Qing dynasty
The First Opium War revealed the outdated state of the Chinese military.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 outmaneuvered 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 five ports of Canton, Amoy, Fuchow, Ningpo and Shanghai to western trade and missionaries, and to cede Hong Kong Island to Britain. It revealed many inadequacies in the Qing government and provoked widespread rebellions against the already hugely unpopular regime.
Qing dynasty
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 late 19th century, but was ceded to the Empire of Japan in 1895 following the First Sino-Japanese War. In addition, many surrounding countries, such as Korea (Joseon dynasty), Vietnam frequently paid tribute to China during much of this period. Khanate of Kokand were forced to submit as protectorate and pay tribute to the Qing dynasty in China between 1774 and 1798.
Qing dynasty
After conquering "China proper", the Manchus identified their state as "China" (中國, 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, international treaties (as the Qing was known internationally as "China" or the "Chinese Empire") and foreign affairs, and "Chinese language" (Dulimbai gurun i bithe) included Chinese, Manchu, and Mongol languages, and "Chinese people" (中國之人 Zhōngguó zhī rén; Manchu: Dulimbai gurun i niyalma) referred to all subjects of the empire. In the Chinese-language versions of its treaties and its maps of the world, the Qing government used "Qing" and "China" interchangeably.
Qing dynasty
Losing the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895 was a watershed. Japan, a country long regarded by the Chinese as little more than an upstart nation of pirates, annihilated the Qing government's modernized Beiyang Fleet, then deemed to be the strongest naval force in Asia. The Japanese victory occurred a mere three decades after the Meiji Restoration set a feudal Japan on course to emulate the Western nations in their economic and technological achievements. Finally, in December 1894, the Qing government took concrete steps to reform military institutions and to re-train selected units in westernized drills, tactics and weaponry. These units were collectively called the New Army. The most successful of these was the Beiyang Army under the overall supervision and control of a former Huai Army commander, General Yuan Shikai, who used his position to build networks of loyal officers and eventually become President of the Republic of China.
Qing dynasty
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.
Nian Rebellion
The Nian Rebellion () was an armed uprising that took place in northern China from 1851 to 1868, contemporaneously with Taiping Rebellion (1851–1864) in South China. The rebellion failed to topple the Qing dynasty, but caused immense economic devastation and loss of life that became major long-term factors in the collapse of the Qing regime in the early 20th century.
Sino-Nepalese War
The Sino-Nepalese War (), also known as the Sino-Gorkha war and in Chinese the Campaign of Gorkha (), was an invasion of Tibet by Nepal from 1788-1792. The war was initially fought between Nepalese and Tibetan armies over a trade dispute related to a long-standing problem of low-quality coins manufactured by Nepal for Tibet. The Nepalese Army under Bahadur Shah plundered Tibet under Qing rule and Tibetans signed the Treaty of Kerung paying annual tribute to Nepal. However, Tibetans requested for Chinese intervention and Sino-Tibetan forces under Fuk'anggan raided Nepal up to Nuwakot only to face strong Nepalese counterattack. Thus, both countries signed the Treaty of Betrawati as a stalemate.
Modern history
Few Chinese had any illusions about Japanese designs on China. Hungry for raw materials and pressed by a growing population, Japan initiated the seizure of Manchuria in September 1931 and established ex-Qing emperor Puyi as head of the puppet state of Manchukuo in 1932. During the Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945), the loss of Manchuria, and its vast potential for industrial development and war industries, was a blow to the Kuomintang economy. The League of Nations, established at the end of World War I, was unable to act in the face of the Japanese defiance. After 1940, conflicts between the Kuomintang and Communists became more frequent in the areas not under Japanese control. The Communists expanded their influence wherever opportunities presented themselves through mass organizations, administrative reforms, and the land- and tax-reform measures favoring the peasants—while the Kuomintang attempted to neutralize the spread of Communist influence.
Ma Zhanhai
Ma Zhanhai (, died 1932) was a Chinese Muslim Battalion Commander who was killed in action during the Qinghai Tibet War which was part of the Sino-Tibetan War. He served in Ma Bufang's Qinghai army.
Second Sino-Japanese War
The Second Sino - Japanese War was a military conflict fought primarily between the Republic of China and the Empire of Japan from July 7, 1937, to September 2, 1945. It began with the Marco Polo Bridge Incident in 1937 in which a dispute between Japanese and Chinese troops escalated into a battle.
