The History of China - #299 - Qing 34: Remember to Remember to Forget You Forgot Me

Episode Date: July 19, 2025

This was no peace borne of reconciliation; this was silence, enforced by amnesia. Time Period Covered: ~ 1739-1759 CE Major Historical Figures: Qing Empire: The Qianlong Emperor (Aisin Gioro Hongli) [r. 1735–1796] Minister Fuheng General Bandi [d. 1755] General Yongchang Khalka Mongols: Prince Erinchindorj [d. 1756] Prince Chingünjav [d. 1757] Dzungar Mongols: Amursana [d. 1757] Major Sources Cited: Perdue, Peter C. China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia. Woodside, Alexander. "The Ch'ien-Lung Reign" in The Cambridge History of Vol. 9: The Ch'ing Dynasty, Part 1: To 1800. Woodside, Alexander. Lost Modernities: China, Vietnam, Korea, and the Hazards of World History. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to an Airwave Media Podcast. Hello, and welcome to the History of China. Episode 299 Remember to Remember to Forget You Forgot Me Last time we left off on or around the year 1758. The once mighty Jungarkhanit lays in ruins, crushed underneath the military might of the Qing Imperial Army. Its leader Amarsana lay dead. The Ili Valley, once a vibrant political and religious center of Oirat power, now stands silent, empty, and haunted. Qing garrisons dot the landscape, and the charred remnants of once-thriving villages

smolder on the horizon. Yet, history does not end when the armies go home. It has a way of sticking around, in the policies drafted by victors, in the memories of the defeated, and in the rebellions that almost inevitably follow. The Qing Empire had destroyed the Jungark Hanate, raised its villages, depopulated its valleys, and even rewritten the very history of the frontier itself. But as they will find out today, winning was easy. Governing is harder.

Today we will turn from the battlefield to bureaucracy. War to rule. The Qing now faced a difficult question. How does one govern a land that has been emptied? How does one foster order and stability in a place steeped in violence and chaos. All told, the Qing conquest had produced a vacuum, not a peace. With the Jungars annihilated and their society destroyed, Great Qing now faced a problem they were not fully prepared to solve—how best to govern a land suddenly without people. There were far too few soldiers to control the vast steppe, and too few settlers to rebuild

its once thriving economy. Moreover, there were far too many unresolved loyalties still lingering amongst the surrounding tribes and population. As such, the Qianlong Emperor's strategy was twofold. First would be to repopulate the area, and then rebuild its institutions in order to foster and enforce imperial authority. The population solution was ethnic redistribution. Uighur Muslims from the Tarim Basin were forced to migrate north into the Ili Valley.

Mongol banners from Khalkha and Inner Mongolia were granted grazing lands. Han Chinese were cautiously allowed to settle certain areas under strict official supervision. Manchu bannermen, already deployed across the region in order to secure it, now established military agricultural or tuntian colonies. But resettlement would prove insufficient. What the Qing now needed most of all across the region was a sense of legitimacy. And legitimacy, like all else within the Qing model of government and empire, required mountains of ritual, paperwork, and obedience. As the Qing reorganized the administration of the newly rechristened Xinjiang, they were already dealing with this new unrest. This time not in the West, but in the very heart of their Mongolian alliance structure.

In 1756, as Qing armies had pursued Amirsana across Jungaria, a nobleman named Chin Gunjav quietly left his post in Beijing and headed north back to his homeland in the Khalkha region of Mongolia. Qin Gunjai was a prince of the Khoyed, a powerful family with long-standing ties to the Qing. He had served well at court, fought in the Qing campaigns against the Jungars, and by all outward appearances seemed completely loyal. But privately, he'd grown very disillusioned with the

system that he served. The Qing's high-handed treatment of their Mongol allies during the Jungar campaigns had been little less than gratingly imperious. Promises of promotion and reward had either been conveniently forgotten or outright broken. Khauqha troops were overworked, underpaid, and given little credit in the final reports back to the capital. Chingunjav could only watch as inner-Asian aristocrats were sidelined by ethnocentric Manchu generals looking down their nose at them. The execution of his friend and fellow Khalkha, the Prince of Ulan-Khu in 1755, only sharpened his suspicion that the Qing no longer respected their Mongol allies at all. In short order, that sense of dissatisfaction led to plotting.

