中央政府对西藏地区的管理。宣统二年（1910年）川军入藏后还曾计划将改土归流扩大到整个藏区并巩固对藏南地区的控制，但因次年（1911年）武昌起义的爆发而作罢。

回部政策

天山山脉将新疆分成天山南北两个区域。天山南路的大部分地区为当今维吾尔族的祖先所居，亦称为回部。由于哈密、吐鲁番率先归服，被封为回部札萨克。乾隆平定大小和卓之乱之后，新归附的地区不设札萨克，实行伯克制。伯克原来是回部的酋长，经清朝重新任命，按职责和品级称「某某伯克」，共三十馀名目。最高的为阿奇木伯克，掌综一城回务，三品至六品，其次为伊什罕伯克，掌赞理回务。四品至六品。其馀分掌地亩、田粮、税务的，大抵四品至七品。在清朝所封的札萨克郡王和诸伯克之上，清朝还派驻伊犁将军，掌天山南北最高军政大权，下设参赞大臣一人辅之。又设塔尔巴哈台参赞大臣，喀什噶尔参赞大臣及帮办大臣，叶尔羌办事大臣及帮办大臣，和阗、阿克苏、乌什、库车、喀喇沙尔办事大臣等。乾隆末年以后，内地汉人和回民开始迁往新疆（以天山北路为主），把大片不用的牧场变为户屯。到十九世纪初，这些定居北疆的移民已达数十万人。在迪化（乌鲁木齐），1808年时各县的民户农田数量已达到1775年的十倍。

从乾隆后期开始，以沈垚、张穆、龚自珍等为代表的学者，均纷纷关心边疆事务，为国家献计献策。龚自珍大倡「回人皆内地人也」，无所谓「华夷之别」，并上疏安西北策，将新疆等同内地，主张「疆其土，子其民，以遂将千万年而无尺寸可议弃之地，所由中外一家，与前史迥异也」。

外交

外交机关

清朝在近代以前并没有正式的外交机构，因当时清廷一向以天朝上国自居，不愿承认与四周国家的平等关系。清朝的外交按照对象的不同，分由礼部、理藩院、内务府与公行制度负担外交事务。六部的礼部负责对日本、朝鲜、琉球与东南亚各国外交或朝贡事务，以维系朝贡体制。理藩院负责交涉东亚内陆如内外蒙古、准噶尔、西藏、俄罗斯帝国等事务，主要防止边患形成。其编制与六部基本相同，官员大多由满族、蒙古族人担任，汉人只能担任堂主事、校正官等少数官职。内务府除管理本身内廷事务，也管理欧洲来华传教士、宗教使节团的事务以及国外贸易的传运徵收特别税。公行制度负责西洋各国如葡萄牙、荷兰、英国等贸易关系（在清朝来看仍为朝贡），限制于广州一地，又称广州制度。

鸦片战争开启中国近代史，清朝对外关系转向被歧视。由于缺乏正式外交机构，为西方国家不满，在《天津条约》就有要求外国公使进驻北京，这使得中国正式开始面对新的外交形势。1861年，总理各国事务衙门成立，专门负责对外关系；然而，其地位逐渐被1870年成立的北洋通商大臣所取代。直到1901年的清末新政，将总理衙门改制为外务部后，才得以统一负责对外事务。

藩属国

清朝的藩属国方面，早在皇太极与康熙时期就有朝鲜与琉球国。到乾隆时期扩充到东南亚地区的安南（即越南）、南掌（琅勃拉邦王国，地属今寮国）、暹罗（今泰国）、缅甸以及南洋群岛的兰芳共和国（柬埔寨被安南与暹罗瓜分，吕宋与苏禄于西班牙统治菲律宾群岛后相继消失）；西南喜马拉雅山有廓尔喀（尼泊尔）、哲孟雄（锡金）、不丹等国；中亚地区有哈萨克汗国、布鲁特汗国、浩罕汗国、布哈拉汗国、爱乌罕（今阿富汗）、巴达克山、乾竺特与拉达克等国。

海禁与海外贸易

清朝建立伊始，清政府为禁止和截断东南沿海的反清势力与据守台湾的郑成功部的联系，以巩固新朝的统治，曾五次颁布禁海令，并三次颁布「迁海令」，禁止人民出海贸易。1683年清军攻占台湾后，康熙接受东南沿海的官员请求，停止清初的海禁政策，并在「粤东之澳门（一说广州）、福建之漳州府、浙江之宁波府、江南之云台山」分别设立粤海关、闽海关、浙海关、江海关作为管理对外贸易和徵收关税的机构。江浙闽粤四大海关总领各自所在省的所有海关口岸，通常下辖十几至几十个海关口岸。但当时西方殖民者的殖民地已遍布中国周围，其殖民步伐引起了清廷警惕，康熙甚至曾口谕大臣们：「海外如西洋等国，千百年后中国恐受其累，此朕逆料之言」。

乾隆二十二年（1757年），乾隆帝以海防重地规范外商活动为理由，谕令西洋商人只可以在广东通商。乾隆谕令「本年来船虽已照上年则例办理，而明岁赴浙之船，必当严行禁绝。……此地向非洋船聚集之所，将来只许在广东收泊交易，不得再赴宁波。如或再来，必令原船返棹至广，不准入浙江海口。豫令粤关，传谕该商等知悉。……令行文该国番商，遍谕番商。嗣后口岸定于广东，不得再赴浙省」这一上谕只是让「外洋红毛等国番船」、「番商」只在广东通商，不得再赴浙江等地，而不是一些资料中所说的关闭江、浙、闽三海关，更不是「广州一口通商」。

鸦片战争前美国和英国两个航海大国的船舶总吨位的总和一度逊于清朝，当时中国沿海商船总数约在9,000至将近10,000艘之间，约有150万吨。加上其他种类的船舶，全国总有大小江海船舶20多万艘，共计400多万吨。而在1814年，英国全国有大小21,500多艘船，共240万吨；美国在1809年全国有船舶135万吨。

西风东渐

18世纪，欧洲各国普遍流行中国风尚，当时欧洲人对中国普遍持正面和向往的态度，例如被誉为「法兰西思想之父」的法国启蒙时代思想家伏尔泰就曾高度赞扬当时在位的乾隆帝及中国的政治和文化。不过与此同时亦存在不同的声音，佩雷菲特指出1792年外交失败的英使马戛尔尼回程路上写的纪事中就包含批判性的看法。然而马戛尔尼在他的日记《A Journal of an Embassy from the King of Great Britain to the Emperor of China》里对清朝的平民百姓的日常生活、官员对下属的态度、统治者的仪态以至整体社会和国家的法律制度有多处正面评价。

有学者指出，在乾隆以后，清朝开始实行「闭关锁国」政策，一开始是四口通商，到后来只有广州开放对外通商，且由十三行垄断其进出贸易。当时西洋的科技发展蓬勃，渐渐地超越奥斯曼帝国为首的伊斯兰世界和以清朝为首的东方世界。

但也有学者指出，「闭关锁国」实际上是西方侵略者强加在清朝头上的贬词，反映出当时对华虎视眈眈的西方国家不顾事实反诬清朝排外，又指出就算是当时西方各国的口岸也只容许本国船只进出，本国的进口货物只容许本国船或原产国船装运，称之为「保护政策」，但又同时强迫其他国家洞开国门，任由他们自由离去和垄断，是为双重标准。此外，英使马戛尔尼曾向清朝提出六项要求，当中包括：

• 要求英国货船能到浙江、天津等地收泊；

• 要求在北京设立商行；

• 要求在珠舟山占一岛屿，以便英国人居住和收存货物；

• 要求在广州城划一地方居住英国人，或者居住澳门之人出入自便；

• 要求准许英商从广东内河航行澳门，货物不纳税或少纳税；

• 要求确定关税条例。

乾隆帝随之复书批驳英国使臣的要求，有学者认为信中虽有妄自尊大的一面，但一些史学家往往断章独引「天朝物产丰盈，无所不有，原不藉外夷货物以通有无」这句话证明清朝「闭关锁国」，对英国侵犯中国领土完整及关税自主的六项要求避而不谈。清廷为了防止澳门被霸占的情况重演而限制英国只能在广州一口通商，其他国家仍然可到四口通商，且并无任何限制。广州海关以外的江、浙、闽三个海关依然对外开放。美国东亚史学家欧立德也指出乾隆帝并非如过去所想的对外界一无所知，乾隆不仅熟悉西方地理，同时也清楚欧洲法、俄两国内部的情势，且清朝政府也认识到英国在印度和广州的影响力。

签订条约

清朝在近代以前与他国签定的条约较少，主要有《尼布楚条约》与《恰克图条约》，均为与俄国签定。

自19世纪以来，经历一系列失败之后，清廷在列强的威迫下，前后被迫签定许多不平等条约。据统计，中国近代签定的不平等条约共有343个，其中四十多个条约影响较大。清朝在西方国家的威逼下通过开放租界口岸，允许外国人来华经商等割地手段来达到和解。致此中国开始向近代过渡，清廷在被迫打开国门的同时也丧失中国大量领土的管辖权。甲午战争后，列强鉴于清朝失去自卫能力，纷纷划分在中国势力范围，中国变成半殖民地。由于受到西方乃至日本的侵略以致割地赔款，中国人的国际形象和地位也骤然下降。但与此同时也激发自强运动等改革措施使西方的科技、文化以及民主宪政思想传入中国，并为随后的辛亥革命提供发展契机。

国旗与国歌

清朝与中国历史上的其它朝代一样，本来并无法定的国旗与国歌。近代以后，随著西方国家用武力打开清朝国门，清朝逐渐引入西方国家的一些概念，其中就包括国旗与国歌。晚清重臣李鸿章在同西方国家谈判、签约、通商、互派外交人员等外交活动中，看到西方列国庄严悬挂国旗，而中国却无旗可挂，深感有失「天朝威仪」。于是上奏慈禧太后，提出在外交场合中需要有代表中国的旗帜，请求颁制国旗。1888年（光绪十四年），清政府认定「黄底蓝龙戏红珠图」（即俗称的「黄龙旗」）为大清国旗。这是中国历史上正式确立的第一面国旗。19世纪后期至20世纪初，清朝曾先后使用《普天乐》、《李中堂乐》、《颂龙旗》作为其半官方国歌或代国歌。1911年，清政府将《巩金瓯》定为正式国歌。不过由于辛亥革命的爆发，《巩金瓯》后来没有流行开来。

