EALC224 - China's Last Empire: the Qing

In 1800, Beijing ruled the world's biggest, wealthiest, and most powerful empire. The Emperor, ruler of China's Qing dynasty, was a sage monarch, a Confucian scholar, even a Bodhisattva on the throne, but his not too distant ancestors had been hunters, ginseng smugglers, and soldiers of fortune in the forests of Manchuria speaking Manchu-a language closer to Mongolian and Turkish than to Chinese. This course will explore how the military organization of these dissident chiefs in the forest came to command all the resources of Chinese statecraft, scholarship, and economy and how by yoking these Chinese management skills to the Manchu "frontier style" built arguably the most successful empire in Asian history.