By the fall of 1756, Ching Gunjav was preparing open revolt. He gathered support from disaffected Khalkha nobles, mobilized loyal retainers, and sought secret alliances with distant Oirat groups who had managed to escape the Qing extermination order. His plan was to strike quickly, cutting communication between Uliastai and Beijing, rally the Khalkha banners, and declare a new Mongol Confederation. But before it could even begin, the plan was unraveled. The Qing imperial court obviously had its spies everywhere. Qin Gunjav's messages were intercepted. Local lords he hoped would join him decided to stay loyal to the emperor.

By early 1757, his nascent, would-be rebellion had collapsed. Ching Gunjav himself was captured and, afterwards, executed in the capital. His entire family was likewise punished, and his lands and riches confiscated. This rebellion in and of itself was small, virtually inconsequential. Yet we discuss it today because it reveals a deeper anxiety within the system writ large. The Qing conquest of Jungaria had shaken up the delicate alliance system that had underpinned imperial control across Mongolia. The Kalakas had always been willing collaborators, allies, yet now they were being treated like mere subjects.

And some, like Qin Gunzhao, were not prepared to accept that de facto demotion. Qin Long responded with a campaign of both reassurance and suppression. Loyal nobles were rewarded, rituals of renewal were held at major monasteries. Yet memories lingered. Even those who fought beside the Qing could in time learn to become its enemies. Out back in Xinjiang, the Qing turned their attention to its permanent occupation. The Yili Valley was rebuilt as a military administrative center. The fortress town of Huiyuan was constructed to house the general of Yili as well as his

staff. Garrison towns were laid out in grid patterns following Confucian planning ideals. Roads and postal stations connected Yili to Urunchi, Barcol, and beyond. The administration of the region was placed under the jurisdiction of the Li Fan Yuan, or the Court of Colonial Affairs. But day-to-day administration was the work of its local military officials, Muslim Begs, Mongol nobles, and Qing-appointed clerks. New regional laws were issued.

Taxation was calibrated based on ethnicity, class, and even geography. Trade was legalized, but only through controlled routes. Religious activity was permitted, but closely monitored. The Qing, it was quite evident, did not trust Xinjiang. They ruled it through containment and caution, not confidence. and caution, not confidence. One striking feature of the Qing occupation was its silence. The official histories spoke little of the genocide. The Jungars were referred to only as rebels, their destruction attributed to their own treachery.

No monument marked their demise, no reconciliation offered. Instead, the emperor declared that the frontier had been pacified through, who else, his own wisdom and justice. The past was thereafter closed. Only the future mattered. But in the frontier towns, among the new settlers, among the Uyghurs forced from their homes and the Mongol herders ordered to relocate to strange pastures, the idea of the past was not so easy to simply buff out. There were whispers of burned villages, vanished families, of ghosts in the hills. And in Beijing, the Qianlong Emperor wrote poems about order and about eternity.

In all, the conquest of the Zhengars may have ended the threat of a rival empire, but in doing so it created new uncertainties. Qing victory had not brought peace, but fragmentation. Xinjiang had been turned into a testing ground for imperial ambition, a space where brutality, bureaucracy, and ideology all converged. The bloodshed had stopped, the jingars were gone, the last embers of resistance had been extinguished. But victory, as the Qing court understood, was not a moment, it was a structure. To rule Xinjiang meant more than occupying territory. It meant defining space, inscribing memory, and securing the loyalty of those newly placed within that imperial order. In the years following

the conquest, one of the first priorities of the Qing court was to map its new holdings. Cartography in the Qing imagination was not just technical, not simply lines on a map, it was also ideological. To draw Xinjiang into their maps was to claim it as part of the imperial realm, all under heaven, Tianxia. Survey teams were dispatched to the Ili Valley, the Altai, and to the Tarim Basin. Astronomers, geographers, and military officers compiled detailed maps using triangulation, celestial observations, and local testimony.