国籍法与「大民族」主义

古代中国只有「户籍」制度而无明确的「国籍」规定，是以「户籍」管理制度实现「国籍」管理功能。为了能够在保护海外华人、华侨方面能够采取法律依据，以及加强海外华人及华侨对大一统中国的认同，清政府于1909年3月28日颁布针对荷兰国籍法的「出生地主义」、采用「血统主义」原则的《大清国籍条例》，也就是中国第一部国籍法，条例中的《固有籍》部分规定：

• 第一条凡左列人等不论是否生于中国地方均属中国国籍：

• # 生而父为中国人者

• # 生于父死后而父死时为中国人者

• # 母为中国人而父无可考或无国籍者。

• 第二条若父母均无可考或均无国籍而生于中国地方者亦属中国国籍。其生地并无可考而在中国地方发现之弃童同。

由于受到当时「大民族」主义的影响，清政府以「血统主义」而不以「居住地主义」的原则来确立国籍法，清政府「独采折衷主义中注重血脉系之办法」，其「血脉」亦包括中国各个民族如满、汉、回、蒙等民族，「统辖于中国中华大『血脉』之中之意」与「大民族」主义主张的「国内本属部之诸族，以对国外之诸族」观念一致。旅美华裔史学家何炳棣表示，是满族创造一个包括满、汉、蒙、回、藏和西南少数民族的多民族国家，而为五族共和的中华民国张本。

人口

明末清初，因为流寇扰乱、清兵入塞、入关战争与三藩之乱的关系造成人民生命与财产的损失。而饥馑、瘟疫使得中国人口又一次地急速下降。史学家葛剑雄认为明清之际人口的跌幅估计可达40%，从崇祯元年（1628年）以来平均每年下降19%，至顺治末年达到谷底。另一种说法则认为，人口隐匿数量远大于人口损失数量，而真正人口损失最大的时期就是入关战争的战乱时期，以及各种的灭绝性屠杀如张献忠屠川。康熙二十年（1681年）后，清廷平定三藩之乱并占领台湾，经过康雍乾盛世获得长期的休养生息，人口得以迅速增加。清初人口数量未明确，史学家姜涛估算康熙十九年（1680年）前后，人口增长到1亿；赵文林推估在康熙二十四年（1685年）超过1亿。到乾隆时期，全国人口正式突破2亿，到鸦片战争前夕的道光十三年（1833年）又猛增到4亿。清朝人口的增长一反中国人口过去的波浪式增长型态，呈现斜线上升。

19世纪时，清朝因为太平天国、捻乱及回乱等战乱损失不少人口；光绪年间又发生不少天灾，光绪元年至四年（1875-1878年）河南、山西、陕西、直隶、山东等地发生特大旱灾饥荒，尤以山西最严重，太原府100万人死95万。总死亡数计950万-2000万不等，也就是清朝人口的约2-4%，史称丁戊奇荒。光绪十三年（1887年）河南郑州下汛十堡（今惠济区花园口镇石桥村）发生黄河决口，致使200多万（一说93万；一说最保守估计150万；一说700万）人罹难。最后加上海外移民风气日盛，因此到清朝灭亡时，中国人口维持在4亿3千万多人，与道光年间的人口数差不多。

人口流动

清朝的人口扩张和流动规模在长期性和常规化等方面在中国历史上前所未有，而且清政府在大部分情况下都鼓励内地人往外移民。

学者认为，清朝鼓励内地人移民，让汉文化推广到非汉民族地区，是为了「移民实边」，发展经济，保卫疆土，是「为了中国本身的利益，也为了较为落后的边疆地区人民的前途」。

在鸦片战争前后，中国内地各省约有七百至八百万人迁移到边疆向海岛地区，形成了一股股由中原向东南、西南、西北、北、东北四面八方辐射状的移民浪潮。

四川地区

由于明末清初长年的战乱与屠杀，产生许多真空地区，而后又因为人口大量提升，使部份省份人口过剩，这些都带动移民潮。例如明末领有四川的流寇张献忠，他于1646年兵败退出成都时，在四川进行空前的烧杀破坏：40万人的成都只剩下20户居民，人口从至少三百万一度锐减到只有八万人。后来清廷推动以湖广、陕西等各省人口填补四川地区，史称第二次湖广填四川，移民四川的趋势历经一个世纪。

东北地区

清廷为保护其发祥地中国东北地区，于奉天（今辽宁省）设立柳条边以限制汉人及外藩蒙古向盛京地区及长白山地区移民，但仍「封而不禁」，对越边时而佯作不知，并通过流放犯人，招抚流民及移旗等方式进行移民实边。而乾隆年间则开始严厉封禁东北地区，直到1792年，由于发生旱灾，清政府公开放松禁令，允许并鼓励灾民前往长城及柳条边外的东蒙及东北地区谋生，以分流难民潮。该措施随即引发了规模空前的难民迁徙，东北三省、特别是柳条边沿线地区从此开始大量接收关内移民。1792年旱灾后的10馀年间，清廷即在东北柳条边沿线地区新建四个行政单元以管理移民，包括长春、昌图、伯都讷和新民，大凌河东岸、养息牧厂、拉林、双城等官垦聚落也分布在附近。

据统计，1780年东北人口约95万，至1820年猛增至247万人，较1780年增长1.6倍，年均增长率24.2‰，增长人口中大部分来自移民（约100万），其中吉林省接收移民30万人，移民增加的趋势极为迅猛。1873年，清廷考量俄国与日本有意染指东北，故撤除柳条边，并且在日俄战争后完全开放移民。

蒙古地区

清朝初期，清朝统治者限制汉人与蒙古人混杂。但到了康熙年间摊丁入亩后，清廷放开封禁，引起大量民众迁徙到长城口外漠南之地定居谋生的浪潮，史称「走西口」。到了二十世纪初，清延开始以各类优惠政策大力鼓励汉人移民内外蒙古，原因之一是为了反制当时俄国人在内蒙古东部的殖民计划。由于意识到汉人大量移民最终可能会导致蒙古人自身被同化或全面汉化，加上汉商的诈欺手法以及清朝统治者的政策转变，一些蒙古人因此怀恨在心并发起叛变。然而那些叛变基本上是地区性的叛变，而非组织严密的「全区性暴动」。

西南地区

自雍正朝大规模地实行改土归流政策以后，内地与西南广西和云南边疆地区之间的交流被加强，地域壁垒被打破，内地人迅速移往西南边疆地区，自清初至道光中叶，约有200-350多万人迁入了西南滇桂地区。

台湾地区

康熙二十三年（1685）以后，清朝向前往台湾的大陆人民实行限额发给照票。雍正十年（1732）后规定渡台者有田产生业足以谋生，均可允许携眷入籍，从此渡台人数急升。乾隆五十五年（1790），清政府为了减少私渡偷渡而决定多处官渡。自清初至道光中叶，共有150多万人从中国大陆迁入了台湾。1895年台湾割让日本，住民根据《马关条约》第5款，在同年5月8日住民去就决定日决定去留，最终99.75%台湾人决定留在台湾。随之于5月25日有部份台湾人成立台湾民主国，但为期不长。同时，各地也有抗日人士展开了长达二十馀年的武装对抗殖民统治的台湾抗日运动时期，而中国大陆渡台亦随之中断。

新疆地区

鉴于新疆战略地位的重要性，清朝在统一新疆前后，对治理新疆的方针开展过深入讨论，并确定向新疆移徒中国内地人口以充实农业劳动人口的方针，又制定一系列组织移民出关的具体措施，因而出现内地人户移民新疆的热潮。自清初至道光中叶，新疆地区约迁入了五十万人。

海外移民

福建与广东各省因为山多人狭，又靠海，许多人口移民海外。台湾早在荷西统治时期、明郑时期就获得闽南、粤东的移民，约有十馀万人。清初因为防止如朱一贵事件等动乱发生，曾严格限制移民台湾。同治末年发生牡丹社事件，日军一度侵台，这使得清廷积极开放移民台湾。到台湾割日前夕，已经有三百数十万的移民人口。早在十五、六世纪，闽粤人民就时常移民泰国、马来西亚与印尼等东南亚地区，这些海外华人还建立了华人为主体的兰芳共和国。鸦片战争之后更多华人移民海外，主要以东南亚地区、美国西部、加勒比海群岛为主。清朝灭亡时，海外已有七百万的华侨。

永不加赋与摊丁入地

康熙后期，经过长时期的休养生息，社会已日趋安定，但人丁与地亩的载册数增加迟缓。一方面由于土地与人口的清查不够彻底，再者也由于地主以多报少之故，贫民迫于赋役的繁重而相率逃亡，人丁的统计并不确实。康熙帝为确实掌握人口数，于康熙五十一年（1712年），下诏「盛世滋生人丁永不加赋」，以康熙五十年（1711年）在册人丁数作为全国徵收丁银的固定总额，以后新增者为「盛世滋生人丁」，从中央到地方均不得随著人口的增加而增税。但除补不易，弊端又无法避免。所以采取摊丁入地政策，废除人头税（丁税），并入土地税内。这使得无产者没有纳税负担，而地主的负担增加，对于清朝人口的持续增加、减缓土地兼并、以及促进工商业的发展有一定的作用。

钱穆认为「地丁摊粮」只收田租，不收人丁税的办法是「清朝统治者自己夸许的『仁政』。但是实际上，这一规定，并不算的是仁政，从中国历史讲，两税制度，早把丁税摊派到地租了」。中国科学院地理科学与资源研究所的学者说，地丁摊粮改革政策也给当时及其后的土地垦辟带来了重大影响，虽然这是一次赋税改革，似乎与垦荒并不相干，但它却有效放松了对贫苦无地农民的约束，使人们可以自由流迁，为异地垦荒提供了丰富的劳力资源。历史学者张硏评价，摊丁入亩在一定程度上改变了赋役不均的情况，增加了地主的赋役，减轻了无地少地农民的负担，减少了户口隐漏，稳定了社会秩序，促进了生产发展，以及改善了国家的财政状况。

