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.

The conquest and the multiethnic state

The house that took the throne had built its own machinery before it crossed the Wall. The Jurchen chieftain Nurhaci forged the Eight Banners — a hereditary military-administrative order that enrolled Manchu, then Mongol, then defected Han households into colored companies — and his son Hong Taiji declared the dynasty Qing in 1636, recasting a frontier confederacy as a contender for the Mandate of Heaven. The breach came not by siege but by invitation: in 1644 the rebel Li Zicheng seized Beijing and the last Ming emperor hanged himself on Coal Hill; the Ming general Wu Sangui opened the Shanhai Pass, and the regent Dorgon led the banner armies through it. The boy Shunzhi was installed on the throne of an empire his uncle would spend the next two decades subduing province by bloody province.

What followed was not the assimilation of a barbarian remnant into Chinese ways but the construction of a deliberately layered sovereignty. The Manchu emperor ruled the Han as a Confucian Son of Heaven, the Mongols as a Great Khan in the Chinggisid line, the Tibetans and the Buddhist Mongols as a dharma-protecting universal monarch, and the Muslim oases of the conquered northwest through their own begs and qadis. He did so in several languages at once: the Manchu script ran alongside Chinese on imperial steles, and the great inscriptions of the mid-eighteenth century were cut in four — Manchu, Chinese, Mongol, and Tibetan. The throne was not one thing wearing four masks; it was, in the phrase Qing scholarship has made standard, a simultaneous emperorship, addressing each of its peoples in that people’s own idiom of legitimacy.

Religion as an instrument of rule

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.

Tibetan Buddhism was the keystone of the Inner Asian settlement. The Mongols had been bound to the Buddhism of Tibet since the sixteenth century, and the Manchu inherited that bond and made it their own: the emperor presented himself to his Mongol and Tibetan subjects not as a Confucian sage but as an emanation of the bodhisattva Manjusri, the embodiment of wisdom — a claim Qianlong had painted into existence in court thangkas that show him robed as a teaching lama, throned at the center of a refuge field. The relationship with the high lamas of Lhasa was framed as patron and priest, the lay donor and the spiritual preceptor, each conferring legitimacy on the other. The temples Qianlong raised at the summer capital of Chengde — the Putuo Zongcheng, built in deliberate imitation of the Potala — turned that theology into masonry: a Lhasa reproduced east of the Wall, where Mongol princes came to do homage in a setting that told them the Manchu khan was also the throne of the faith. Modern scholarship reads this not as personal piety but as statecraft, the cheapest possible administration of a steppe and a plateau that no garrison could hold by force alone.

Confucian orthodoxy did the parallel work among the Han. The civil examinations that recruited officials by mastery of the Confucian canon were kept, expanded, and made central; the Kangxi and Qianlong emperors patronized classical scholarship on a colossal scale, sponsoring dictionaries and the enormous Siku quanshu compendium even as the same project quietly censored the books it gathered. To rule the literati the throne had to out-Confucianize them, and largely did.

Taoism as a living institution

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.

The two great orders had long since divided the religious field between them. Quanzhen, the Complete Perfection lineage that descended from the twelfth-century Wang Chongyang and his Seven Perfected, was monastic, celibate, and vegetarian; its dominant Longmen sub-lineage governed most of the northern monasteries, with its patriarchal seat at the White Cloud Monastery in Beijing — Baiyun Guan, the temple that the Mongol patron of the order’s founding generation had granted to Qiu Chuji five centuries before. Against it stood Zhengyi, the Orthodox Unity tradition of the hereditary Celestial Masters at Dragon-and-Tiger Mountain in Jiangxi, a householder priesthood that married, transmitted its registers from father to son, and served the surrounding society with talismans, exorcisms, and the great communal rites. The Qing kept the older arrangement under which the reigning Celestial Master held a state rank and presided over the Daoist clergy, though across the dynasty the court trimmed that standing and withdrew its enthusiasm, governing Taoism as a department to be supervised rather than a faith to be exalted.

Beneath the orders ran the liturgy itself, which is what Taoism mostly was to the people it served. The Daoist priest was understood as a registered functionary of a celestial bureaucracy, empowered to address heaven on a community’s behalf: he performed the jiao, the offering and renewal rite that purified a territory and renewed its covenant with the gods, and the zhai, the fast and retreat, above all the Yellow Register rites that conducted the dead through the courts of the underworld. The same period saw the inner-alchemical tradition, neidan, refined within the Quanzhen monasteries as a discipline of self-cultivation rather than laboratory work — the architecture of which belongs to the study of Daoist alchemy. All of this rested on a canon the dynasty had inherited intact: the Ming Daozang, printed in 1445 with its supplement of 1607, whose woodblocks survived in Beijing until 1900, was the scriptural repository on which the whole edifice stood.

The sectarian undergrowth and the great risings

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.

The doctrinal engine of the sects was the Eternal Venerable Mother and her three-kalpa history of the world, in which a weeping mother goddess sends a succession of buddhas to gather her lost children home — the lamplighter buddha of the first age, the Sakyamuni of the present, and Maitreya, the buddha of the age to come. To await Maitreya’s descent was to await the overturning of the present order, and that expectation, carried in vernacular scriptures and recited in lay halls across the empire, gave the risings their fuel. “White Lotus” was less a church than a label the magistrates pinned on whatever they could not classify; the great rising of 1796–1804 that bears the name spread through the mountain country of the central provinces, took the better part of a decade and an emptied treasury to suppress, and exposed how far the banner armies had decayed from the force that took Beijing.