The resulting maps were incorporated into the Huangyu Chuanlan Chu, or the complete atlas of the imperial territories. In these maps, Xinjiang was not a borderland. It was placed at the center of new circuits of power. Roads led not away from Beijing, but towards it. Even the orientation of the maps themselves reflected that authority. Up was not North. It was Beijing.

As Laura Hostetler argues in her study of Qing mapping, quote, Cartography functioned as a visual language of domination. The land became readable only when it became governable. End quote. Alongside mapping came ritual. To make Xinjiang truly part of the empire, the Qing deployed an entire suite of ritual ceremonies. Inspections by high-ranking officials, proclamations posted in multiple languages, sacrifices to

heaven and earth at key mountain passes, were just a few of the many introduced and overseen. The fortress city of Huiyuan, built near the former Zhenggar capital, became the symbolic and administrative center of Great Qing's new Xinjiang. From there, the general of Yili presided over annual rituals that honored the emperor, reaffirmed imperial justice, and reminded local populations of their new place in the cosmology of Qing rule. Banners were paraded, poems were recited, oaths were sworn. Each group, be they Manchu, Han, Mongol, or Muslim, was assigned a ritual role within the larger structure, a spatial position, and even a script. Loyalty was as much performed as it was enforced. As we've talked about

repeatedly, the Qing ideology relied heavily on managing difference, such as the nature of a conquest empire. We could say very much the same thing about the Mongol Yuan dynasty. But here and now, looking at Xinjiang, that region would become a case study in ethnic segmentation that was to become the de facto norm of Qing rule. The Uyghurs were governed through their local Begs, who were themselves supervised by Qing officials, but did retain some authority over Islamic law and community affairs. Mongols continued to operate under their old banner and league structure. Han migrants were organized under separate townships with Confucian schools and Chinese

magistrates. The Manchus, meanwhile, staffed the military and colonial administration. This isn't what you'd call multiculturalism. It's not a melting pot or a mixed salad. This is just racial hierarchy. Each group's position was calibrated to maximize their loyalty and to minimize intergroup unity. Think, perhaps, of the post-colonial Middle East after the First World War and how that was carved up into regions specifically designed to ensure maximum ethnic instability in the absence of an overriding

colonial ruler. Uyghurs for instance could not intermarry with Han Chinese. Mongols could not enter Muslim towns without permission. Han merchants could trade, but they could not proselytize Chinese beliefs or ideologies. As Perdue observes, quote, the Qing frontier was a zone of carefully curated inequality, engineered to prevent solidarity, end quote. Loyalty must be to the capital and the throne, not to one another. Education served as both carrot and stick.

The Qing established charitable schools called yixue in order to teach the Chinese classics and the rituals of Confucian loyalty. In cities like Turfan and Orenqi, Muslim boys were encouraged to learn Chinese and participate in the imperial Examination System. For elite families, the promise was clear. Enter the schools, serve the empire, and gain access to status and opportunity. For the Qing, it was a way to shape a loyal frontier elite. But many families resisted. Some saw Confucian schooling as alien. Others sent their sons only nominally, enough to satisfy the officials, but not enough to abandon any kind of real tradition. Still, the schools endured, and then they multiplied. And with them, so too did the

imperial gaze. While the frontier was reshaped in stone, ink, and paper, the past was meanwhile being erased. The Jungars were never mentioned in favorable terms. Court histories described them only as rebels, traitors, and bandits. Their former temples were either destroyed or outright repurposed. No memorials were built to honor their dead. Instead, the Qianlong Emperor commissioned a flood of commemorative texts, poems, steles, official gazetteers. In each of these, the conquest was always just, the extermination morally necessary. Jesuit artists at court painted dramatic scenes of Qing soldiers storming fortresses, capturing rebels, and distributing food to grateful civilians.

