Qianlong Emperor

Qianlong Emperor the fifth emperor of the Qing dynasty of China (1711-1799), whose reign of sixty years marked the height of the dynasty's power and prosperity and also the beginning of the pressures that would undermine it. A patron of the arts and a tireless administrator, he expanded the empire's frontiers but also presided over a court increasingly insulated from the changes transforming the wider world.

Accession and Early Reign

The Qianlong Emperor was born in 1711 as Hongli, a son of the Yongzheng emperor and a grandson of the Kangxi emperor. He was carefully educated and was favoured by his grandfather, and he came to the throne in 1735 upon his father's death, at the age of twenty-four. He had been groomed for rule and was well prepared for the responsibilities that now fell to him.

From the beginning of his reign he showed himself diligent, accomplished and ambitious. He continued and extended the administrative reforms of his father, maintained a firm control over the bureaucracy and cultivated the image of a cultivated and benevolent ruler in the Confucian mould. He was a gifted calligrapher and poet and a passionate collector, and he spent lavishly upon the palace, the gardens and the artistic treasures of the court.

He reigned for sixty years and then, out of respect for the length of his grandfather's reign, abdicated in favour of his son in 1796 while retaining effective power until his death in 1799. His long reign thus covered most of the eighteenth century, and it left a deep impress upon the institutions, the frontiers and the culture of the empire.

Expansion and the Ten Great Campaigns

The Qianlong Emperor is associated with the so-called Ten Great Campaigns, a series of military expeditions that extended and secured the frontiers of the empire. In the west his armies finally destroyed the Dzungar power and incorporated Xinjiang into the empire, campaigns that were costly and often brutal but that settled the long struggle for control of Central Asia. In the south-west he conducted campaigns against the peoples of the borderlands, and in Burma and Vietnam he intervened with mixed success.

The empire reached its greatest territorial extent under his rule, encompassing Manchuria, Mongolia, Xinjiang, Tibet and Taiwan as well as China proper. He developed an elaborate system for the administration of these frontier regions, combining military garrisons, patronage of local elites and religious policy. His treatment of the peoples of the frontier was sometimes harsh, and the conquest of Xinjiang involved heavy loss of life.

He was also concerned to fix the boundaries of the empire and to regulate relations with neighbouring states and with the European powers then appearing on the maritime frontier. He maintained the restrictive system that confined foreign trade to a single port under strict supervision, a policy that would later prove damaging, and he received foreign embassies with a formality that expressed the assumed superiority of the Chinese empire.

Culture and the Imperial Collections

The Qianlong Emperor was one of the greatest patrons of scholarship and the arts in Chinese history. He ordered the compilation of the Complete Library of the Four Treasuries, a vast collection of the literature of China that employed hundreds of scholars and produced both a catalogue and copies of the selected works. The project preserved an immense body of writing but also involved the censorship and destruction of books deemed disloyal or heterodox.

He was a passionate collector of painting, calligraphy, bronzes, ceramics and jades, and he filled the palaces of Beijing and the imperial residences of Rehe and the Yuanming Yuan with treasures. He had works catalogued and inscribed, sometimes adding his own verses and seals to them, and he sponsored the production of fine porcelain, lacquer and other luxuries. His taste and his patronage did much to shape the decorative arts of the period.

He was himself a prolific poet and a competent calligrapher, though his verses are more remarkable for their quantity than for their quality. He cultivated the ideal of the scholar-emperor and surrounded himself with men of letters, and he used his cultural patronage to reinforce the legitimacy of the dynasty and to present himself as the heir of the Chinese classical tradition.

Government, Society and the Later Reign

In his earlier years the emperor ruled with vigour and effectiveness, reforming the tax system, encouraging agriculture and public works and maintaining the efficiency of the bureaucracy. He was attentive to reports from the provinces and used a system of secret memorials to keep himself informed. The economy expanded, the population grew and the empire enjoyed a long period of peace and prosperity.

As the reign lengthened, however, signs of decline appeared. The emperor grew more autocratic and more suspicious, and he relied increasingly upon a favourite, Heshen, whose corruption and extortion spread through the administration. The costs of the military campaigns and of the imperial household strained the treasury, and the prosperity of the early reign gave way to financial difficulty and to rising unrest in the provinces.

Social tensions, population pressure and the beginning of official decay marked the closing decades of the reign. The strict censorship of the literary inquisition and the resistance to foreign ideas limited the empire's ability to respond to the changes taking place beyond its borders, and the policies of the period left difficult problems to the emperor's successors.

Legacy and Assessment

The Qianlong Emperor is remembered as the ruler under whom the Qing reached the summit of its power and prestige, and also as the ruler whose later policies contributed to the troubles of the nineteenth century. His reign represents the classical age of the late imperial state, and its achievements in administration, expansion and culture were genuine and enduring.

His failures were equally consequential. The corruption of his later years, the exhaustion of the treasury, the rigidity of the political system and the refusal to engage seriously with the European powers left the empire ill-prepared for the challenges that followed. The contrast between the splendour of his court and the pressures gathering on the frontiers of the empire has made his reign a favourite subject of historical reflection.

He died in 1799, having dominated China for more than half a century. His mausoleum and the treasures of his court survive as monuments to the wealth and artistry of the age, and his reign remains the standard by which the achievements and the limitations of the Qing empire are measured. He stands with the Kangxi Emperor as one of the two defining figures of the high Qing.

See also

• Qing dynasty
• Kangxi Emperor
• Yongzheng Emperor
• Complete Library of the Four Treasuries