人口普查

乾隆六年（1741年），户部有感于人口的增长，有必要对人口登记制度加以检讨，并彻底改变户口统计与管理制度，以掌握人口真实情形。然而却遭到廷臣苏霖渤等人们的反对，他们认为实施人口普查对维护统治没有实质意义，各省户口殷繁，「若每岁清查，诚多纷扰」。到乾隆三十九年（1774年），湖北东部发生灾害，由于赈济的人数超过地方登载的户口总数，经过清查发现，有些县份在每年上报人口数都含混交代。乾隆帝大怒，要各省督抚全面展开人口清查。隔年，保甲严格执行人口普查制度，共增加43,534,131人，此后全国各省人口数较以往更接近实际人口数。人口查报也成为保甲的一项重要职责。无论在乾隆四十年（1776年）前后，人口统计都限于各省。而且京师顺天府、八旗、黑龙江、新疆、蒙古、西藏、台湾、云贵川广地区居住的少数民族等并未列入户口统计中，不管何时见于官方记载的人口均低于实际人口数。葛剑雄以为乾隆四十一年至道光三十年的户口统计数基本上是较可靠的。

养老制度

清代社会上七十岁以上的老年人口占总人口的比例约百分之二。清代法令对于老人给予免税和减刑，独子犯罪可因亲老而留养，而官员可因自己年老告休，也可因父母年老而申请终养。此外，清代老人在一些场合中获政府的赏赐、礼遇和优待。贫穷的老人也是慈善机构救济的对象之一。

经济

清朝人口呈现爆发式增长，乾隆时期已达三亿，相对应地，需要更加以多种方式提升粮食作物的产量。清朝采取开垦荒地、移民边区及推广新作物，改进种植技术等方式以提高生产量。由于国内与国外的贸易提升，经济农业也相对发达。手工业方面改工匠的徭役制为代税役制。产业以纺织和瓷器业为重，棉织业超越丝织业，瓷器以珐琅画在瓷胎上，江西景德镇为瓷器制造业中心。清朝商业发达，分成十大商帮。其中晋商、徽商支配中国的金融业，闽商、潮商掌握海外贸易。清朝曾实施海禁政策，直到消灭明郑统治台湾后，才宣布展界开海，沿海对外贸易开始活跃，而货币方面则采银铜双本位制。康熙晚期曾为防止民变，一度推行禁矿政策，在一定程度上阻碍工商业的发展。

清朝人口在中国古代历史上为最高，其国内生产毛额（GDP）总量所占的世界比例在中国近三千年历史上也是最高的，据英国经济学家安格斯·麦迪森的研究，按照1990年美元价格计算，1820年清朝GDP总量为2286亿美元，占世界GDP总量的32.9%，中国人均GDP为600美元，当时经过第一次工业革命的英国人均GDP为1,706美元。据他研究，即便被认为是中国历史上经济最繁荣时代的宋朝，其GDP总量为265.5亿美元，才占世界经济总量的22.7%，宋代中国的人均GDP在450美元，略低于阿拉伯帝国阿拔斯王朝的人均GDP（621美元）；这两个地区皆超过当时西欧人均GDP（427美元）。这里仅表明购买力平价，与所谓财政收入是不同的概念，英国财政年收入在1830年代至1840年代在5000万英镑以下；不过，清朝GDP数值在1840年前凌驾于欧洲之上，这一说法基本得到普遍认同，但部分中国学者如刘逖仍认为麦迪森高估了中国历史上的GDP总量和人均GDP。因此，刘逖对麦迪森1600至1840年数据做了调整，认为1820年中国人均GDP在325美元，而非麦迪森说的600美元。

农业

清代的土地仍可分为官田和民田两大类。清朝入关后，1644年顺治帝颁布圈地令。有主与无主地被满人圈占，统称「官庄」。大量农民不得不弃家逃亡，或者沦为新主人的奴仆。圈地主要执行三次，以北京附近的顺天、保定、永平、河间四府最为突出，直到1685年康熙帝宣布废止而终。至于全国其他原明朝皇室或地主的土地，清廷称其为「更名田」，分配给无地农民使用，或是被新地主霸占。据统计，这种土地的总数不下二十多万顷。清代也拥有不少屯田，屯区多在新疆、漠南等边疆地带。清帝推行令民垦荒的政策。使得华北、华中地区先后著令准垦，一些边疆如新疆、青海、海南、台湾、漠南等地区于清朝中叶先后实行开垦政策，而东北地区直到清朝后期才准许大量汉人前往开垦。

清代农业亦是历史亩产量最高的一个历史时期，秦汉时中国的亩产量为264市斤/市亩，唐代是334市斤/市亩，清以前亩产量最高是明代，为346市斤/市亩，清代的亩产量达到了374市斤/市亩，分别比汉代增加了41.6％，比唐代增代11.9％，比明的亩产量高了8％」，清代所编著的农书数量为之前所有中国朝代总和的2.09倍。另外，在清代的农书中，蚕桑类的农书共155部，而清以前所编写的蚕桑书有4部，反映了清代蚕桑生产和蚕桑技术发展的程度。

水利设施

清初，在康熙时期进行的多项水利兴修。明末清初，黄河、淮河下游堵塞，京杭大运河也受阻塞。康熙帝时大力修治黄河，任靳辅为河道总督，采用疏导和筑堤的办法将黄、淮故道逐渐修复，使这一带的农业生产在一段较长的时间里减少水患的威胁。1713年康熙帝成功修浚位于北京的永定河，使旧河两岸的「斥卤」变为膏腴良田。另外，雍正时修筑江浙海塘也是保护农田的水利工程。清朝的耕地面积于康熙时期逐渐提升。江南、湖广与四川等地的土地比中原地肥沃许多，湖广更有「湖广熟，天下足」之誉称。

粮食作物

由于清朝人口成长超过可耕地发展速度，如何维持庞大人口有赖占城稻与一些新的粮食作物。占城稻在中国有一段长期的发展时间，到明清时期发展成五十日到三十日即可收获的品种，使得二次收获，甚至三次收获变成可能。此外早熟稻耐旱，可在高原或山坡地种植。从宋朝初期到清朝道光年间，稻米产量以及耕种面积都增加一倍。一些从美洲引进的粮食作物也开发许多原先不擅种植的地形，以提高粮食生产面积。例如比较乾旱的高原有赖玉米与甘薯，更加崎岖的山地则依靠马铃薯。到嘉庆年间，这些高原都种满新一代的粮食作物。而河川沿岸的沙地则大量种植花生，约18世纪到19世纪才由南方推广到北方。

清朝粮食产量远超以往的历史时期，康熙二十四年，全国共有耕地六亿亩，到乾隆帝去世，全国耕地约为10.5亿亩，全国粮食产量则迅速增至2040亿斤。当时随英国马戛尔尼使团来中国的巴罗估计，中国的粮食收获率高于英国，麦子的收获率为15：1，而当时的欧洲，粮食收获率居首位的英国也仅仅为10：1。

法国汉学家谢和耐认为：「中国农业于18世纪达到其发展的最高水平。由于该国的农业技术、作物品种的多样化和单位面积的产量，其农业看来是近代农业科学出现以前历史上最科学和最发达者。」。

赈灾政策

清政府在各省设有常平仓，储藏谷物以应付紧急需要，其幅度远远超过前朝。同时在全国设有灾害监测网，任何地方遇上灾害，政府便会利用附近常平仓的粮食来赈济灾民，以致清朝在鸦片战争之前从没出现过严重饥荒。康熙年间的外国传教士亦对清朝的治灾手法有所赞扬。

乾隆帝多次蠲除国家赋税钱粮，赈灾救济费用，在乾隆二十年之前达到2,500万两以上。乾隆十一年、三十五年、四十三年、五十五年共四次普免全国共计1.2亿两的赋税钱粮，次数高于康熙年间的一次。

经济作物

清朝的经济作物种植面积也逐渐扩大，促进商品经济的活跃。棉花在清朝已是十分重要的经济作物，其产地遍及全国，其中江苏、浙江、河北、河南、湖北、山东等地都是著名的产棉区，甚至连农业发展较晚的奉天，也成了外输地区之一。产棉量以河北保定一带，长江中下游的松江、太仓与通州一带，以及上海等地最大。烟草原产地是美洲，明中叶以后开始传入中国，最早的种植地区是福建。种烟草获利很高，重要产地以陕南汉中、城固，山东兖州，湖南衡阳等地为主。湖南的衡烟、陕西的蒲城烟、北京的油丝烟、山西的青烟、云南的兰花烟、甘肃酒泉的水烟（又名西尖），均负盛名。甘蔗产地以华中、华南为主，江南、四川与台湾等地的制糖业非常发达。蚕桑业以江苏浙江的苏州、湖州、嘉兴、杭州和广东的广州最为发达，已成为当地农民的重要生产活动。

手工业

清朝的手工业在康熙中期以后逐步得到恢复和发展。至乾隆年间，江宁、苏州、杭州、佛山、广州等地的丝织业都很发达。江南的棉织业、景德镇的瓷器都达到历史高峰。手工业分成官营与民营，由于工匠实行以银代役，所以顺治二年就下令废除工匠制度，官营缺乏必要的工匠而逐渐衰落。民间手工业兴盛，例如云南民间炼铜场十分发达。苏杭一带民间丝织中已有不少具有专门技术的人，站在一定的地方等待雇用。

制瓷业与纺织业

瓷器制作技术改进，产量也大幅提升。例如江西景德镇瓷窑所烧造的御瓷产量在雍正六年（1782年）时，一年之中生产十数万件御器。玻璃制造有较大的进步，清宫玻璃厂能生产透明玻璃和多达十五种以上的单色不透明玻璃，造型也丰腴美观。丝织技巧也有新的提高，出产的重要提花品种有妆花纱、妆花缎、妆花绢等。广东的「女儿葛」是广东增城的少女用一种葛藤的丝织成，质量极优。当时的棉织业以松江最为发达，技术最好，而染色、踹布业则以芜湖、苏州为最先进。