These images were copied, printed, and distributed across the Empire. The message couldn't be more clear. The Emperor had brought order to chaos. There had never been another possibility. And yet, beneath that placid surface, discontent yet simmered. Resettled Uyghurs resented their displacement. Mongol herders grumbled about land allocation. Han settlers competed with locals over trade and taxation. Even the Manchu garrisons, isolated and under supplies, would in time write bitter memorials about their hardship. The system was working, but only barely. In the early 1770s, the Qing had created a functioning frontier order, but it was inefficient, costly, brittle, and depended on an expansive system

of continual surveillance and imperial subsidy. This was no peace born of reconciliation. This was silence enforced by amnesia. The Qing conquest of Xinjiang was followed by an ambitious program of ideological and administrative consolidation. Yet it only ever rested on segregation, coercion, and enforced silence. The region had become a showcase of imperial capacity, but simultaneously a warning as to its limits.

Hit pause on whatever you're listening to, and hit play on your next adventure. Stay three nights this summer at Best Western and get $50 off a future stay. By the mid-1770s, the Qing presence in Xinjiang had taken effective route. Roads had been built, borders drawn, temples had been reconsecrated or replaced, and new towns had been settled. But routes can be shallow, and the earth beneath them can shift. The Qianlong Emperor, buoyed by his success in eliminating the Jungar threat, began to reimagine Great Qing in a more global standing. The Empire had succeeded under him where its predecessors, and his, had failed. It had not only defended its borders, it had obliterated the last nomadic state in Central Asia and annexed its lands.

Flush with a deserved confidence, Qianlong turned outward. The Qing Empire began expanding influence among the Himalayan Rim, extending protect rights to the Kokunar region, reaffirming control over Tibet, and launching embassies to neighboring conits and courts. The notion of a universal empire was not just some pipe dream anymore, it was the structure of state. The emperor styled himself as the ruler once again of all under heaven, not only in the classical Chinese terms of huangdi and tianxia and tianzi, but in the multilingual rhetoric

of Inner Asia as well. Khan to the Mongols, Chakravartin to the Buddhists, Protector to the Muslims. Xinjiang was both proof of concepts and a platform for further expansion. Administratively, the Qing refined and expanded their institutional presence across the region. The general of Ili remained the highest authority, but the bureaucracy beneath him deepened ever further. New offices were created to oversee taxation, religious affairs, military logistics, and inter-ethnic disputes. Official routes, known as yidao, were fortified and maintained with posting stations.

These routes not only facilitated military movement and grain supply, but also signaled Ching authority through visible, regulated infrastructure. Most of us know how heartened we feel if we are lost in the wilderness and come across a paved road, after all. It's a clear indication that, hey, at least someone's in charge here. Garrison towns became semi-permanent fixtures, evolving into mixed settlements with marketplaces, temples, mosques, and schools. Local bags were incorporated into the imperial hierarchy through salary stipends and the conferral of robes and official seals. Some were sent on pilgrimages to Beijing to see the face of the emperor and receive a

form of ritual acknowledgement. Even as the court emphasized hierarchy, it still leaned heavily on collaboration. Imperial control was achieved not by replacing local elites, but by tying the existing elite's fortunes to that of the dynasty. With the frontier now secured, the Qing encouraged trade, but it must always be remembered, only on the Qing's terms. Uyghur merchants were allowed to travel to Gansu and beyond, but they had to carry permits and register goods at checkpoints.

Caravan routes between Kashgar, Yarkand, and Ili were taxed and monitored. Tariff revenue helped fund garrisons and pay stipends. Han merchants, too, flowed into the region, bringing cotton textiles, tea, and manufactured goods. In return, they bought jade, horses, hides, and dried fruits. Markets in Urumqi and Turfan flourished. Hui Muslim Networks helped link Xinjiang to commercial hubs in Xi'an and Lanzhou. Yet the court was wary of overintegration. It feared that free commerce might disrupt ethnic boundaries or give rise to new forms

of local power. Merchants were encouraged, but never trusted. As Woodside notes, quote, the Qing court fed off trade while disavowing its logic, end quote. One of the less visible but more consequential legacies of Qing rule in Xinjiang was the production of knowledge. Gazetteers, tax registers, route maps, and ethnographic reports poured into Beijing. Officials were required to report on local dialects, customs, family structures, and even inheritance laws.

