Qing Dynasty Quotes

Rather, he led them against the Manchu Qing dynasty in the Taiping Rebellion – the deadliest war of the nineteenth century. From 1850 to 1864, at least 20 million people lost their lives; far more than in the Napoleonic Wars or in the American Civil War.

In 1957, the then-emperor, Qianlong, who ruled China for sixty years (1736-95) and is often referred to as 'Qianlong the Magnificent' for his achievements, closed the door of the country, leaving only one port open for trade, Canton.

The fundamental axiom of economics is the human mercenary instinct. Without that assumption, the entire field would collapse. There isn’t any fundamental axiom for sociology yet, but it might be even darker than economics. The truth always picks up dust. A small number of people could fly off into space, but if we knew it would come to that, why would we have bothered in the first place?” “Bothered with what?” “Why would we have had the Renaissance? Why the Magna Carta? Why the French Revolution? If humanity had stayed divided into classes, kept in place by the law’s iron rule, then when the time came, the ones who needed to leave would leave, and the ones who had to stay behind would stay. If this took place in the Ming or Qing Dynasties, then I’d leave, of course, and you’d stay behind. But that’s not possible now.

Hong’s message fired the imagination of millions of desperate Chinese, who were shaken by China’s defeats in the Opium Wars and by the coming of modern industry and European imperialism. But Hong did not lead them to a kingdom of peace. Rather, he led them against the Manchu Qing dynasty in the Taiping Rebellion – the deadliest war of the nineteenth century, which lasted from 1850 to 1864. At least 20 million people lost their lives; far more than in the Napoleonic Wars or in the American Civil War.

Several companies hung the Star of David on the wall. He smiled, remembering that people on the ocean liner said that Jews had arrived in Shanghai to make a fortune as early as in 1843, after Britain defeated the Chinese Qing dynasty during the first Opium War.

It is impossible to fathom current Tibetan attitudes toward the Chinese government without grasping the enormity of what befell them in the 1950s and early 1960s. Tibetans often speak about “when the Chinese invaded”—only to be chastised by Chinese who point out that this eastern part of the plateau had been part of the Qing dynasty’s China since the early eighteenth century. But the Qing emperors were Manchus, a northern people who were nominally Tibetan Buddhists. The Han Chinese were virtually strangers. And what difference does it make? When somebody who speaks a different language comes to your town, confiscates your home, your clothing, your shoes, and your food, destroys that which is most sacred to you, imprisons the young men in your family, and shoots those who resist, it feels like an invasion whether that person is a fellow citizen or not. Tibetans aren’t talking about the fine points of international law or the definition of sovereignty: they are speaking honestly about what they experienced.

Uncle Zhang, think back to what things were like one hundred twenty years ago. It was still the Qing Dynasty! It took over a month to go from Hangzhou to Beijing, and the emperor had to spend days cooped up in a sedan chair to get to his summer retreat.

Cao Tingdong (1699–1785) of China’s Qing dynasty wrote in his treatise on the Gerontology Perennial Maxims: Sufficient nourishment must be consumed for breakfast and lunch, and less for dinner, and at night we have to keep the stomach completely empty. Old people, in particular, should consume a very light dinner.52

Looking at a massive jade carving of the Buddha from the Qing dynasty, my guide offhandedly remarked that this was a good illustration of how the Eastern view of art differs from the Western view. “How so?” I asked. Elliptically, he answered my question with a question: “What do you think of when I ask you to imagine a work of art yet to be started?” “An empty canvas, I guess,” I responded. “Right. That’s because you Westerners see art as being created from nothing. In the East, we believe the art already exists, and our job is simply to reveal it. It is not visible because we add something, but because we take away the parts that are not the art.

Guangdong is where many of these dubious environmental accounts are hidden. Just as in the Qing dynasty, when corrupt local officials put British opium dealers above their own people, the province is now selling itself as a haven for carbon cheats and waste-regulation dodgers. This is a major reason why China has overtaken the U.S. as the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases: between 15 and 40 percent of the country’s carbon dioxide output is attributable to the production of exports.

Absolutism reigned not just in much of Europe but also in Asia, and similarly prevented industrialization during the critical juncture created by the Industrial Revolution. The Ming and Qing dynasties of China and the absolutism of the Ottoman Empire illustrate this pattern. Under the Song dynasty, between 960 and 1279, China led the world in many technological innovations. The Chinese invented clocks, the compass, gunpowder, paper and paper money, porcelain, and blast furnaces to make cast iron before Europe did. They independently developed spinning wheels and waterpower at more or less the same time that these emerged at the other end of Eurasia. In consequence, in 1500 standards of living were probably at least as high in China as they were in Europe. For centuries China also had a centralized state with a meritocratically recruited civil service. Yet

Absolutism reigned not just in much of Europe but also in Asia, and similarly prevented industrialization during the critical juncture created by the Industrial Revolution. The Ming and Qing dynasties of China and the absolutism of the Ottoman Empire illustrate this pattern.

The death-tolls during the last years of the Qing dynasty and in China’s forty years of non-Communist republican government are impossible to be precise about, but the figures are estimated to be very large.

the last dynasty of China, the Qing dynasty, ended when the Meiji era faded into the sands of time.