劳雇关系

清朝劳动者与雇主之间的关系，主要是通过买与卖来体现的。不仅全部劳动成果全归雇主，而且在人身上也很少自由。在这些行业中，劳动者的工资是「按件而计」的；而且按照工匠技术的高低和工作的繁简论定工价。劳动者所得的工资，已经是根据劳动的熟练程度来规定。劳动者也比过去有较多的自由。例如苏州丝织业作坊中的劳动者，「倡众歇作」，要求增加工价，可以「另投别户」，追寻较好的待遇。

商业

在明清时期的农业和手工业进一步发展的基础上商业也很发达，商品货币经济空前活跃。由于农业中商品性生产扩大，农产品越来越多地变为商品，出现许多专门化的经济作物地区，为手工业生产提供原料，或者直接供应消费者。例如养蚕地区为调剂桑叶的供需，出现专卖桑叶的「青桑行」和「叶市」。一些经济作物如蔗糖行销国内外，茶叶于十八世纪输出激增。粮食作物除大量供给城市居民食用外，还有不小的部分用于酿酒、油和豆制品加工等。这些产品自然都是为供应市场而生产的。

清代城市工商业者的地位相对改善，明代以来匠人对国家人身依附的「匠籍」制度随之瓦解。国家对民营瓷窑、纺织工场及采矿等进一步放宽限制。大小城市各类作坊林立，苏杭的丝织，松江的棉纺织，景德镇的制瓷，佛山的铸铁等业名扬天下。

商业城市

商品性生产的发展，商品流通范围的扩大，促使一些新的工商业市镇的兴起和发展，例如汉口镇和朱仙镇就是位处交通枢钮点而兴起，而佛山镇和景德镇专司生产如丝绸、瓷器等高价值产品的城镇。至嘉庆年间，这四镇并称为「四大名镇」。其他兴起的尚有于江泾、震泽镇等等。许多重要城市如北京、苏州、江宁（今南京）等地，也更趋发达。例如北京的居民已不下百万，一切生活所需，都从商业渠道取得，不能一日无贸易。当时尚流行「天下四聚」的说法：「天下有四聚，北则京师（北京），南则佛山，东则苏州，西则汉口。然东海之滨，苏州而外，更有芜湖、扬州、江宁、杭州以分其势，西则惟汉口耳。」

农业与手工业的发展为商业繁荣奠定基础，扬州、苏州、南京、杭州、广州、佛山、汉口、北京，成为全国八大商业城市。中小城市星罗棋布，取得比前朝更大的成就。

;商帮

与此同时，金融业与贸易业发达，商人分成十大商帮。其中晋商、徽商支配清朝的金融业，闽商、潮商掌握海外贸易。广州的行商与扬州的盐商都是最阔气的商人，山西商人掌控全国银号。

货币制度

清朝货币大体上采白银与铜钱并用的银铜双本位制，大数用银，小数用钱，但银的地位更见重要。因海外贸易发达，白银大量从国外输入，康雍乾盛世流通的外国银元除西班牙银元外，还有葡萄牙银元、威尼斯银元、荷兰银元、法国银元等。鸦片战争前后，需要固定形式的银币出现，正式使用机器铸造银币则是鸦片战争以后的事。鸦片战争前，由于英国将大量鸦片销入中国，导致中国白银大量外流，需要更多的铜钱才能换取白银。由于白银是百姓纳税的固定货币，这带动通货膨胀，严重恶化经济。使得曾经于1651年顺治帝发行纸币，到1853年咸丰帝又发行大清宝钞与户部官票等纸币，以稳定清朝经济。

海外贸易

清廷在初期平定明郑前对于民间海外贸易厉行海禁政策；对于外国来华贸易，仍沿袭明代的朝贡制度加以控制。最初与清朝发生朝贡关系的，主要还是南洋和东南亚诸国，但有许多限制，如贡期和随贡贸易的监视等都作严格的规定。对于西方国家来华商船的限制就更严。只许它们停泊澳门，与澳门商人进行贸易，每年来华贸易的大小船只，不得超过二十五只。1685年才允许外商到前述口岸通商。

清廷平定明郑后放宽海禁，在「粤东之澳门（一说广州）、福建之漳州府、浙江之宁波府、江南之云台山」分别设立粤海关、闽海关、浙海关、江海关作为管理对外贸易和徵收关税的机构。江浙闽粤四大海关总领各自所在省的所有海关口岸，通常下辖十几至几十个海关口岸，并准许外商在指定口岸通商，逐步建立一套管理外商来华贸易的制度，主要有公行制度和商馆制度。浙江、福建与广东地区盛行海外贸易，人民时常与日本、琉球、东南亚各国及葡萄牙、西班牙与荷兰等西洋各国展开贸易。到18世纪还有英国、法国与美国参与其中，当中英国几乎独占对华贸易。西洋各国与日俱增地需要清朝的丝绸、茶叶与甘蔗，然而清朝对西洋事物需求不大，使得中国对外贸易呈现大幅出超的情形。大量银元流入中国，增加货币流通量，刺激物价上涨，促进商业繁荣。在此期间，中国沿海以泉州、漳州、厦门、福州与广州先后崛起，成为贸易大城，操控对外国际贸易。汉学家杜赫德认为，在清朝国内贸易的极盛时期，整个欧洲的总贸易量也不能与中国抗衡。

据西方文献记载，清朝时期的中国各省被比喻为欧洲诸国，各自拥有自己丰富且多种多样的特产进行贸易，如湖广省和江西省专门向所有不产大米的省份提供大米；浙江省出产最优质的丝绸；江南省盛产漆料、墨水，以及各种有趣的小作坊；云南省、陕西省、山西省出产铁、铜还有其他各类金属，还富有马、骡和毛皮生意等等；福建产糖和最好的茶叶；四川盛产植物、药物、像大黄等等，而且都倾向于联盟保护的形式，在所有的城市里也一样。清朝官员在商业界里都拥有自己的股份／分成，同时亦惠及平民百姓。清朝的市集亦相当繁华，中外商家贸易往来频繁，外国商人对中国商人的诚实也有深刻的良好印象。

清朝在康熙年间部分主要与近邻国家或地区贸易的进出口货品如下：

• 清朝从日本出口的商品：各种药材、白糖、水牛、各类刺绣、木料类等；

• 清朝从日本进口的商品：珍珠、紫铜棒、日本刀具、花纹装饰的纸张、瓷器、日式工艺品、金等；

• 清朝与马尼拉的交易商品：大量的丝绸，各类刺绣，地毯，茶叶，瓷器，各种药材等；

• 清朝从巴达维亚（今印尼雅加达）进口的商品：银、各种香料、玳瑁、木材、玛瑙玉石、琥珀、欧洲布料等；

• 清朝向欧洲出口的商品：上等药材、各色各样的茶叶、金色棉线、麝香、珠宝玉石、水银、瓷器等。

另外，当时期清朝与欧洲贸易最为重要的商品为日式工艺品、瓷器以及各类丝绸；清朝亦有将从欧洲进口的布匹转销至日本。

乾隆年间虽有10年的「南洋海禁」和在乾隆二十二年（1757年）禁止西洋商船前往闽、浙、江三海关贸易的阻碍和影响，但中国的海外贸易并未因此停顿或萎缩，而是不断地向前发展，其规模和贸易总值超越前代，在清朝乾隆十年期间，四港贸易额总值达到36,571,777两，是前朝最高时期的三十五倍，仅广州一地，贸易额就是前朝全部贸易最高额的十馀倍。18世纪时期中国海外贸易的鼎盛还为荷兰东印度公司带来危机感。

乾隆二十二年（1757年），由于外商频年不断的掠夺和违法行为，清廷只保留广州一地作为「番商」如英国、荷兰、葡萄牙、西班牙等西洋商人的通商出口处，而江、浙、闽三个海关在乾隆、嘉庆和道光期间虽有所限制，但在某程度上亦有继续正常履行其管理对外贸易的职能。到十九世纪，英国在印度种植鸦片，并且大量销往中国。这使得中国对外贸易逆转为入超。鸦片的问题引爆鸦片战争，中国战败后门户大开。南京条约不但开放厦门、上海、宁波、福州、广州等五口通商口岸给外国人。随后陆续的不平等条约使外国人大量来华投资，并且建立租界，加速对清贸易。

宗教

佛教

清朝自康熙至乾隆，虽然总体上对于佛教（藏传佛教除外）较为冷淡，不过对于稳定社会仍有一定的帮助。乾隆：「彼为僧为道，亦不过营生之术耳。穷老孤独，多赖以存活。其劝善戒恶，化导愚顽，亦不无小补。」清朝皇帝多与僧人来往，顺治帝先后与名僧憨璞性聪、玉林通琇、茚溪行森和木陈道沁等互相交流，顺治本人曾削发打算出家，他所宠爱的董鄂妃在他的影响下也栖心禅学。再如康熙在外出巡，每往名山巨刹，为之题字撰碑。雍正喜读《金刚经》，也多与佛教徒往来，选编语录，俨然以禅门宗匠自居。

不过佛教无限制的发展，对统治者也有不利之处，如果太多人民出家，政府徵税的对象就会减少，寺院上层兼并土地，发展寺院经济，就会加强土地集中的程度，激化社会矛盾，一些犯法的人，往往藏身寺庙作为躲避惩罚的手段，某些「聚众为『匪』之案」，甚至「多由『奸邪』僧道主谋，「平时『煽惑』愚民，日渐酿成大案。」，因此清朝一方面保护佛教，另一方面又对之加以限制。清朝限制佛教的办法主要有三种，设置僧官、实行度牒制度与不许擅造寺庙。佛教在限制下仍有一定影响力。佛教各派，除了禅宗还算盛行之外，其精神日趋世俗化，宗风也随之衰落。另外如净土宗、律宗、也仅能保持典型。乾隆时，曾禁止各地建立新寺院，民间出家为僧者也受限制。士大夫虽喜谈佛学，但只是谈论佛理，没有兴隆佛教的意愿。

