I was trying to research about the fall of the Manchu Dynasty, but all that comes of is the Qing Dynasty. Some people said that they are the same thing, while others argue they are different. I know that the Qing Dynasty had roots from Manchuria, but were they two entirely different dynasties?
I would seriously question anyone who argued that the 'Manchu Dynasty' referred to anything but the Qing.
The division between Manchu emperors and Han Chinese subjects was evident right throughout the Qing Dynasty, and the emperors were more than willing to keep it that way. The Kangxi Emperor (ruled 1661-1722) had no qualms at all about denigrating the character and moral fibre of various subsets of the Han, and implicitly refused to acknowledge that they were anything but the physical inferiors of the Manchus (albeit tacitly admitting their military capabilities during the Revolt of the Three Feudatories.)^1 Qianlong (ruled 1735-1796) insisted on Manchus taking pride in ancestors whose practices would have been seen as barbaric by the Han, such as using corpses (including those of one's family) as bait when fur-trapping.^2 Even at the bitter end in 1911, the Qing maintained elements of this hierarchical relationship, emphasised through the wearing of the queue and, more importantly, compulsory shaving of the forehead for men – in this image of counter-revolutionary troops at Hankou, it can clearly be seen on the bareheaded man that his forehead is clean-shaven, although by this point queues had been discarded for the modernised armies.
This distinct identity would be used against the Qing on multiple occasions. To the Taiping, whose Heavenly Kingdom (1851-64) proved a mortal threat to the Qing, Xianfeng was 'the Manchu demon', 'the Tartar dog' and 'the mortal enemy of us Chinese'.^3 During the First Opium War (1839-42), the abuse of Chinese soldiers by Manchu troops in Zhapu allegedly resulted in the formation of pro-British fifth columnists, and in reprisals against Manchu abuses in Zhenjiang, Chinese civilians looted the Bannermen quarters when the British occupied the city in 1842.^4 One notable instance of anti-Manchu sentiment comes in the form of variations on Tse Tsan-tai's The Situation in the Far East (1899), a cartoon originally from Hong Kong which would be appended with references to the Manchus and published by Cai Yuenpei in a Shanghai newspaper, arguing that only the Chinese (and implicitly not their foreign rulers) would be the only ones to save themselves. This long-standing anti-Manchu sentiment would come to a head in the 1911 Revolution, with massacres of Manchu civilians up and down the country. Sun Yat-Sen even planned to sell Manchuria to Japan in exchange for military support against Yuan Shikai in 1913.^5
Even foreign observers recognised that there was a significant racial gulf between court and country. Before he had even set foot in China, Lord Amherst in 1816 had familiarised himself with the English-language literature on China, and devised fanciful schemes to form an Anglo-Chinese army that would depose the Manchus and install a pro-British puppet regime.^6 Between the capture of Zhenjiang and the signing of the Treaty of Nanjing, British observers had to admit that the war had become 'a Manchu and not a Chinese affair.'^4 During the Taiping Civil War (1851-71), John Scarth, a merchant in China familiar with the Taiping, castigated the British government's China policy following the Second Opium War (1856-60) with a series of pamphlets, including one titled Is Our War with the Tartars or the Chinese? (1860), ^7 whilst one pro-Taiping MP, William Henry Sykes, then also head of the Royal Asiatic Society, disparaged the recently-crowned Tongzhi Emperor as a 'Tartar boy Emperor' in 1860.^8 Japan, too, was well aware of the Han-Manchu divide, and in 1909 the Japanese statesman Ito Hirobumi would also criticise the British decision to intervene on the Qing side, as this affront to the self-determination of the Chinese would lead to even worse reprisals in future.^9
It is unsurprising, therefore, that all references to the 'Manchu Dynasty' lead you to the Qing. Everyone, both inside and outside China, saw the two as one and the same.
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