Qianlong Emperor (1735-1796): The High Qing at Its Peak

The Qianlong Emperor ruled China’s Qing dynasty from 1735 to 1796, one of the longest reigns in Chinese history. Under him the empire reached its greatest size, absorbing Xinjiang and tightening its hold on Tibet, while Beijing’s court became a centre of art collecting, scholarship and building. Yet the same decades brought harsh censorship, costly wars and a corrupt final era, so his reign marks both the peak of the High Qing and the start of its decline.

Background: an inheritance at full strength

Hongli was born on 25 September 1711, the fourth son of Prince Yong, who reigned from 1722 as the Yongzheng Emperor. His grandfather, the Kangxi Emperor, is said to have taken a liking to the boy, and Yongzheng secretly named him heir under a new system of sealed succession, designed to avoid the bitter struggles among princes that had marred Kangxi’s last years.

When Yongzheng died suddenly in October 1735, Hongli, then 24, took the throne without dispute. The new era name, Qianlong (often translated “Heavenly Prosperity” or “Lasting Eminence”), began with the new year of 1736. He inherited a treasury refilled by his father’s fiscal reforms, an efficient bureaucracy and a Manchu-led army that had already defeated most of its rivals. The Qing were a Manchu dynasty ruling a mainly Han Chinese population, and Qianlong worked hard to present himself as a ruler for all his peoples: a Confucian sage to the Chinese, a khan to the Mongols and a patron of Tibetan Buddhism.

The reign at its height

Government and economy

Qianlong worked long hours, read huge numbers of memorials (official reports) and relied on the Grand Council, a small inner cabinet created under his father. His early chief ministers, such as Ortai, Zhang Tingyu and later Fuheng, were experienced administrators. Grain prices were watched closely, state granaries were maintained to relieve famine, and tax remissions were granted repeatedly.

The economy grew strongly. New World crops such as maize and sweet potatoes helped peasants farm hillsides, and China’s population rose from roughly 150 million around 1700 to about 300 million by 1800, according to most estimates. Foreign demand for tea, silk and porcelain brought in large quantities of silver. In 1757 Qianlong confined European seaborne trade to a single port, creating the Canton System that lasted until the First Opium War.

The Southern Tours

Like his grandfather, Qianlong made six grand tours of the wealthy Jiangnan region in the lower Yangzi valley, in 1751, 1757, 1762, 1765, 1780 and 1784. These journeys allowed him to inspect river works and flood defences, meet local elites and display imperial splendour. Court painters such as Xu Yang recorded them in vast handscrolls, but the tours were also hugely expensive for the provinces that hosted them.

The Ten Great Campaigns

In 1792 Qianlong celebrated what he called his “Ten Great Campaigns” and styled himself the “Old Man of the Ten Completions”. The list mixed real triumphs with failures.

• Dzungaria (1755 and 1756–57): two wars that destroyed the Dzungar Khanate of the western Mongols, described in the article on the Qing conquest of the Dzungar Khanate. The Dzungar population was largely wiped out by war, smallpox and flight.
• The Tarim Basin (1758–59): the defeat of the Khoja brothers, Muslim leaders in Kashgar and Yarkand, which brought the oasis cities under Qing rule. The new lands were named Xinjiang, “the New Frontier”.
• Jinchuan (1747–49 and 1771–76): two campaigns against small Tibetan chieftaincies in the mountains of western Sichuan. The second cost tens of millions of silver taels to subdue a few thousand defenders in stone towers.
• Burma (1765–69): four invasions of the Konbaung kingdom that ended in a negotiated withdrawal after heavy losses, largely from disease.
• Taiwan (1787–88): the suppression of the rebellion led by Lin Shuangwen.
• Vietnam (1788–89): an intervention to restore the Le dynasty that ended in defeat by Nguyen Hue of the Tay Son, after which Qianlong recognised the victor.
• Nepal (1788–89 and 1791–92): two campaigns against the Gurkhas, who had invaded Tibet. In 1792 a Qing army under Fukang’an advanced close to Kathmandu and forced a settlement.

These wars more than doubled the territory under Qing control compared with the Ming, to an estimated 13 million square kilometres at its peak. They also drained the treasury and gave military commanders and supply officials many chances for embezzlement.

Patron of the arts and scholarship

Qianlong was a tireless collector, poet and calligrapher. He is credited with more than 40,000 poems, many of them written or polished by court officials, and he stamped his seals and inscriptions on thousands of paintings in the imperial collection, to the dismay of some later connoisseurs.

