Qing Dynasty

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The Qing was the last imperial dynasty of China, established in 1644 when the Manchu — a people from beyond the northeastern frontier — took Beijing and ruled the empire until the abdication of the child emperor Puyi in 1912. It was the longest-lasting and largest of the conquest dynasties: a vast multiethnic state in which a small Manchu ruling house governed a Han majority alongside Mongols, Tibetans, and the Muslim peoples of the far west, holding the whole together by patronizing each tradition in its own terms.

That arrangement shaped the religious landscape that the West later encountered. The Qing court underwrote Tibetan Buddhism as an instrument of rule in Inner Asia, sponsored the Confucian examination system that disciplined the literate class, and kept a wary supervisory eye on the rest. Taoism in this period was not the speculative philosophy of the early classics but a vast living institution — the Quanzhen monastic orders and the hereditary Celestial Masters, liturgies for the dead, temple festivals, and ritual specialists serving village life. Alongside it ran a dense undergrowth of popular sects, many of them millenarian, awaiting the descent of a future buddha or the turning of a cosmic age. The state distrusted these movements as sources of sedition, and not without reason: the White Lotus risings and, in the mid-nineteenth century, the enormous Taiping rebellion — led by a man who believed himself the younger brother of Jesus Christ — were religious movements before they were anything else.

It was also the dynasty under which China was first read at length in Europe. The Daoist scriptures that the Victorian library holds — Legge’s Texts of Tâoism, Giles’s Chuang Tzŭ, Balfour’s Taoist Texts — were translated from editions current in the Qing, by men working in a China governed from the Manchu throne. What reached the Western esoteric revival as “the wisdom of the East” arrived through that late imperial filter: a tradition already two thousand years old, transmitted in the forms the dynasty had inherited and maintained.

The distinction worth keeping is between what these texts meant in their own setting and what later readers made of them. To the Quanzhen monk or the village priest, the Tao was the substance of an ordered cosmos and a working liturgy, not a doctrine of self-cultivation abstracted for foreign consumption. Modern scholarship has spent recent decades recovering the Qing as a Manchu empire on its own terms, rather than a simple continuation of Chinese dynastic history — and recovering its religion as something organized, contested, and political, rather than the timeless serenity the term “Taoism” came to suggest abroad. The empire fell to revolution in 1912. The traditions it had sheltered, and the translations made under it, outlasted it.

→ In the library: Legge — The Texts of Tâoism (1891) · Giles — Chuang Tzŭ (1889) · Balfour — Taoist Texts (1884)

→ Related: Eastern Monasticism