清朝为笼络内外蒙古、青海、西藏外族，优礼和尊崇藏传佛教（亦称喇嘛教），顺治八年，特于北京建造一大喇嘛庙，度喇嘛一百馀人，皆内府诸旗王公属下满州人。雍正帝曾得喇嘛之助继位，之后以其潜邸改建为雍和宫大喇嘛庙，成为北京也是当时中国最大之喇嘛庙。雍正五年，又为蒙古之哲布尊丹巴呼图克图，建大喇嘛庙，发帑银十万两之多。并尊哲布尊丹巴为喀尔喀大喇嘛，其地位与西藏之达赖、班禅鼎立为三，后世称为「活佛」。乾隆帝曾经把藏传佛教作为解决现实社会矛盾的方法不过也以理藩院来控管其发展。藏传佛教虽然表面上受到君王的礼遇，不过事实上不像元明前两代如此兴旺，乾隆末年发生川楚教乱，使藏传佛教渐走衰落之途。

道教与民间宗教

道教在宋朝最为盛行，之后元明两代对其仍为优遇，到了清朝，帝室虽然也信奉道教，但不如前代之盛行，清朝对道教的政策与对待其他宗教一样，既保护又加以控制。清朝的道教在明朝衰落的基础上，进一步走向衰落。其主要原因如下：

• 满族统治者对道教素无信仰，他们在入关前尊奉藏传佛教格鲁派，乾隆时又宣布黄教为国教。

• 清朝在思想上更加重视程朱理学，宣扬「忠」「孝」观念，以束缚人们思想，麻痹人们斗志。他们收罗一些理学家，如李光地等，纂修性理精义等书，颁行天下。而这些理学家则对释、道两教进行攻击。

• 基督教传入中国后，也使部分群众改信其教。

• 民间秘密宗教的发展，这些民间宗教往往是正统道教的流衍，因此道教实际上慢慢演变成这些民间宗教。

衰落最根本原因是时代发生急剧的变化。商品经济的发展，生产水平的提高，世界交流的频繁，科学技术的传入和进步，新文化、新思想的兴起，这些衰落的表形，使其在政治上的地位日益下隆；另外道教教义学说陈陈相因，已停滞不前；道教上层人物日益腐化，失去群众；道教也与儒佛两教教日趋融合，使其自身的特点日益消退。

由于正统的道教逐渐衰落，促成民间宗教的崛起。其为道教的变种与流衍。因为他们被统治者视为「邪教」，而只能秘密传播，但传播的范围却很广泛这些的民间宗教，名目不下数十百种。

民间宗教的思想内容，大量抄袭佛、道、儒等各家的教义，但也有不同之处。其中最多宣传的东西，是关于弥勒等神佛下凡和劫变的观念，以及关于「真空家乡，无生父母」的信仰。民间宗教的所有这些宣传，无疑是一种封建迷信，表达人民的不满和抗议，它给人们以安慰和希望，在一定程度上反映人们要求改变现实愿望，因此容易被人民所接受，可以成为组织，号召贫苦群众参加起义的工作。有些民间宗教，还有明确的「反清复明」思想，如清茶门教宣传，「清朝已尽，四正文佛落在王门；胡人尽，何人登基；日月复来属大明，牛八元来是土星。」这些民间宗教如白莲教与天地会，在清朝中叶以后，发动许多起义活动，如：川楚教乱、林爽文事件等等，对清朝国力造成很大的损伤。

伊斯兰教

从元朝开始，西域伊斯兰教教徒大量来到中国各地，穆斯林居住于甘肃、陕西、四川、山西、直隶、广东、云南等省。清廷对伊斯兰教采取放任的态度，尊重他们的信仰，用他们的法律来处理纷争，但是比起元、明前两代来说较为没落，清朝防制回人的法律极严，内地各省，回人犯法，判罪较一般犯人为重，凡罪当流徒，一般人民可申请存留养亲者，回民却不得申请。在回疆，清朝每于重要所在分建汉、回二城，限制回民的自由，并禁止汉回通婚，在公文书中，则民、回别称，表示将回民排斥于一般平民之外。

由于受到清朝及汉人的压制，在清朝统治期间，清朝末年时，甘肃、陕西、云南这三省曾发动叛乱。康熙顺治年间，甘州回民丁国栋、米喇印起兵造反，乾隆年间的大小和卓之乱，嘉庆年间张格尔据浩罕叛，道光同治年间的陕甘回变与云南回变一时俱起。

基督宗教

满清入关后，汤若望、南怀仁等教士，先后被任命为钦天监主要官员，他们利用职务之便来传教，虽然一度受到康熙历狱的打击，不过随著康熙帝开始亲政后，翻案成功重新执掌钦天监来继续传教，康熙帝对于天文历算、火炮之学很有兴趣，曾叫传教士徐日升、白晋等人轮流进讲。并以他们担任通译及处理外交事务。如：徐日升、张诚随索额图参加中俄尼布楚条约谈判，充当翻译和参谋。清朝对定居中原的西方传教士采取礼遇态度。其中，顺治帝特别倚重德国耶稣会士汤若望，并尊其为「玛法」（满语「爷爷」的意思）。在随后的一百多年前，钦天监皆由耶稣会士掌管。

耶稣会传教士对于中国原有的风俗习惯，抱持容忍态度。教徒祭天、祭祖、祭孔者盛行，虽然与教义互相冲突，但都以默忍。不过到了17世纪末至18世纪初，天主教内部发生「礼仪之争」。依照道明会传教士的指控，罗马教宗下令禁止的传教士使用耶稣会的中文词汇「天」和「上帝」来称呼天主，也禁止中国信徒祭拜祖先与孔子。这与当初意大利传教士利玛窦以及其后的传教士在中国传教时所采取的本土化政策截然相反。清政府对此十分不满，认为这样做有违中国敬孔祭祖的传统。康熙帝于1700年批示说：「敬孔敬祖为敬爱先人和先师的表示，并非宗教迷信」。

双方争持不下，最后清廷下令必须遵循「利玛窦规矩」传教，不然就不准传教，逐出中国，是为「禁教令」。1722年，雍正帝彻底推行禁教令，使得清朝初年西方基督教在中国传教被终止，到了道光帝时，连钦天监也不任用传教士。不过清朝皇帝对于教禁并没有彻底禁止，嘉庆年间（1807年），新教教士英国人马礼逊，曾藉工作之便私下在广州进行传教的工作。

鸦片战争后，清廷虽并未正式撤销禁令，但基督教的传教自由已经由不平等条约获得确认，于是欧美各地的基督教教士在西方列强的庇护下进行宗教活动，基督宗教传播更为迅速。除了传教之外，设立医院和学校，对于中国文化和社会的演进，发生巨大的影响。不过有些西方传教士拥有种族优越感，以争议手法传教，如不理会传统社会阶级之分、强占土地（强行索回雍正禁教时遭没收的土地房产）、袒护教徒干涉司法审判、下令教徒不得分摊并参与地方集体祭祀活动、直接要求北京政府撤换省级官员，甚至一些犯罪之人也藉由信教取得司法保护，引起中国人的反感，因此民教冲突不断；加上民间以讹传讹的负面谣传，最终导致许多民众则愤而纷纷起来焚烧教堂，驱逐或甚至杀害传教士，收回被侵占的土地财物。从1856年至1889年先后发生的教案多达三百多起，著名的有1870年的天津教案，1900年的义和团之乱期间，有数万民中西方传教士与基督教信徒惨遭杀害。

文化

清朝统治中原后，推行的汉化政策比其他征服王朝还要深，然而清室也尽可能保留本族文化，并且维持本身文化与汉文化的平衡。清初以来，所有施政文书都以汉文、满文两种文字发布。自康熙起大力推行以儒学为代表的汉文化，汉传统经典成为包括皇帝在内的满族人必修课。到乾隆中期，满人几乎全部以汉语为母语，满文渐渐成为仅用于官方历史记载用的纯书面文字。到19世纪，官方文件中的满文已基本为汉文所取代。然而儒家的一些思想清朝皇帝没有完全接受。

在18世纪康乾盛世期间，欧洲前往中国的传教士们将当时中国图景呈现给欧洲人，而后引发在17世纪末至18世纪末的100馀年间，甚至直到19世纪初，欧洲吹起中国风。无论是在物质、文化还是政治制度方面，欧洲都对中国极为追捧，以至于在1769年曾有欧洲人写道：「中国比欧洲本身的某些地区还要知名。」对中国风的狂热追逐曾经是当时欧洲社会的普遍时尚。这种时尚渗透到欧洲人生活的各个层面，如日用物品、家居装饰、园林建筑等。1735年，法国神父翻译并发表法文版《赵氏孤儿》后，造成非常轰动的中国戏剧热。西方对当时的中国也存在负面的声音，认为中国朝廷过于独裁与专权。乾隆末年英国派遣马戛尔尼出使清朝，在佩雷菲特笔下的马戛尔尼本人认为：「人民生活在最为卑鄙的暴政之下，生活在怕挨竹板的恐惧之中，所以人们胆怯、肮脏并且残酷」，而马戛尔尼本人的日记却如此记载：「中国政府的行政机制和权力是如此的有组织和高效，有条件能够迅即排除万难，创造任何成就」。马戛尔尼访华团成员之一的爱尼斯·安德逊却如此评价：「杀头案在中国是非常少见的。关于这问题，我甚为注意而且好奇地去打听，一有机会就向人探问，我不只问过一个人，有好几个人，至少有70岁高龄的老人，他们从未见过或听到过有杀头处刑的事……比较轻的刑事案，在这人口非常多、商业又发达的国内也不常有」；「走过的乡村（北京郊区）前后每1英里路上的人数足以充塞我们英国最大的市镇」；「这城市（广州城）的街道一般是15英尺到20英尺宽，用宽大的石板铺砌，房屋超出一层的很少，用木材和砖建筑。商店的正面大门之上有漂亮的阳台，因而门前形成一街檐，用各种油漆装修得很美丽」；「……这个马车队伍停歇在一个大市镇内，镇名「吉阳府」。说它是人口稠密，则我又用了这冗繁的语词，这语词可以同样应用于整个帝国，如每个村庄、市镇、城市；不，每一条河流和河流的两旁也充满了人。在这国家里，在我们所经过的地方，人口是极为众多而且是到处是那么多：我们走过的乡村前后每1英里路上的人数足以充塞我们英国最大的市镇，道路两旁不少别墅田庄散布在田野之间，大为增色，也足以证明其富裕」；「……不能不对这位伟大、显赫、聪明、慈善的中国皇帝致以崇高敬意。他治理中国60年之久，按他的百姓的普通呼声，他对他们的康乐与兴旺从未忘怀。在他管理司法方面的情况是：他保护他的百姓中最低微的人」。

