GB Times - As the last ruling family of China, many of the stories and visual reminders we are left with of Imperial China are related to the Qing Dynasty. In this series of articles we look at the rise and fall of the dynasty and some of the stories of its emperors.

Bringing the Manchus Together

Aided by a peasant revolt, the Manchu armies eventually captured Beijing in 1644.

The man often cited as the first leader of the Qing Dynasty, although never an emperor of unified China, was the Manchu leader Nurhachi. He was the leader of a clan from the area known as Aisin Gioro. He assembled together disparate groups from the region and began to organize them into military units known as banners.

Proclaiming himself the ruler of these armies and the region, Nurhachi established a regime known as the “Latter Jin.” Succession passed to his son, Hong Taiji. By 1635, the region comprised a united Manchu people who set out to challenge Ming rule in the southern regions.

Aided by a peasant revolt, the Manchu armies eventually captured Beijing in 1644. After Beijing fell to the Manchus, the last Ming emperor, Chongzhen, killed himself. This event marked the beginning of the Qing Dynasty under a Manchu leader known as the Shunzhi Emperor.

Ruling a Unified China

While the Shunzhi Emperor is regarded as the first emperor of the Qing Dynasty, he was the third ruler of the self-proclaimed Latter Jin Dynasty. He began what was the final period of imperial rule in China, one that focused on inclusion and the expansion of the unified country.

The Manchu rulers not only integrated the Han Chinese, but they extended the country’s borders farther than the preceding dynasties and brought a mix of peoples, cultures and religions into the country.

Following the Shunzhi Emperor were the emperors Kangxi, Yongzheng and Qianlong. They ruled over a period of change in China which saw advances in social systems, politics, science and foreign relations. This period is often referred to as “The Golden Age of Three Emperors.”

There then followed a familial succession of five emperors. The last emperor, Puyi, assumed the throne as a boy in 1908. The dynasty was in a decline and finally fell in 1911 during a revolution led by Sun Yat-Sen.

The deposed emperor resided for some years in the Forbidden City and had his power temporarily restored to him by the Japanese in the 1930s, but the Qing Dynasty and 2,000 years of imperial rule in China had come to an end.

The Boxer Rebellion

The 20th Century began in China with a wave of xenophobia sweeping the country. Thousands of angry Chinese roamed the countryside attacking and killing foreigners and Chinese Christians.

Time of discontent

The end of the 19th century was a low time in the history of the Chinese Empire. Defeated by Western powers in the Opium Wars, China was forced to sign unfavorable trade deals and give concessions to Britain, France, Germany and Japan, among others. Meanwhile, the Manchu rulers of the Qing Dynasty were incapable of modernizing the country in a way that would enable China to resist the technologically and militarily more advanced Western powers.

What caused even more discontent among ordinary Chinese were the extraterritorial rights given to foreigners, including missionaries. Superstition and suspicion towards alien beliefs also influenced popular reasoning, so that when the Yellow River flooded in 1898, many Chinese took it as a sign that foreign influence in China had unsettled the balance between man and nature

Righteous Fists of Harmony

The first attacks against foreigners associated with the Boxer uprising took place in the poor eastern province of Shandong. In 1898, a Chinese temple was forcibly converted into a Catholic church in the small village of Lilienyuan. The local Chinese reacted by rebelling. The Chinese Imperial Army was sent to suppress the rebels, but most of the soldiers ended up joining them.

The uprising was organized by a secret society whose members called themselves the Yìhétuán or the Righteous Fists of Harmony. This was a group of rebels who practiced martial arts – hence they were called Boxers by Westerners - and rituals by which they claimed to gain supernatural powers that made them impervious to bullets and swords. The first Boxers were mainly indignant peasants and laborers who had been left in abject poverty by floods and poor harvests, but as the movement gained popularity, more people joined in.

The original aim of the Boxers was to overthrow the Qing government and restore the Ming Dynasty. But as the political situation in China changed, they soon found a better enemy in the “foreign devils” and their Chinese collaborators.

Alliance with the Imperial Court

While the Boxer uprising was gaining momentum in Shandong, a coup d'etat took place in the Chinese Imperial Court. In 1898, Emperor Guangxu tried to modernize China during a period known as the Hundred Days of Reform. However, Guangxu’s aunt, Empress Dowager Cixi, managed to have the Emperor imprisoned and thereby seize the power to rule China.

Empress Dowager Cixi was a conservative ruler who saw the Boxer movement as an opportunity to fight the Western powers that had sympathized with the reform-minded Emperor Guangxu. Cixi declared her support to the Boxers who then became more daring in their attacks. During the spring and summer of 1900, the Boxers poured into Beijing where they destroyed Christian churches, placed the embassy area under siege and murdered the German ambassador Klemens von Ketteler. Dozens of missionaries were killed in the hands of the Boxers, but the situation was even worse for Chinese converts who had nowhere to escape. Stories about the murders of Europeans and Christians in China circulated in Europe, causing outrage and fanning fears about the "Yellow Peril."

European governments reacted by sending troops to Beijing to protect their citizens, but they were soon defeated by the Boxers who now received help from the Chinese Imperial Army. The Empress Dowager Cixi then declared war on all foreigners in China. However, but this time, Japan, Russia, Britain, France, the United States, Germany, Italy and Austria-Hungary were determined to win and sent a military force consisting of 55,000 soldiers to China and defeat the Boxers. In August, the Eight-Nation Army captured Beijing and began looting the city.

The beginning of the end of the Qing Dynasty

After the Boxer Rebellion, the Chinese Empire was even weaker than before. The victorious foreign powers forced the Qing court to sign a peace agreement (the Boxer Protocol) which ordered China to pay 450 million taels in silver as war reparations. Empress Dowager Cixi, who had fled from Beijing before the city was captured, was allowed to remain in power only because the Western powers thought that China could be best governed through the Chinese Imperial Court.

Although the Boxer Rebellion failed, Chinese nationalism kept growing even stronger. Secret societies such as theTóngménghuì led by Sun Yat-sen were more and more actively working to overthrow the Manchu rulers who had proved incapable of defending China against foreigners. This time the Chinese nationalists, however, did not try to turn back the hands of time – their new aim was to found a modern Chinese Republic.