I did contemplate writing a fuller answer to this last night, but I feel like the various elements that would have made it up would have ended up recycled from older answers, so I'll link said answers here and save myself the trouble. I will note, if there's anything you'd like covered that I didn't, do feel free to ask a follow-up or two or three about them.

• Were pre-industrial European states as powerful as Asian states in the same period? and following on from that, Did Europeans in the nineteenth century have an insurmountable military advantage over Asian polities like the Qing, Ottomans, and Mughals?

• Why did the Qing so fiercely resist reform and modernisation?

• What challenges did China face in the 1860s that prevented them from pulling a Meiji Restoration of their own?

• How did China survive the late nineteenth century?

• Why did the Qing Dynasty fail to modernise China in a similar fashion as Japan did to their own country?