The story of its ruin is simple and obvious; and, instead of inquiring why the Roman empire was destroyed, we should rather be surprised that it had subsisted so long.

– Edward Gibbon, 1773(?)

This slick little quote, tucked into Gibbon's supplementary essay 'General Observations on the Fall of the Roman Empire in the West', may not actually apply that well to Rome, but it's not that far off as regards the last century or so of the Qing – at least, not the second part. For the very reason that you felt like asking this question, the causes of the Qing's fall may not seem that simple or obvious. But the really rather remarkable survivability of the Qing despite two major periods of severe military crisis, the first in the 1790s and the second in the 1850s, is quite notable. The survival of the Qing through two protracted crises deserves to be considered just as much as its collapse to a relatively short third one in 1912.

The Qing can be thought of in many ways as the Early Modern empire par excellence. It was a vast multicultural dominion that maintained said dominion through not just hard power, but also effective adoption and adaptation (and some might add manipulation) of the religious, social, cultural and political traditions of its constituent parts; it made use of the latest technology to augment its ability to expand and consolidate its rule; and it maintained formal, long-term diplomatic engagements across the Eurasian continent. Critically, the Qing underwent many of the same processes in state formation that would be seen in many other Eurasian states like Russia or France: the expansion both of state administrative capacity, and also of private enterprises upon which the state could draw; the cultivation of ideologies underpinning forms of absolutist monarchy; and colonial enterprises that aimed to integrate certain regions into the wider imperial whole, at the expense of long-established indigenous populations. During the eighteenth century, the Qing were in many ways an object of admiration in Europe: Voltaire extolled the late Kangxi Emperor as a 'Chinese Sun King' upon which the rulers of France should model themselves (incidentally, the text in which he does so was also published in 1776); the Prussian monarch Frederick 'the Great' built a 'Chinese House' and a 'Dragon Pavilion' as part of his pleasure palace at Sanssouci in Potsdam; Chinese porcelain, exported in bulk from South Chinese kilns, proliferated and was imitated just as prolifically.

Why do I stress the apex of the Qing so much here? While the Qing fell for a multitude of reasons (which I will get into below), one framework for providing a unifying aspect to those reasons would be to say that the Qing were an Early Modern state that were holding out in a post-French Revolution world, and would be beset by internal and external problems that it had on the one hand somewhat helped to create, but on the other hand had an increasingly hard time responding to.

What were these problems? First, and I would argue most critical, were matters of ethnicity, the most salient aspect being the emergence of a sense of Han Chinese nationhood, but more broadly involving a more fundamental challenge to the ideal balance between the various constituencies which Qing rule was predicated on maintaining. The second was an increasingly fractious state of class relations within China proper, not just between 'elite' and 'working-class' populations, but also between urban and rural populations. The third was the emergence of a number of predatory external enemies willing and able to contest the Qing on their frontiers, which certainly influenced Qing policy even if they were never quite so powerful as to shape it outright. Finally, the Qing state's capacity for dealing with sudden stresses became increasingly strained, creating a vicious cycle that allowed the above forces to take hold for longer, further weakening the Qing's ability to respond.

The Qianlong reign, while it in one sense represents the apex of the Qing state, also has incidents that can be interpreted as embryonic cases of its future troubles. Looking at the ethnic side of things, the Qianlong Emperor made a conscious effort to more clearly delineate ethnic categories, most notably through his effective disbandment of much of the Hanjun Banners, who occupied an awkward status between Manchus and Han. This hardening of ethnic boundaries served to streamline Qing rule by more clearly defining the cultural constituencies to which the Qing appealed and oversaw, but it also had the effect of creating a potentially far clearer divide between Han Chinese and Inner Asian members of the Qing government, especially during the later years of the Qianlong Emperor's rule. The ascendancy of Heshen after around 1777 was seen as a time in which corruption ran rampant, and who was more representative of that corruption than the clique of Manchu and Mongol civil officials, Banner officers and nobles that the Qianlong Emperor surrounded himself with?

The reason why corruption would be seen as an especially severe problem was the first major crisis of what we can term the Late Qing period, that being the White Lotus War of 1796-1804. This conflict was initially sparked by a sectarian revolt in Hubei Province which had effectively fizzled out by late 1797, but devolved into a protracted series of local and regional combats, some the result of civilians rebelling against government corruption, others involving those corrupt officials basically paying mercenary units to fight each other in order to keep receiving funds from the imperial government. By the end of the conflict, Qing treasuries had been almost completely exhausted, with 120 million taels of silver (over 4500 metric tonnes) having been spent on what was in effect a domestic 'counterinsurgency'.

But this conflict was not the first case of an extremely expensive inland war that the Qing faced. The Second Jinchuan War of 1771-6, fought in a formerly Tibetan region in what had since become northern Sichuan, cost some 61 million taels, of which 32 million were spent on the payment of 460,000 people employed as porters and as guards for depots and supply convoys. Six decades later, in the wake of Afaqi uprisings and Kokandi invasions in the Tarim Basin, the Qing took the drastic step of encouraging Han Chinese migrants to the region in order that they could be called upon as militia. In other words, the Qing state was generally feeling the limits of its logistical capacity when it came to military operations.

That the Qing state managed to reassert some modicum of authority is in large part attributable to the efforts of the Jiaqing Emperor, Qianlong's successor, in reining in the excesses of informal 'inner court' (neiting) authority that had prevailed under his father. The Jiaqing Emperor formalised the status of the Grand Council as the emperor's principal advisory and executive authority, and moreover counterbalanced the Banner elements in the Qing government through the promotion of Han literati values. This took place partly through literally promoting Han literati at a far higher rate than before, and also in part by encouraging an atmosphere in which both officials and private scholars were encouraged to more openly criticise the running of government, serving as a check on previously unaccountable Manchu and Mongol aristocrats. But as with the Qianlong reforms, this streamlining of Qing rule came at the expense of reinforcing a sense of Han-Manchu division at the higher levels of the state.

This became a major problem when the Opium War broke out in 1839, however, as Han Chinese officials whose training predominantly focussed on theoretical discussions of domestic policy turned out to have significant difficulties dealing with a major frontier war. Frustrated by not only the inability of officials to deal with the crisis, but also their refusal to admit it and consequent feeding of lies to the throne during the conflict, the Daoguang Emperor re-established a period of Manchu ascendancy, dominated by the grand councillor Mujangga, which lasted until his death in 1850. His son, the Xianfeng Emperor, had Mujangga impeached more or less immediately upon his accession, and again surrounded himself with Han officials who took a far harder stance on foreign policy, leading to a disastrous policy of continued resistance during the Arrow (Second Opium) War of 1856-60 which culminated in the destruction of the imperial summer palace outside Beijing. While the reasons for the palace coup of November 1861 in the wake of the Xianfeng Emperor's death, which saw the regents of the new emperor Zaichun deposed by the Empress Dowagers Cixi and Ci'an and Xianfeng's brother Prince Gong, are complex and not fully understood, that the new regency was dominated by people who adopted a reformist, accommodationist approach to foreign policy, but a reactionary, conservative one to ethnic policy, is probably not coincidence. This Manchu re-ascendancy would last basically until the fall of the dynasty in 1912, with Cixi attempting to reconsolidate the increasingly vulnerable Manchu aristocracy and fend off threats to its supremacy, such as from the radical reformers of 1898. Her choice of regent, Zaifeng, father of the Xuantong Emperor Puyi, was expected to continue this policy of maintaining political privileges for Manchus and ensuring the continued integrity of the Eight Banners, the institution in which all Manchus were enrolled.

TBC