学术思想

清朝学术兴盛，文人学者对明朝以前各朝代的种种学术都加以钻研、演绎而重加阐释，集历代之大成，梁启超称清朝为中国的「文艺复兴时代」。鉴于晚明政治腐败、内忧外患不断，宋明理学流于空泛虚伪，致使清初学者多留心经世致用的学问。明朝亡于流寇、清朝定鼎中原后，一时学者痛定思痛，排斥空谈心性的宋明理学与阳明学，推究各朝代治乱兴衰的轨迹，提出种种改造政治与振兴社会的方案，使清初学术思想呈现实用主义的风气，发展出实事求是的考据学。

考据学

考据学又称为「朴学」，强调客观实践，有疑问时求证，具有科学精神。考据学专研训诂、音韵和校勘等。而其治学远宗两汉的经师，有异于宋明理学，故又称为「汉学」。以顾炎武、黄宗羲、王夫之并为明末清初三大儒，与方以智、朱舜水等人并称清初五大师，颜元也是这一时期的大师。顾炎武提倡「经学即理学」，提出以「实学」代替宋明理学，要学者直接研习六经。提倡「天下兴亡，匹夫有责」，著有《日知录》、《音学五书》等，其学说发展成乾嘉学派。黄宗羲有「中国思想启蒙之父」之誉称，著有《明儒学案》、《宋元学案》，是中国学术史之祖。他保护阳明学，排斥宋明理学，力主诚意慎独之说，蔚为浙东学派。王夫之强调实际行动是知识的基础，认为历史发展具有规律性，是「理势相成」。其思想发展成船山学，后人编为《船山遗书》。

民主思想

以民为天下之主的思想于明末清初亦有所流行，例如生活在明末又经历清初时期的黄宗羲和顾炎武、王夫之提倡民权，所著的《明夷待访录》攻击君主专制体制，提倡天下为主，君为客的观点，倍受清末革命党的推崇。部分学者认为黄宗羲的思想是近代民主主义的思想，有西方学者称黄宗羲为「中国自由主义的先驱」。清初思想家唐甄所著《潜书》描述：「清兴五十年来，四海之内，日益困穷，农空、工空、市空、仕空（值得一提的是，清初五十年期间正处于气候最为异常之时，当时世界上多处亦发生罕见的大饥荒）。」，并指出皇帝是一切罪恶的根源，认为「自秦以来，凡帝王者皆贼也。」

被当时正纯学者（儒生）斥为「名教罪人」、「丧心病狂」、「人可戮而书可焚」的袁枚追求自由个性，反对专制思想和理学，亦贬斥汉学，他亦针对清廷统一人心风俗政策说「物之不齐，物之情也，天亦不能做主，而况于人乎？」，但袁枚从来没被追究过「害义伤教」之罪，在当时亦生活得颇为顺畅，名倾一世，令人羡慕。

六经皆史

清代中期的考据学崇尚研究历史典籍，对中国历史从天文地理到金石铭文无一不反覆考证。当时分成吴、皖两派。吴派以惠栋父子、段玉裁、王引之与王念孙为主，以「博学好古」为宗旨，恪守儒家法则；皖派以戴震为首，以「实事求是」、「无徵不信」为宗旨。他们「毕注于名物训诂之考订，所成就亦超出前儒之上」。桐城派健将姚鼐提倡「义理、考据、词章，三者不可偏废。」道光与咸丰年间，曾国藩又把经济与义理、考据、词章并列。然而考据学到后来过分重视琐碎事物的探究，为学问而学问，知古不知今。当时章学诚提出「六经皆史」，注重六经蕴含的义理，并使用于当代政治上，意图矫正此歪风。鸦片战争后，西学大量流入中国，考据学逐渐式微。

西方技术与思想

明末清初，随著欧洲耶稣会传教士来华，西学输入中国，对于当时的学风由浮虚转为务实，也是有相当的激励作用。他们将西方科技介绍给中国人，扩大其知识领域，使中国的学术思想添增不少新成分。

当时有才华的传教士被皇帝欣赏和重用，西方先进的科学技术也被推崇和应用。而在民间，民人与西方传教士能够互相交游，西学在社会中得以自由传播，由康乾皇帝敕辑的丛书《古今图书集成》和《四库全书》亦收录传入中国的西方科学技术，当中《四库全书》收录了24种西方传教士的著述。

康熙帝亦曾经委派传教士闵明我（Domingo Fernández Navarrete）返回欧洲招募人才，希望增进中西方科技文化交流。《四库全书总目》以及乾隆帝亦对西方技术作出较高的评价：「西洋之学，以测量步算为第一，而奇器次之。奇器之中，水法尤切于民用，视他器之徒矜工巧，为耳目之玩者又殊，固讲水利者所必资也」；「欧罗巴人天文推算之密，工匠制作之巧，实逾前古」。

鸦片战争之后，大量西方科技与思想带动中国近代化革新。此时学者如龚自珍、魏源与康有为等人继承章学诚的说法，并进一步要求改革祖宗的法制，来应付内忧外患的局势。龚自珍讲求经世之务，志存改革，追求「更法」。魏源的《海国图志》主张「师夷长技以制夷」，冯桂芬的《校邠庐抗议》主张「以中国之伦常名教为原本，辅以诸国富强之术」。康有为与梁启超主张君主立宪。他们吸收来自西方的知识，先后推动自强运动与维新运动，这一波改革风潮最后引发清末新政与辛亥革命。

文学

清朝文学多元发展，兼容并包历代之文学特色。明朝以前的文学发展多表现在声韵、格律、句法、结构的因袭或创变；清朝承接各代文学成果，先后形成许多学派，将各种在明朝以前已式微的文体重新复兴，并继明末进一步发展各类小说、戏曲；另外，因不同地区、民族互动而呈现出语言风格多样化之文学面貌，于古体诗、近体诗、骈体文、散文、赋、词、曲、小说、戏曲皆然。由于语言转变较微妙，往往被人忽视，造成清朝文学缺乏明显特徵与创造力的一般印象。整体而言，清代文学面向相当复杂多样，但质量上也良莠不齐。

散文

清朝前期出现风格率真、浪漫的小品文，以张岱、李渔与袁枚为主；又有侯方域、魏禧、汪琬合称「清初散文三大家」。但是他们的文风不受道学学者支持，这些学者发起复兴唐宋文风的古文运动，此即桐城派。创始人方苞与刘大櫆、姚鼐有「桐城三祖」之称。姚鼐是桐城派的集大成者，他的古文主张，在提倡「义理（内容合理）、考据（材料确切）、词章（文辞精美），三者不可偏废。」讲究义法，提倡义理，要求语言雅洁，反对俚俗。后来曾国藩发展成湘乡派，恽敬、张惠言发展成阳湖派。

诗

清朝的诗风甚盛，以帝王、宗室为首，官方大力提倡诗学，自清圣祖以后诸帝主导官修《御定全唐诗》、《御选唐诗》、《御选宋金元明四朝诗》、《御定全金诗》、《御定佩文斋咏物诗选》、《御定历代题画诗类》、《御选唐宋诗醇》、《钦定熙朝雅颂集》、《御定千叟宴诗》、《钦定千叟宴诗》、《钦定重举千叟宴诗》、《上书房消寒诗录》、《三元诗附三元喜宴诗》、《御定历代赋汇》以及各代皇帝之《御制诗集》，如清高宗酷爱作诗，一生作《御制诗》五集，共计十馀万首，每作一首诗便令词臣注释，若词臣不得内容原委则准许其回家查阅典籍，多罗安郡王玛尔浑选宗室王公诗为《宸萼集》。皇帝也将诗咏作为联系、拢络官员的方式。

在清代，写诗的女性越来越多，且诗的创作者皆来自各行各业。清代是一个文学收藏和批评的时期，许多现代流行版本的中国古典诗歌都是通过清朝诗集传播的，如《全唐诗》和《唐诗三百首》等。

清初诗家首推钱谦益、吴伟业与王士祯；康熙中后期，江南地区出现王式丹、吴廷桢、宫鸿历、徐昂发、钱名世、张大受、管棆、吴士玉、顾嗣立、李必恒、蒋廷锡、缪沅、王图炳、徐永宣、郭元𨥤合称「江左十五子」。乾隆时期袁枚、蒋士铨与赵翼并称江左三大家，同时黄景仁与郑板桥也以诗闻名。嘉庆、道光年间文人广结诗社，京师与扬州风气最盛，以消寒诗社最知名，代表人物有顾莼、夏修恕、程恩泽、陶澍、朱珔、吴椿、梁章钜、潘曾沂、胡承珙、李彦章、刘嗣绾、周之琦、林则徐、徐宝善、卓秉恬。被称为「诗界革命」的诗歌改良运动产生于维新运动，其代表有黄遵宪的以写作反映时代的社会诗，其馀如谭嗣同、唐才常、康有为、蒋智由、丘逢甲、夏曾佑均有作品存世。于清末又发展出同光体，代表作家陈三立、陈衍、沈曾植等，且延续到辛亥革命后。清朝诗论学说分成沈德潜的格调说、王士祯的神韵说、袁枚的性灵说与翁方刚的肌理说。