Pacific War
It is generally considered that the Pacific War began on 7/8 December 1941, on which date Japan invaded Thailand and attacked the British possessions of Malaya, Singapore, and Hong Kong as well as the United States military bases in Hawaii, Wake Island, Guam and the Philippines. Some historians contend that the conflict in Asia can be dated back to 7 July 1937 with the beginning of the Second Sino-Japanese War between the Empire of Japan and the Republic of China, or possibly 19 September 1931, beginning with the Japanese invasion of Manchuria. However, it is more widely accepted that the Pacific War itself started in early December 1941, with the Sino-Japanese War then becoming part of it as a theater of the greater World War II.[nb 9]
Sikkim
Phuntsog Namgyal was succeeded in 1670 by his son, Tensung Namgyal, who moved the capital from Yuksom to Rabdentse (near modern Pelling). In 1700, Sikkim was invaded by the Bhutanese with the help of the half-sister of the Chogyal, who had been denied the throne. The Bhutanese were driven away by the Tibetans, who restored the throne to the Chogyal ten years later. Between 1717 and 1733, the kingdom faced many raids by the Nepalese in the west and Bhutanese in the east, culminating with the destruction of the capital Rabdentse by the Nepalese. In 1791, China sent troops to support Sikkim and defend Tibet against the Gorkha Kingdom. Following the subsequent defeat of Gorkha, the Chinese Qing dynasty established control over Sikkim.
Sino-Tibetan relations during the Ming dynasty
Josef Kolmaš, a sinologist, Tibetologist, and Professor of Oriental Studies at the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, writes that it was during the Qing dynasty "that developments took place on the basis of which Tibet came to be considered an organic part of China, both practically and theoretically subject to the Chinese central government." Yet he states that this was a radical change in regards to all previous eras of Sino-Tibetan relations.
Qing dynasty
Historians have judged the Qing dynasty's vulnerability and weakness to foreign imperialism in the 19th century to be based mainly on its maritime naval weakness while it achieved military success against westerners on land, the historian Edward L. Dreyer said that "China’s nineteenth-century humiliations were strongly related to her weakness and failure at sea. At the start of the Opium War, China had no unified navy and no sense of how vulnerable she was to attack from the sea; British forces sailed and steamed wherever they wanted to go......In the Arrow War (1856–60), the Chinese had no way to prevent the Anglo-French expedition of 1860 from sailing into the Gulf of Zhili and landing as near as possible to Beijing. Meanwhile, new but not exactly modern Chinese armies suppressed the midcentury rebellions, bluffed Russia into a peaceful settlement of disputed frontiers in Central Asia, and defeated the French forces on land in the Sino-French War (1884–85). But the defeat of the fleet, and the resulting threat to steamship traffic to Taiwan, forced China to conclude peace on unfavorable terms."
Beiyang Fleet
The Beiyang Fleet (Pei-yang Fleet; , alternatively Northern Seas Fleet) was one of the four modernized Chinese navies in the late Qing dynasty. Among the four, the Beiyang Fleet was particularly sponsored by Li Hongzhang, one of the most trusted vassals of Empress Dowager Cixi and the principal patron of the "self-strengthening movement" in northern China in his capacity as the Viceroy of Zhili and the Minister of Beiyang Commerce (北洋通商大臣). Due to Li's influence in the imperial court, the Beiyang Fleet garnered much greater resources than the other Chinese fleets and soon became the dominant navy in Asia before the onset of First Sino-Japanese War in 1894–1895 — it was the largest fleet in Asia and the 8th in the world during the late 1880s in terms of tonnage.
Qing dynasty
The Qing showed that the Manchus valued military skills in propaganda targeted towards the Ming military to get them to defect to the Qing, since the Ming civilian political system discriminated against the military. The three Liaodong Han Bannermen officers who played a massive role in the conquest of southern China from the Ming were Shang Kexi, Geng Zhongming, and Kong Youde and they governed southern China autonomously as viceroys for the Qing after their conquests. Normally the Manchu Bannermen acted only as reserve forces or in the rear and were used predominantly for quick strikes with maximum impact, so as to minimize ethnic Manchu losses; instead, the Qing used defected Han Chinese troops to fight as the vanguard during the entire conquest of China.
Second Sino-Japanese War
The Second Sino - Japanese War was a military conflict fought primarily between the Republic of China and the Empire of Japan from July 7, 1937 to September 9, 1945. It began with the Marco Polo Bridge Incident in 1937 in which a dispute between Japanese and Chinese troops escalated into a battle. The conflict then escalated further into a full - scale war. It ended with the unconditional surrender of Japan on September 2, 1945 to the Allies of World War II.
Tibet
For several decades, peace reigned in Tibet, but in 1792 the Qing Qianlong Emperor sent a large Chinese army into Tibet to push the invading Nepalese out. This prompted yet another Qing reorganization of the Tibetan government, this time through a written plan called the "Twenty-Nine Regulations for Better Government in Tibet". Qing military garrisons staffed with Qing troops were now also established near the Nepalese border. Tibet was dominated by the Manchus in various stages in the 18th century, and the years immediately following the 1792 regulations were the peak of the Qing imperial commissioners' authority; but there was no attempt to make Tibet a Chinese province.
Zeng Jize
Marquis Zeng Jize () (1839 – April 12, 1890), one of China's earliest ministers to London, Paris and Saint Petersburg, played an important role in the diplomacy that preceded and accompanied the Sino-French War (August 1884–April 1885).
Qing dynasty
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 Righteous and Harmonious Fists, or "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.
When did the location of the Sino-Nepalese war become part of Qing China?
Sino-Nepalese War >> location
Tibet
When did #1 become part of Qing China?
mid-18th century