He enlarged the Yuanmingyuan, the Old Summer Palace near Beijing, adding the European-style palaces and fountains designed by Jesuit missionaries such as Giuseppe Castiglione and Michel Benoist. He also expanded the Chengde Mountain Resort, where he received Mongol and Tibetan leaders, and built there temples modelled on the Potala Palace in Lhasa and other Tibetan sites.

His greatest scholarly project was the Siku Quanshu, the “Complete Library of the Four Treasuries”, begun in 1773. It gathered and copied thousands of works into a single imperial library, but it was accompanied by a literary inquisition in which books judged hostile to the Manchus were banned, altered or burned, and some authors and their families were punished.

Key people

• Qianlong Emperor (Hongli, 1711–1799): the fourth Qing emperor to rule China, energetic, cultivated and increasingly self-satisfied in old age.
• Empress Xiaoxianchun (1712–1748): his first empress, of the Fuca clan, whose death on a tour in 1748 deeply affected him.
• Fuheng (died 1770): her brother, a trusted Grand Councillor and commander, who died of disease after the Burma campaign.
• Giuseppe Castiglione (1688–1766): the Italian Jesuit painter whose blend of European and Chinese styles shaped court art.
• Heshen (1750–1799): a Manchu guardsman who rose from the mid-1770s to dominate the court, building a vast fortune through bribery and patronage networks.
• Jiaqing Emperor (Yongyan, 1760–1820): the son who received the throne in 1796 and moved against Heshen as soon as his father died.

Strains at the end of the reign

From the 1770s the reign darkened. Heshen controlled appointments and the flow of information to the ageing emperor, and corruption spread through the bureaucracy and the army. Population growth outpaced the supply of land, especially in the hill country of central China, while officials remained few and poorly paid.

In 1793 the British embassy led by Lord Macartney arrived seeking a resident ambassador and new trading rights. The Macartney Embassy was received at Chengde but turned down; Qianlong’s edict to King George III stated that China had no need of foreign manufactures. Historians debate how far this reflected genuine complacency or a calculated diplomatic stance, but it later became a symbol of Qing isolation.

Qianlong had promised not to reign longer than his grandfather Kangxi, who ruled for 61 years. On 9 February 1796 he formally abdicated in favour of his son, who became the Jiaqing Emperor, but as retired emperor he continued to hold real power. The same year the White Lotus Rebellion, a millenarian uprising rooted in poverty and official abuse, broke out in Hubei, Sichuan and Shaanxi. It took until 1804 and huge sums to suppress.

Qianlong died on 7 February 1799. Within days Jiaqing had Heshen arrested, and he was ordered to commit suicide. The confiscated fortune was so large that later legend inflated it to many years of state revenue; the exact figure is uncertain.

Myths and facts

• Myth: Qianlong was a Han Chinese by birth. A popular legend claims he was secretly the son of a Han official, the Chen family of Haining, swapped at birth. Historians regard this as folklore without evidence.
• Myth: China under Qianlong was closed to the world. Trade with Europe grew enormously during his reign, and the court employed European missionaries as painters, mapmakers and clockmakers. What Qianlong controlled closely was where and how foreigners traded.
• Fact: not all ten campaigns were victories. The Burma and Vietnam wars ended in withdrawal, even though court records presented them as successes.

By the numbers

Timeline

• 1711, 25 September: Hongli is born in Beijing.
• 1735, October: The Yongzheng Emperor dies; Hongli takes the throne as the Qianlong Emperor.
• 1751: First of six Southern Tours to Jiangnan.
• 1755–1759: Conquest of the Dzungar Khanate and the Tarim Basin; Xinjiang is created.
• 1757: European maritime trade is restricted to Canton.
• 1765–1769: Failed wars against Burma.
• 1773: The Siku Quanshu project begins.
• 1793: The Macartney Embassy is received at Chengde.
• 1796, 9 February: Qianlong abdicates in favour of the Jiaqing Emperor; the White Lotus Rebellion breaks out.
• 1799, 7 February: Qianlong dies; Heshen is soon forced to commit suicide.

Why it matters

The Qianlong reign shaped the map of modern China, which still broadly follows the borders the Qing reached in the 18th century, including Xinjiang and Tibet. It also left a vast cultural legacy in art collections, palaces and libraries. At the same time, the corruption, overpopulation and fiscal strain that set in during his last decades help explain why the Qing struggled so badly when Western powers arrived in force in the 19th century.