词

词兴起于隋唐的「燕乐」，两宋发展达高峰，至元朝衰微，延续至明朝则趋近消亡；清初词学振兴繁盛，康熙年间纳兰性德与朱彝尊、陈维崧并称「清词三大家」，随后产生由陈维崧为代表的阳羡词派、朱彝尊为代表的浙西词派，词学蔚为风潮。万树整理词调辑成《词律》，于清词颇有影响力；康熙末，清圣祖敕命王奕清等编成《御定词谱》，为词调格律的集大成钜作，影响层面最广。乾隆、嘉庆朝，常州词派起而代之，反对浙西词派的「清空之弊」，代表人物有张惠言、张琦、恽敬、黄景仁、李兆洛、丁履恒、钱季重、陆继辂、左辅、董士锡、周济、刘嗣绾、刘逢禄、谭献、庄棫、宋翔凤、谢章铤、冯煦、陈廷焯、王鹏运、郑文焯、况周颐、朱祖谋等人，著名词人辈出，持续到清末民初。清朝因此被称为词的「极盛时期」，「号称词学中兴」，「作家之盛，直比两宋」，门户派别各具风采，婉约、豪放都各自重现、盛行。

小说

清朝小说杰出者众，曹雪芹等著《红楼梦》不仅为四大名著之一，由于其对社会百态和众多人物全面精确的写实描绘和丰富的艺术魅力而被普遍认为是中国古典小说的巅峰之作。蒲松龄以志怪内容反映社会面貌的短篇小说集《聊斋志异》。吴敬梓所著的虽结构松散但足称伟大讽刺小说的《儒林外史》；以及在《儒林外史》的影响下，以《老残游记》为代表的揭发官场丑态的谴责小说均有很大影响。

四库全书

乾隆三十八年至四十九年（1773年－1784年）编纂的《四库全书》是中国古代最大的一部官修书，也是中国古代最大的一部丛书，分经、史、子、集四部，故名四库。据文津阁藏本，该书共收录古籍三千五百零三（3503）种、七万九千三百三十七（79337）卷、装订成三万六千馀册，保存丰富的文献。「四库」之名，源于初唐，初唐官方藏书分为经史子集四个书库，号称「四部库书」，或「四库之书」。经史子集四分法是古代图书分类的主要方法，它基本上囊括古代所有图书，故称「全书」。清代乾隆初年，学者周永年提出「儒藏说」，主张把儒家著作集中在一起，供人借阅。这是编纂《四库全书》的社会基础。《〈四库全书〉总目提要》又是一部重要的目录学著作。

《四库全书》收录27种西方传教士的著述，包括西洋的数学、天文、仪器及机械等方面的著作，被收录的书籍包括有《泰西水法》、《西儒耳目资》、《坤舆图说》、《乾坤体义》等。

四库全书编撰过程中，清朝统治者有诏令禁止鼓吹反政府以及违背儒家道德伦常的野史、笔记、文集等诸多书籍收入《四库全书》，并取缔非议清朝统治者的著作，史称四库禁书。但四库禁书中极少数遭到彻底焚毁，绝大部分是为官方藏禁。。史学家季羡林说，乾隆编修四库全书的初衷虽是「寓禁于徵」，但客观上整理、保存了一大批重要典籍，开创了中国书目学，确立了汉学在社会文化中的主导地位，具有无与伦比的文献价值、史料价值、文物价值与版本价值。史学家龚书铎亦说：「乾隆年间《四库全书》的编纂，为华夏文明的延续做出了不可磨灭的贡献，为后人保留了许许多多珍贵的书籍和资料；但是，在编纂过程中，也免不了发生许多令人遗憾的事情。」。鲁迅在批评明清以及民国文学时也对《四库全书》的编纂过程作出批评：「现在不说别的，单看雍正乾隆两朝的对于中国人著作的手段，就足够令人惊心动魄。全毁，抽毁，剜去之类也且不说，最阴险的是删改了古书的内容。乾隆朝的纂修《四库全书》，是许多人颂为一代之盛业的，但他们却不但捣乱了古书的格式，还修改了古人的文章；不但藏之内廷，还颁之文风较盛之处，使天下士子阅读，永不会觉得我们中国的作者里面，也曾经有过很有些骨气的人……清朝的考据家有人说过，「明人好刻古书而古书亡」，因为他们妄行校改。我以为这之后，则清人纂修《四库全书》而古书亡，因为他们变乱旧式，删改原文；今人（民国）标点古书而古书亡，因为他们乱点一通，佛头著粪：这是古书的水火兵虫以外的三大厄。」

清朝在编纂《四库全书》时亦救亡不少大量早已失传的中国古籍，梁启超对此评论道：「此二百馀年间总可命为中国之『文艺复兴时代』，特其兴也，渐而非顿耳……吾辈尤有一事当感谢清儒者，曰辑佚。书籍经久必渐散亡，取各史艺文、经籍等志校其存佚易见也。肤芜之作，存亡固无足轻重；名著失坠，则国民之遗产损焉。乾隆中修《四库全书》，其书之采自《永乐大典》者以百计，实开辑佚之先声。此后兹业日昌，自周秦诸子，汉人经注，魏晋六朝逸史逸集，苟有片语留存，无不搜罗最录。其取材则唐宋间数种大类书，如《艺文类聚》、《初学记》、《太平御览》等最多，而诸经注疏及他书，凡可搜者无不遍。当时学者从事此业者甚多，不备举。而马国翰之《玉函山房辑佚书》，分经史子三部，集所辑至数百种，他可推矣。遂使《汉志》诸书、《隋唐志》久称已佚者，今乃累累现于吾辈之藏书目录中，虽复片鳞碎羽，而受赐则既多矣。」

艺术

书法与陶艺

书法方面，晚明的帖学在清初仍然发达，姜英、张照、刘墉、王文治、梁同书与翁方纲等人在刻尊传统的时候，力图表现出新面貌，或以淡墨书写，或改变章法结构等。但由于帖学未有很好地加以清理而逐渐颓势。随著金石考证学的发展，清朝书法多从碑体入手，成为清朝书坛的主流。有名的有翁方纲、刘墉、何绍基与赵之谦。到康有为大力张扬碑学，碑学作为一种与帖学相抗衡的书学系统而存在。清代的陶艺发展出繁复的不透明釉上彩陶器以及素色陶器两种风格迥异的风格。

京剧

京剧被称为中国的「国粹」，起源于明朝的昆曲和京腔，形成于乾隆、嘉庆年间。京剧之名始见于清光绪二年（1876年）的《申报》，历史上曾有皮黄、二黄、黄腔、京调、京戏、平剧、国剧等称谓。乾隆五十五年（1790年）四大徽班进京后与北京剧坛的昆曲、汉剧、弋阳、乱弹等剧种经过五、六十年的融汇，衍变而成，是中国最大戏曲剧种。其剧目之丰富、表演艺术家之多、剧团之多、观众之多、影响之深均为全国之冠。京剧是综合性表演艺术。集唱（歌唱）、念（念白）、做（表演）、打（武打）、舞（舞蹈）为一体、通过程式的表演手段叙演故事，刻划人物，表达「喜、怒、哀、乐、惊、恐、悲」思想感情。角色可分为：生（男人）、旦（女人）、净（男人）、丑（男、女皆有）四大行当。人物有忠奸之分，美丑之分、善恶之分。形象鲜明、栩栩如生。

建筑与园林

清朝建筑比前世变化不多，除了规模宏伟之外，作为中国建筑特色之一的斗拱日趋虚饰纤丽，几乎失去原来用途。北京紫禁城有许多大型色彩丰富的砖石建筑。历代帝陵无寝，自明太祖开始方有明孝陵。清朝分别建有位于辽宁渖阳的盛京三陵、河北遵化的清东陵与河北易县的清西陵。清代园林艺术以圆明园为代表，融合江南名园佳景与欧洲义大利楼房花园，被外国传教士誉为「万园之园」。清朝提倡藏传佛教，分别于奉天、北京与五台山兴建大喇嘛庙。康熙帝也于热河承德兴建仿西藏布达拉宫的承德避暑山庄，供游猎避暑的住所。

绘画

清朝画坛由文人画占主导地位，山水画科和水墨写意画法盛行，更多画家追求笔墨情趣。清代山水画家有名的有「正统派」的四王（王时敏、王翬、王鉴和王原祁）、吴历与恽寿平，合称「清初六大家」。其中恽寿平创造不用墨线勾勒的没骨花卉画法，承自北宋徐崇嗣之没骨法，又加入创意，蔚为清代花卉画宗师，颇为后人所效仿，形成以恽寿平、邹一桂为首的常州画派。然而正统派的绘画与元明两朝相比，其水准水平一般，大致上总不脱临摹的陋习。不过清初绘画仍有翻新出奇、流于怪异之处，比如清初四僧的「遗民派」画家（八大山人、石涛、渐江与髡残）以及「金陵八家」的龚贤、樊圻、高岑、邹结、吴宏、叶欣、胡慥和谢逊等人；雍乾之际以金农、郑板桥为首的扬州八怪。清朝的宫廷画院以义大利的郎世宁、最著名。受到西洋画的影响，清宫廷中的画家如焦秉贞、冷枚等人受西洋画影响。清末时期，任伯年、吴昌硕、居廉的仕女花鸟画及杨柳青、桃花坞和民间年画如《莲生贵子》、《鱼跃龙门》等对后人也有很大影响。

科学与技术

整体而言，清朝的科学技术和同时代的西方国家相比较为落后，在晚期差距更为明显。清初统治者和部分中国学者积极与西方传教士进行中西文化技术交流，统治者亦会将习得的新知识实际地运用在治国方面，然而后来由于禁教的原因导致人们对西学日益模糊和隔阂。清代科学技术的落后是中国贫困积弱的重要原因之一，但在某些科学技术领域中比前也有明显进展，尤其是在数学、天文、历法等学科方面得到空前发展，而精于此道的学者也是英才辈出且人数众多，从远古到清朝这段期间，有关学者的数量在清代占约44%。清代学者亦对古代技术和文献的复兴和修复也作出贡献。