The Imperial Court believed that to govern was to observe. Linguistic policy was of particular concern. Translators were officially trained to render Manchu, Chinese, Mongolian, and Turkic. Edicts were thus issued in these multiple scripts. Yet even within this multilingual order, Chinese still reigned supreme. Schools increasingly emphasized Chinese literacy. Examination candidates from the frontier were expected to know the classical texts. The Qing, for all this ethnic pluralism, never abandoned the ideal of cultural hierarchy. Yes, there were many languages in the empire, but there was one correct language. Or as one imperial tutor put it,

languages are tools, but the way is one. In Beijing, the conquest and occupation of Xinjiang became a mirror in which the court saw its own image reflected back, one that sharpened, exalted, and, of course, distorted. The Qianlong Emperor commissioned a monumental history of his great conquest, the Pingding Xiyu Fanglui, or the Military Strategy for the Pacification of the Western Regions, as both a policy archive and an ideological text. He celebrated the campaign in stale inscriptions, court poetry, and annual rituals. He also had paintings made, massive, baroque canvases rendered by European Jesuits depicting

scenes of victory, submission, and, of course, imperial generosity. These images were not for the frontier, they were for the capital and its denizens, for display, for instruction, for self-congratulation. The more the court celebrated its great triumph, the more it came to depend on the silence of those who'd been destroyed. Thus, despite all these projections of confidence, the system remained fragile. In 1765, just a few years after the consolidation of Qing control, riots began to break out across southern Xinjiang.

The weaker populations resented land seizures, tax hikes, and the behavior of certain Qing officials. A particularly notorious case involved Su Chang, a sub-prefect in Kashgar, whose abuses triggered local protests and ultimately his murder. The Qing responded forcefully, dispatching troops, arresting ringleaders, and issuing new administrative guidelines. But the unrest had revealed the limits of the region's consent. Imperial power in Xinjiang rested on a pyramid of performance—ethnic order, ritual display,

economic management, and bureaucratic surveillance. Remove any one of those pieces, or shake the ground beneath all of them, and the whole structure would tremble. By the 1770s, the Qing had transformed Xinjiang into a showcase of imperial capacity, but beneath the waving banners and fancy rituals lay strain, resentment, and contradiction. In the final decades of the Qianlong reign, the Qing Empire stood at its zenith. Territorially vast, culturally triumphant, diplomatically dominant, but deep at the core of that illusion of unshakable power lay the contradictions that would ultimately come to define the great empire's decline.

And nowhere were those contradictions more deeply rooted than in Xinjiang. By 1780, the Qing had ruled Xinjiang for over two decades. No major uprisings had shaken the region since the 1765 Kashgar riots. The Qing court interpreted this claim as proof of successful governance. The general of Yili reported orderly markets, compliant begs, and stable tax revenues. Temples and mosques operated, but under state surveillance. Caravan trade was regulated. Military garrisons were provisioned, if often underpaid. On paper, at least, the system functioned.

But Imperial agents on the ground noted something else. Deep veins of fear, silence, and fatigue. The population remained compliant, but not confident. Many Uyghur families still mourned forced relocations. Han merchants complained of bureaucratic extortion. Mongol herders faced grassland depletion and jurisdictional disputes. The frontier, once a space of adventure and wild conquest, had become a space of quiet contestation. In response to faint murmurs of unrest, the Qing court did what it was most likely to

do in the event of unrest, which was the Qing court doubled down on its current solution, by which of course I mean its big brother state surveillance monitoring system. Local magistrates were required to report monthly on population movements, ethnic disputes, and market irregularities. Secret informants were stationed in major towns. Military patrols increased in frequency. The costs spiraled. Maintaining such a surveillance state over such a broad, sparsely populated region was