It was Zhang Zhidong who suggested this guiding ideology during the reforms of the late Qing. 'Chinese learning at the base' meant preserving the political system of the late Qing, and 'Western learning for application' meant introducing and utilizing Western experience to strengthen the political system, consolidate rule, and prolong the life of the declining Qing dynasty. In Den Xiaoping's era, 'Chinese learning as the base' preserved the road, theory, and political system left behind by Mao, and 'Western learning for application' was aimed at developing the economy and thereby bolstering and prolonging the political system that Mao left behind. However, since the political system of the Mao era was mainly imported from the Soviet Union, it would be more accurate to say 'Soviet learning as the base.' Economic reforms drew China into a new era, but the reforms were led by the bureaucratic clique that was the ultimate victor in the Cultural Revolution. They controlled all the country's resources and the direction of reform, and in objective terms decided who would pay the cost of reforms and how the benefits of reform would be distributed.

The Qing Dynasty (1644–1912) came to power when the neighboring Manchu people capitalized on instability and rebellions in Ming China to challenge it.

Then the cycle began again under the Qing Dynasty. China achieved its maximum territorial expansion, governing over a third of the world’s population while reforms under the reigns of three long-ruling emperors led to an extended period of economic prosperity.3 Then the European powers arrived. Earlier in this book we saw how the European powers, in the Age of Exploration, used their military strength to trade with and exploit resource-rich but militarily weaker foreigners. That’s what happened starting in the early 1800s, which began what is called the Century of Humiliation in China. The Europeans came offering to trade but the Chinese didn’t want anything they had to offer. This led to the British bringing opium into China to get the Chinese addicted, so that they would trade for it. A series of military confrontations followed during the 1800s (most notably the Opium Wars), which sped China’s decline. Chinese moves to stem their decline failed and there was great internal conflict and uprisings (most notably the Taiping Rebellion), which continued until the collapse of the Qing Dynasty in 1912.

These developments led to the eventual fall of the Qing Dynasty, the resignation of the Japanese government, and the continued control of India by the British. Especially in Japan and China, it also led to the realization that they needed to modernize, which prompted the Meiji Restoration (in Japan) and the Self-Strengthening Movement (in China). This move was very successful in Japan and not successful in China, which continued to suffer in what the Chinese call the Century of Humiliation. Second Industrial Revolution (1850s–early 1900s) Beginning in the mid-1800s, a second big wave of innovation took place, centered at first around steam-powered locomotion (e.g., railroads) and then electricity, telephones, interchangeable manufacturing parts, and other innovations at the turn of the 20th century. Whereas the First Industrial Revolution was centered on the UK, the Second Industrial Revolution primarily benefited the United States. As is typical, this period produced both great wealth and great wealth gaps and excesses in the capital markets, leading to an era known as the Gilded Age in the US. Invention of Communism (1848) The invention and development of communism in the mid-1800s came as a reaction against both capitalism and the wealth gaps it created and the benefits of the Industrial Revolutions going more to the owners of the new technologies than to the workers.

Having reviewed diverse theories and hypotheses on the waning of the Age of Enlightenment in Central Asia, it is now time to step back and raise a larger question: does it really require an explanation? The assumption behind our search for causes is that if one or another factor had not come into play, the movement of thought would have continued. But that great period of intense cerebration, that age of inquiry and innovation, had lasted for more than four centuries. If more information on the centuries preceding the Arab invasion had survived, we might confidently extend that period of flowering even further back in time. Even without this addition, the Age of Enlightenment was five times longer than the lifetime of Periclean Athens; a century longer than the entire history of the intellectual center of Alexandria from its foundation to the destruction of its library; only slightly shorter than the entire life span of the Roman Republic; longer than the Ming or Qing dynasties in China and the same length as the Han; about the same length as the history of Japan from the founding of the Tokugawa dynasty to the present; and of England from the age of Shakespeare to our own day. As they say in the theater world, it had a long run. It is well and good to speak of causes of the decline of the passion for inquiry and innovation, or of some supposed exhaustion of creative energies. But just as we feel little need to discover the cause of a nonagenarian’s death, we need not inquire too urgently into the cause of the waning of this remarkable age. Of course, the question of why the region as a whole remained in a state of backwardness from the end of the Age of Enlightenment down to recent times is vitally important, but it involves many factors besides those that came into play in the intellectual decline. It should form the subject of another book.

I’ve lived in greater China off and on for more than a dozen years. I have taken years of Mandarin lessons. I can recite a Tang dynasty poem. Occasionally I drink bubble tea. But my understanding of China ends at bu tai qing chu. In a literal sense, the phrase does mean “not very clear.” But it has a linguistic flexibility. Each time I grasp a new context for bu tai qing chu, it turns up in a new way. It means at least these things: I can’t help you. I will not help you. I don’t want to tell you. I’ll get in trouble. You don’t deserve to know. I’m moving on now.

Addiction among its southern population was a serious and growing social problem for the Qing dynasty. Although the Portuguese had been the main suppliers, the trafficking burgeoned when Britain’s East India Company entered the business. The East India Company, a privately capitalised firm but operating with the full mandate and

Cao Xueqin’s The Story of the Stone (also known as The Dream of the Red Chamber), which is considered to be one of the greatest, if not the greatest, Chinese novels. While the story is set in the Qing dynasty, it does give a stunning portrait of what life was like in a grand household with many courtyards and gardens and inhabited by a large family, countless concubines, and retainers of every sort.