The Taiping was a different and vaster thing. Hong Xiuquan, a failed examination candidate from the Guangdong borderlands, read a missionary tract, fell into a visionary fever, and emerged convinced that he was the second son of the Christian God and the younger brother of Jesus Christ, commissioned to sweep the demons — the Manchu and their idols alike — from the earth. The Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace he proclaimed held Nanjing as its capital from 1853, ruled much of the rich Yangzi heartland for over a decade, and was put down only by provincial Han armies raised outside the banner system, at a cost in the tens of millions of dead. It was, among much else, a measure of how combustible the dynasty’s religious underworld had become — and of how much its survival now depended on the very Han gentry it had spent two centuries holding in check.

How the texts reached the West

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. James Legge, the Scottish missionary-sinologist, produced The Texts of Tâoism as volumes 39 and 40 of Max Müller’s Sacred Books of the East in 1891, rendering the Tao Te Ching and the Zhuangzi for the series that placed the Chinese classics beside the scriptures of India and Persia. Herbert Giles, a consular officer turned Cambridge professor, had already given the Zhuangzi its most readable Victorian dress in his Chuang Tzŭ: Mystic, Moralist, and Social Reformer of 1889, and Frederic Balfour, an editor working in Shanghai, had gathered a wider net of texts — including the Yinfu jing and the Qingjing jing — in his Taoist Texts of 1884.

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 translators worked from the printed Qing editions to hand, and their selection set the shape of Western Daoism for a century — philosophical, textual, drawn almost wholly from the two ancient classics, with the entire living apparatus of priesthood, register, and liturgy left out of frame. The Shangqing revelations, the Lingbao retreats, the immense Daozang — the constitutive scriptures of the religion as it was actually practiced — went almost entirely unread.

Recovering the Qing on its own terms

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 pivot is associated above all with Evelyn Rawski’s 1996 presidential address to the Association for Asian Studies and the work it crystallized into a movement. Where an older account held that the Manchu succeeded by becoming Chinese — absorbed, “sinicized,” dissolved into the civilization they conquered — the New Qing History reads their success the other way: in a multiethnic strategy that kept the rulers distinct, addressed each constituency in its own terms, and held Inner Asia by Buddhist and Mongol idioms a purely Chinese throne could never have spoken. The question of how Manchu or how Chinese the conquest dynasty truly was remains genuinely contested — the older “sinicization” reading had able defenders and has not vanished — and the argument turns on what the Manchu archives, long unread, are now made to say. Religion sits at the center of that reappraisal, because it was through religion — the lama and the literatus, the register and the rite — that a frontier house of a few hundred thousand governed a fifth of humanity.

That gap is the heart of the matter. The Daoist priest at his altar was constituting himself an officer of heaven to lodge a community’s memorial with the celestial bureaucracy; the Victorian reader, opening Legge by lamplight, found in the same tradition a serene quietist philosophy of withdrawal and the Way. The text was the bridge between them and the trap: a working instrument of a ritual order, lifted clean out of its working setting, became in translation exactly the thing it had never been at home.

Scholarship and the textual tradition

The modern recovery of the Qing rests on a body of work that recast the dynasty from a sinicized epilogue to Chinese history into a Manchu empire studied through its own sources. Evelyn Rawski’s 1996 address, “Reenvisioning the Qing: The Significance of the Qing Period in Chinese History,” Journal of Asian Studies 55.4 (1996): 829–850, opened the argument that her The Last Emperors: A Social History of Qing Imperial Institutions (University of California Press, 1998) developed at length; Ho Ping-ti’s rebuttal, “In Defense of Sinicization” (Journal of Asian Studies 57.1, 1998: 123–155), defined the opposing pole. Pamela Kyle Crossley’s A Translucent Mirror: History and Identity in Qing Imperial Ideology (University of California Press, 1999) reconstructed the simultaneous, multiethnic emperorship from Manchu and other archival sources, and Mark C. Elliott’s The Manchu Way: The Eight Banners and Ethnic Identity in Late Imperial China (Stanford University Press, 2001) traced the banner institution that kept the conquerors distinct.

On religion as statecraft, the foundational study is David M. Farquhar’s “Emperor as Bodhisattva in the Governance of the Ch’ing Empire,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 38.1 (1978): 5–34, which set out the Manjusri theology of Qing rulership; the religious history of the modern period more broadly is mapped in Vincent Goossaert and David A. Palmer’s The Religious Question in Modern China (University of Chicago Press, 2011), which gives the millenarian sects and their Republican successors their place in the story of how China renegotiated the very category of religion. For the institutional Daoism the dynasty inherited, Kristofer Schipper and Franciscus Verellen’s The Taoist Canon: A Historical Companion to the Daozang (University of Chicago Press, 2004) is the definitive guide to the canon the translators almost entirely passed over.

The Victorian translations themselves remain in print and in the open record. Legge’s The Texts of Tâoism is hosted in full at the Library, alongside Giles’s Chuang Tzŭ and Balfour’s Taoist Texts — the very editions through which the Daoist classics first entered the English-language esoteric tradition, carried out of a Qing-printed China by missionaries, consuls, and editors of the treaty ports.

To the gaogong officiant pacing his ritual at a village offering, the scriptures the foreign translators carried home were never doctrine to be contemplated but the score of an office to be performed before the gods of an ordered state — and the serenity the West came to call Taoism was the residue left when the office was stripped away and only the words remained.

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

→ Related: Eastern Monasticism · China · Taoism · Quanzhen · Zhengyi · Shangqing Highest Clarity · Tao Te Ching · Alchemy · Tibetan Buddhism · Confucianism · Buddhism · Maitreya · Daoist Canon Daozang · Daoist Neidan · Chinese Popular Religion · Jesus Christ