both financially expensive and logistically burdensome. Yet the court could not help but believe that only further vigilance could prevent another rebellion. Thus, any cost was justified. The surveillance burden trickled downward. Local elites were expected to police their own communities. Begs who failed to report suspicious activities were replaced or punished themselves. Manchu officers were evaluated not on battle success, but on bureaucratic consistency. were evaluated not on battle success, but on bureaucratic consistency. Paranoia, very quickly, became policy. The Qing had long adopted a policy of conditional tolerance for Islam in Xinjiang. Mosques operated, Quranic schools taught, and Sufi leaders continued to exert influence, so long as they posed

no challenge to state authority. But in the late Qianlong period, the long as they posed no challenge to state authority. But in the late Qianlong period, the long-standing suspicion of Islam and its practitioners only deepened. Court memorials warned of foreign scriptures, fanatical gatherings, and subversive chants. Several Sufi shrines were closed or placed under direct imperial oversight. Religious leaders were forced to register sermons in advance. Pilgrimage routes were narrowed and policed. Some policies were explicitly assimilationist. Uighur children were pressured to attend Confucian schools. Chinese language prayer books were introduced in certain mosques. Imperial officials framed these actions as civilizing initiatives. As one edict stated, quote, harmony emerges not from freedom, but from shared loyalty to the throne, end quote.

But harmony enforced by coercion would prove to breed only resentment. But harmony enforced by coercion would prove to breed only resentment. Even decades after their extermination, the memory of the Jungars continued to shape Qing policy. Internal documents referred to the Jungar rebellion as the ultimate cautionary tale. New policies were often justified with phrases like, in order to avoid another Amarsana, or, lest the frontier decay as it once did. The name Jungar became a euphemism for insubordination. It was used not to describe ethnicity, but disloyalty. To be called a Jungar was to be labeled suspect.

a Jungar was to be labeled suspect. This sort of retrospective reframing created a paradox that was almost like an imperial poltergeist in the palace. The Jungars had all been killed, they were dead, yet their ghosts still haunted Qing governance. Their very absence produced fear in the hearts of Qing officials of their reoccurrence. Thus the Zhengars, though erased as a people, were preserved as the idea of a threat. While the court managed Xinjiang with increasing rigidity, it faced yet new pressures from abroad. In 1793, the British government dispatched Lord George McCartney to China. The embassy's goal was to open broader trade relations and establish formal diplomatic ties.

McCartney carried with him gifts, scientists, and commercial ambitions of his own. Qianlong received the mission politely, but firmly rejected its proposals. Alright, so what does that have to do with Xinjiang? Pretty much everything. Qin Long's rejection letter, composed in the ornate authoritative tone of universal monarchy, cited the empire's self-sufficiency and vast dominion. Xinjiang, conquered, administered, and stable, was invoked as proof of imperial grandeur. The subtext was clear. We do not need you. Look at what we've already accomplished ourselves. The memory of conquest

served as a justification for what would quickly become strategic stagnation and at the most inopportune of historical moments. Now don't worry that I've just breezed by the entire McCartney expedition. I cross my heart here and now and promise you that we will be getting more into that long strange trip when the time comes, but here and now it'll just be a reference. By the end of the 1790s, cracks began to show. The administrative system in Xinjiang was bloated. Garrison troops filed complaints of late pay and poor provisions. Tax revenue declined due to crop failures and trade disruption.

Local populations grew weary of the overweening and ever-present surveillance. A new generation of officials, less tied to the conquests of the 1750s, began to question the viability of maintaining such a heavy and wide footprint. Some advocated reform. Others, even more quietly, worried that another wave of unrest might not be containable by the throne. The empire that had once gloried in its total victory now struggled under the weight of that victory's legacy. The conquest of the Zhengars had redrawn the map of Central Asia. The extermination of a people had secured the empire's western frontier. But what the Qing forged in Xinjiang was more than a territorial acquisition.