天文学与地理学

清军入关后，汤若望、南怀仁等教士来华传教，带来西方科学与技术。他们先后被任命为钦天监。康熙帝对于天文历算，火炮之学很有兴趣，曾令白晋、德玛诺等人，测绘全国地图，历时十年而成，康熙帝命名为《皇舆全览图》，它是中国第一部用经纬度测绘的地图。顺治帝多次向汤若望学习天文、历法、宗教等知识，以及治国之策。不久汤若望成为「钦天监」的负责人，掌管国家天文历法事务。在随后的一百多年前，「钦天监」皆由耶稣会士掌管。由于需要新的历法，清政府遂下令根据汤若望所著的《西洋新法历书》，制定新历法并颁行全国，名为时宪历。另一受西方影响较大的是地图测绘学。康雍乾时期，国家统一，版图巩固，始绘制全国和各地的地图，派人到各处实地测量。外国传教士雷孝思、杜德美和清朝学者何国宗、明安图等参加这项工作，采用西方经纬度定位和梯形投影法，所制地图居当时世界水平的前列。在测绘全国地图的过程中，康熙时期编成的数学巨著《数理精蕴》亦发挥实际作用。

从顺治到乾隆期间，西方传教士在皇帝的要求下制造以及添加不少天文仪器如赤道经纬、黄道经经纬、简平仪等，同时有相关天文学术著作出现，亦改善和编制较为先进的历法。西方的物理学知识也从明朝末年起一直在中国传播，康熙年间的学者戴震就写有关于阿基米德定律的作品，传教士南怀仁著有《熙朝定案》等介绍各种工程技术的作品外，亦著有《验气图说》和《形性理推》等对中国的物理学界产生一定影响的介绍西方光学知识的书籍，并在一定程度下让一些学者启迪进而研究光学，例如在康熙年间写有《镜史》一书的孙云球以及在十九世纪前期写有《镜镜詅痴》的郑复光；在对待西洋器物方面，清代有不少学者、匠师和科学家如黄履庄、黄履、孙玄球等对西方「奇器」有一定的研究和高度仿制，西方「奇器」在一定程度上亦推动中国的物理实验和机械制造的发展。

由于清政府对天文历法的重视，民间的天文学研究也很活跃，主要代表人物有著有《晓庵新法》和《五星行度解》的王锡阐等。

火器

为平定三藩之乱，康熙特命比利时传教士南怀仁制造适应南方地形特点和便于战场上机动使用的火炮。南怀仁「依洋式铸造新炮」，并进呈《神威图说》一书，介绍西方的制炮理论和方法。在康熙十四年（1675）至康熙末年四十馀年间，仅中央政府就督造或改制神威无敌大将军、金龙炮、制胜将军、威远将军等各型火炮近千尊。不但数量多，而且种类也不少，乾隆二十一年（1756年）颁行的《钦定工部则例造火器式》载有各种火炮共85种，同年的《皇朝礼器图式》中鸟枪，红衣炮，子母炮这三样火器成为制式武器。其他的著作分别有薛熙撰的《练阅火器阵纪》，沈善蒸撰的《火器真诀解证》，王达权、王韬同撰的《火器略说》，薛凤祚撰的《中西火法》，陈旸撰的炮规图说以及董祖修撰的《炮法撮要》等。清朝军队的火器装备率也超过明朝，直到两次鸦片战争期间和太平天国战争初期，清军的主要火器是鸟枪和各种生铁、青铜铸造的火炮，在道光、咸丰年间又装备了两人抬用的抬炮和抬枪，清朝军队火器的装备率达到50-60％。

清朝初期在政权稳固及稳定后容许汉族民众持有冷兵器，但仍然警惕火器尤其是重型火器的流存。虽然清朝在法律上严禁民间私制火器，但在实行上却没有也难以严加管制，终清一代火器在民间几乎随处可见，制造和销售火器在民间已有相当的规模，出于自卫、捕猎、游戏等原因有不少平民都拥有了火器，甚至在京城也有铁匠私造火器售卖。此外，清朝希望士绅掌管的民间武力协助国家维持基层社会的秩序和协助保卫国土，加上亦需顾及民间狩猎和自卫的需要，故清政府在一定条件下容许民间武器合法存在。中国历史上的历代王朝都不会乐见民间有大量武器，特别是不愿看到有精利武器在民间流传，但基于上述原因，清朝对民间火器的政策经常陷于「允许、鼓励」与「禁止、控制」的两难处境。

农业

农业方面，清代有《授时通考》、《广群芳谱》、《补农书》等著作，详细论述各种作物的栽种和农业生产技术。清代亦是中国传统农学的高度发展时期，中国历代所编著的农书共714部，其中清以前的二千一百多年间编著的农书为231部，清代267年，编著的农书为483部，为清代以前农书数量的2.09倍，清朝治理及研究蝗虫的技术亦相对比较发达。

医学

清初至鼎盛时期，医药学进步所表现在很多方面，基本上是明朝医药盛况的延续。如对经典著作的研究、本草学、方剂学、诊断治疗学、医案整理等，均较明朝更成熟。各家学派的纷争也逐渐缓和，大多医家能采各家之长折衷于临床。但也不乏固守《内经》、《难经》、《伤寒论》，而批评金元以后一切新说的医学，这与当时考据学盛行不无关系。清朝中医药学最重要的成就，就是关于急性传染病的研究，它已形成一个新的系统，即温病学说。这一学说的出现，虽然是基于历代医家的有关成就上，但清代温病学派在中医发展史上的贡献，仍然是相当显著的，它并不亚于东汉张仲景著《伤寒论》，金朝刘完素创河间学派。

康熙年间有不少精通医术的传教士如张诚和白晋等向中国传授西方医学，并且被容许在入职朝廷、建立试验室以传授解剖学知识，康熙对此深感兴趣，甚至曾经在一次研探解剖学时得病。法国传教士巴多明（Dominicus Parrenin）用满文翻译人体解剖学方面的著作并名之为《钦定格体全录》，巴多明和白晋也在康熙的支持下翻译出有关人体血液循环的著作，并且在北京传播相关知识。西方传入的医学知识和理论亦引起了当时中国医学界人士的注意，例如清初刘献廷研究过人物图说等西方医学著作，乾隆年间著有《医林改错》的医学家王清任亦十分重视解剖学：「著书不明脏腑，岂不是痴人说梦，治病不明脏腑，何异于盲子夜行」。

清朝中叶后，西学的影响不像清初仅局限于个别传教士，西方科技的刺激显然变得十分具有影响力。尤其是西方国家有意识地把医药作为实现他们宗教目的、掠夺目的的手段，所以西方医学对中国的渗透变得比清初那时更为明显。那时中国人民也有吸收外来医药学的需求，于是中西医汇的主张应运而生。这种新的思想既有解放中医药学家保守思想的一面，也有压抑对传统中医药学继承和发展的一面。

到了清末民初，由于西方医学的强势输入，以其诊断、手术器械的先进、服药的便利、诊间及病房的明亮乾净，对当时的传统中医造成了前所未有的生存与竞争的压力。然而由于中国人根深蒂固的医疗习惯、中医的实际疗效以及西医人数尚少不能普及于全国等原因，当时的中医并未如日本明治维新之后的汉医般几乎绝迹。

数学

中国古代的数学成就曾名列世界前茅，到明代衰落下来，古算几成绝学。明末，西算传入中国，从徐光启翻译《几何原本》前六卷起，直到康熙时编成《数理精蕴》（《数理精蕴》是明末清初西算输入时期一部带有总结性的数学巨著，被称之为当时中国最高水平的数学百科全书），这是中国历史上第一次西算输入时期，雍正以后到鸦片战争以前，又为「古算复兴时期」。介绍西算和复兴古算构成清前期数学发展的两大内容。清初的历法大辩论，新法以计算精确战胜旧法，这件事使当时知识界对数学重视起来。康熙又聘请传教士徐日升、白晋、张诚、安多等入宫，讲授几何、代数、天文、物理等科学知识，这就推动数学的蓬勃发展，出现方中通、梅文鼎、梅毂成、明安图、王元启、董佑诚、项名达等著名数学家。

清朝学者亦重新发掘出在古代已长期失传的大量数学著作，例如《四库全书》的编纂工作者之一的戴震就从《永乐大典》中发现和整理出久已失传的许多古典算书。如《海岛算经》、《五经算术》、《周髀算经》、《九章算术》、《孙子算经》、《五曹算经》以及《夏侯阳算经》。他又从南宋刻本的毛扆影抄本中抄辑出《张丘建算经》和《辑古算经》两种，连同明刻本的《数术记遗》共计十种。这十部算经于乾隆三十八年由孔继涵刻入《微波榭丛书》，正式题名为《算经十书》。戴震还从《永乐大典》中抄辑出宋秦九韶的《数书九章》及杨辉的各种算书，令汉唐以来数学成就的结晶重现。

清朝的数学人才辈出且著作繁多，大约有五百人贡献一千多种数学著作，超过以往任何一个朝代；但因受乾嘉汉学的影响，多集中在对古算的整理、注释方面。在若干领域内，清代学者也作出创造性的贡献。如陈世仁发展宋元以来垛积术的研究，即高阶等差级数求和的方法；焦循注释《九章算术》，提出加减乘除的交换律；还有汪莱和李锐继承宋代天元术和四元术，发展方程论的研究，对方程根的性质以及根和系数的关系等进行探讨。

建筑学与基建

建筑学方面取得很高的成就，宫殿、园林、寺庙、宅宇、城垣的建筑，盛极一时。或雄伟庄严，或富丽典雅，彩绘藻饰，光彩照人，庭院草木，错落有致。著名匠师梁九、雷发达均有高超的设计和施工技艺。外国传教士蒋友仁、王致诚等带来西方的建筑技术，设计圆明园内西洋楼、大水法等建筑群。

清朝末年，中国的交通事业有所发展，詹天佑是中国第一位杰出的铁路工程师，他主持修建的京张铁路工程之艰巨是当时世界铁路史上罕见的。詹天佑克服一道道难关，创造性地设计出「人」字形轨道，减缓坡度，降低造价，比原计划提前两年完工。詹天佑修建京张铁路期间，厘定各种铁路工程标准，并上书政府要求全国采用。中国现在仍然使用的4尺8寸半标准轨、郑氏自动挂鈎等等都是出自詹天佑的提议。此外詹天佑亦著重铁路人才的培训，制定工程师升转章程，对工程人员的考核和要求作出明文规定，并且定明工程师薪酬与考核成绩挂钩。京张铁路培训不少中国的工程人员，詹天佑所制定的考核章程亦成为其他中国铁路的模仿对象。

君主列表

注释