China (Ming and Qing Dynasties), 1368–1800

The Mongolian Yuan empire’s fall in 1368, and the return to native Chinese rule under the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), brought stability to China. The country’s army and navy needed rebuilding, as did cities. Yet though the focus of Ming government was China’s eighteen core provinces, its borders were threatened. The Great Wall was strengthened, and under Emperor Yongle huge infrastructural and architectural projects were enacted, including the first version of Beijing’s Forbidden City. In the seventeenth century, however, Manchu armies confederated in the northeast, capturing Beijing by 1644. Manchu rulers, known as the Qing dynasty (1644–1912), built an empire from Korea to today’s Xinjiang province with a multicultural, multilingual, multi-religious population. The expansive territory was hard fought. Despite occasional victories in the eighteenth century, the Qing army was constantly at war with the peoples of Mongolia, Tibet and Inner Asia. By the nineteenth century, China was much weakened, as seen by the inroads made by European merchants, and then British naval forces, in the subsequent Opium Wars, the opening of five treaty ports and the ceding of Hong Kong to Britain. The native Ming dynasty offered social and cultural opportunities for its private citizens that had not been possible in China since the previous Chinese (Song) dynasty, before Mongolian Yuan rule. Although Ming Emperor Hongwu initially repressed individual creativity, by the fifteenth century, arts and literature were flourishing not just at court but also in urban centres further away. In particular, the literary culture that emerged under Mongol rule in the fourteenth century flourished in Suzhou under the Ming dynasty. The subsequent Manchurian Qing dynasty was a multicultural, multilingual society in which ethnicity was apparent, even as the central government worked for national unity. Lamaist Buddhism from Tibet became the main Qing court religion. Both Ming and Qing China produced unprecedented literary compilations as well as China’s best-known novels and plays. Under Emperor Yongle of Ming dynasty and Emperor Kangxi of Qing dynasty, vast encyclopaedias and dictionaries were created to promote greater freedom of thought. Meanwhile, the arrival of Jesuit missionaries in the Qing court spread European intellectual and artists ideas, with perspective and trompe l’oeil effects appearing in what was otherwise orthodox Chinese painting. Thousands of buildings still survive in China from the period of this chapter. The Great Wall reached its greatest extent – 5,660 kilometres (3,520 miles) – in the Ming dynasty, but the uncontested greatest achievement of Ming- and Qing-era architecture is Beijing’s Forbidden City, with its astonishing scale, symmetrical axes, timber halls and modular proportions. Beijing was China’s capital and the most important city for most of the period, containing many important monuments, such as the Altar of Heaven. Elsewhere, Buddhist and Taoist architecture spread across China, often on sacred peaks. Ming and Qing China was also an age of imperial garden design in the north, such as in Chengde, and private gardens in the south, notably Suzhou, such as in the Garden of the Failed Politician. This was also a period when vernacular architecture appeared across China, representing dozens of non-Chinese nationalities that resided and worshipped under the expansive Qing dynasty. New urban housing forms proliferated such as Beijing’s hu tong. The eighteenth century produced China’s second extensive construction manual that instructed how to design imperial buildings, as well as China’s most extensive craftsman’s manual for house construction, and several treatises on garden design. Figures like the seafarer Zheng He, Jesuit missionaries including Matteo Ricci and Giuseppe Castiglione, and the Ming-Qing Emperors Yongle, Jiajing, Kangxi and Qianlong, all left lasting architectural legacies.