It was a template, a precedent for how the state could use administration, ideology, and outright annihilation to write itself into the land and the history of it. We'll end today tracing the long shadow cast by the conquest, exploring how the Qing's 18th century policies shaped Xinjiang's future, and how memory was manipulated to sustain silence, and how the legacy of the Jungar Genocide continues to echo in China's contemporary frontier policies. The Qing institutions established in the 1760s and 70s endured deep into the 19th century. The General of Ili remained the paramount official in the region, and the segmented

administration divided along ethnic and religious lines persisted as a foundational logic of governance. Even as Qing's central authority weakened in the 1800s, Xinjiang yet remained under imperial command. Local power shifted gradually to Muslim Begs, Mongol Princes, and Han military officers, but always safely within the framework the Qing had constructed, that of hierarchy, separation, and above all else, control. The durability of that system in spite of the many difficulties the empire faced speaks to the Qing's effectiveness.

Yet it also reveals the depth of their investment in keeping Xinjiang different. Governed not like the rest of the empire, not by integration, but by distance and segregation. The 19th century would not prove kind to Great Qing. It would face, in time, internal revolts, foreign invasions, and economic destabilizations, oftentimes all at once. And through all that, in Xinjiang, the system itself began to buckle. In the 1820s and 30s, small-scale uprisings broke out in the southern oases. Discontent simmered over taxes, land use, and official corruption. By the 1860s, patience had worn out, and rebellion exploded.

The uprisings of the Junkan revolt from 1862 to 1877, and the rise of the Yaqob Beg, who seized control of much of Xinjiang and declared himself ruler with nominal Ottoman backing, nearly tore the region from imperial control altogether. Only through costly campaigns, led by none other than General Zuo Zongtang, was the province retaken and retained. These events exposed the fragility of the Qing order. The very mechanisms that had kept the region stable— ethnic segmentation, religious hierarchy, administrative separation—

had in time become its new fault lines. After retaking the region, only then did the Qing court recognize that their old model had failed. In 1884, the Guangxu Emperor formally declared Xinjiang a province of the Qing Empire, the same administrative status as any other province of China. This was a momentous shift. It marked an end to the policy of frontier as exception. Yet the name endured. Xinjiang, the new frontier. And the structures that had defined the region for over a century, its garrisons, its sensorial surveillance, its ethnic management, remained deeply embedded across the land. The province had come into existence, but it still bore the scars

of its very creation. Throughout both the late Qing and Republican eras, the Jungar genocide remained largely unspoken in official narratives. Histories framed the Qing conquest as a pacification of rebellion, a civilizing mission, or an inevitable unfolding of dynastic heavenly fate. Only in modern scholarship did the scale and intentionality of the extermination become widely acknowledged. Peter Perdue, in China Marches West, argues that the campaign, quote, "...was not an incidental episode of military repression. It was the deliberate destruction of a people seen as an obstacle to imperial order."

This historical amnesia was not accidental. It served a purpose. It allowed later regimes to inherit an empire without having to confront the means of its making and the blood on the hands of the state itself. Today, as many know, Xinjiang remains a region of tension, conflict, and surveillance. The PRC is framed as policies in the region, particularly toward weaker populations, as measures for stability, development, and anti-terrorism. But critics, both domestic and international, point to very distinct echoes of Qing imperial colonial logic.

The ethnic engineering, the securitized administration, the suppression of religion, and the manipulation and overwriting of history. While the conditions certainly differ, the resonance is chilling. The story of the Jungars, their rise, destruction, and erasure, offers not only a window into Qing governance, but a warning. It shows how states construct stability through violence, and how memory is shaped not just by what is remembered, but by what is forbidden to be said. The Qing conquest of the Jungars was one of the most consequential and catastrophic events in early modern Eurasia.

It reshaped borders, ended centuries of steppe sovereignty, and set in motion a system of rule that would reverberate far beyond the 18th century. It was a tale of victory and of annihilation. A triumph that required forgetting. An empire built atop the echoing silence of the dead. Thank you for listening. creators of the popular science show with millions of YouTube subscribers comes the MinuteEarth podcast. Every episode of the show dives deep into a science question you might not even know you had, but once you hear the answer, you'll want to share it with everyone you know. Why do rivers curve?

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