Transcript: China Dynasties

Author: Mark Elliott, Harvard University

Full Time Count: 05:14

Imperial China is the term that is used to refer to the period between 221 B.C. and
1912. So this is an extremely broad length of time, obviously. The date, 221 B.C.
marks the creation of the first empire by the first Qin emperor, the emperor famous for
the terracotta warriors that were unearthed in 1976 under the city of Xian, and 1912 is
the date when the last emperor of the last Imperial Dynasty, which was called the Qing
Dynasty, abdicated, or rather his abdication was announced. He, at that point, was a
little boy. He was about 4 years old. And from 1912, then, we enter into the period of
First Republican China, beginning of 1912, and then with the establishment of the
People’s Republic of China in 1949, we have another important break.

Now, Imperial China, lasting over 2,000 years, is clearly too big a time period for us to
speak about it in a way that allows us to say very much at all. So typically, historians
tend to divide Imperial China down into other kinds of smaller subperiods or eras. The
most common way to do this is by dynasty, so we have the Qin Dynasty, the Han
Dynasty, the Tong, Sung, Ming, Qing and many others, as well. Another way of dividing
up time is by talking about Early Imperial China, Middle Imperial China, Late Imperial
China. Now, as in many fields of history, historians discuss all the time about what kind
of periodization makes the most sense and these are debates that continue today.
Typically, though, this Early, Middle, Late is one that is regarded as fairly
noncontroversial and is one that you’ll see used in a lot of writing.

The period that is of most interest, I think, to students tends to be that of Late Imperial
China. It’s the period that is closest to the modern era. It’s the time during which China
began to experience very extensive contact with the West, so its connections then with
the rest of the world, which, in fact, had always been quite significant. If we look in the
Middle period or even in the Early period, during the time of Silk Road exchanges,
which began in the 1st century B.C. roughly, perhaps even earlier, we already know that
there was contact between ancient Imperial China and Rome, for instance. Roman
senators used to complain about young girls dressing themselves in flimsy Chinese
silks and this was very unseemly in their point of view. We have examples of Roman
coins and Roman glass in sites in East Asia. So these are contacts of very long
duration, but they certainly intensify in the period after Mongol rule, in the 12th, 13th and
14th centuries, and then with the Ming Dynasty from 1368 until 1644, and finally in the
Qing Dynasty which lasted from 1644 until 1912.

The figure of the Qianlong Emperor emerges certainly as a central person in the history
of late Imperial China. He ruled from 1736 until 1795 and he died in 1799. So, in fact,
he ruled for a period of over 60 years. That puts him in the same league as somebody,
say, like Louis the XIV, or Elizabeth I. He was a figure with a tremendous sense of his
own historical importance and somebody with great curiosity about the world. At his
court we find a great number, for instance, of Jesuit missionaries who were employed
there as astronomers, as mathematicians, as architects, and painters, and a great deal
of the visual record that we have from the Late Imperial Period, from the 17th, 18th and
19th centuries is a result of the collaboration, really, between the Imperial Manchu Court
– the Qing Dynasty was a dynasty founded by a non-Chinese people, the Manchus –
and these Western missionaries who were very active in China at the time. So this
period really lends itself to a fuller understanding of the important role that China has
always played in world history, during the Imperial period and afterward.