The History of China - #302 - Qing 37: Palace of Mirrors

Episode Date: August 15, 2025

Qianlong's empire shines as a beacon of both martial might and cultural splendor, yet its mirrored glory hides truths too fragile for celestial ambitions. Time Period Covered: ~1770-1799CE Major Historical Figures: Qing Empire: The Qianlong Emperor (Aisin-Gioro Hongli) [r. 1735–1796, d. 1799] Grand Councillor Heshen [1750-1799] Great Britain: Lord George Macartney (1737-1806) Major Sources Cited: Bland, J.O.P. and Lord Edmund Backhouse. Annals and Memoirs of the Court at Peking. Fairbank, John King, and Denis Twitchett, eds. The Cambridge History of China, Volume 9, Part 1: The Ch'ing Empire to 1800. Perdue, Peter. China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia. Woodside, Alexander. The Qing in the Age of Confucian Empire. Yuan, Wei. Shengwu ji (Sacred Military Achievements). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to an Airwave Media Podcast. Have you ever gazed in wonder at the Great Pyramid? Have you marvelled at the golden face of Tudankhamun? Or admired the delicate features of Queen Nefertiti? If you have, you'll probably like the History of Egypt podcast. Every week, we explore tales of this ancient culture. The history of Egypt is available wherever you get your podcasting thing. come let me introduce you to the world of ancient Egypt

Hello and welcome to the history of China Episode 302 Palace of Mirrors Today we begin in a new chapter of our exploration of Qing China under the Qianlong Emperor, a ruler who, by the second half of his reign, was not merely defending a dynasty or overseeing a government, he was designing his legacy with eternity as his intended audience. In the aftermath of the major conquests that had marked the first two decades of his rule, including the extermination of the Junggar Confederation in Central Asia, Qianlong turned his attention more inward. His vision of

empire had never been solely military. Even in the midst of his grand campaigns, he'd been planning something far more ambitious to establish an all-encompassing architecture of power, one that fused ideology, culture, ritual, administration, and memory into a single, coherent image of Qing supremacy. By the 1770s, Chen Long's empire was the largest centralized polity on earth, as population already spiraling to over 300 million surpassed that of all of Europe combined. Its court was the most elaborately bureaucratized in Chinese history, and at its helm said an emperor who believed that he had achieved and must now immortalize a moral order unmatched in human history.

What would come to pass over the course of his later decades of rule was not simply the continuation of good governance. Rather, it was something closer to a campaign. of symbolic consolidation, a bid to define what China was, who it belonged to, how it remembered its own past, and what it would permit going into the future. We'll now explore the beginnings of this project, a campaign not of swords and soldiers, but of scholars and scrolls, and maybe even more dangerous for exactly that reason. Let's talk scale. By the 1770s, the Qing Empire stretched from the humid rice fields of Fujian to the shifting sands of Xinjiang,

from the gorges of the Yangza River to the endless taiga forests of Manchuria. It had absorbed not only the classic Ming heartland of China proper, but also the territories of Tibet, Mongolia, and much of Central Asia. Its government, while nominally Chinese in its Confucian orientation, was in practice a complex, multi-ethnic and multilingual machine of empire. And the emperor ruled over it all. Han Chinese, Manchu's, Mongols, Tibetans, Uyghurs, Kui Muslims, and dozens of other communities, each with their own institutions, hierarchies, and individual expectations. To govern such diversity, and to do so with the centralized authority that the Qianlong emperor

absolutely demanded, required more than just troops or taxes. It required belief. The people of the empire had to see Qing rule not as foreign or temporary, but as necessary and enduring, as the very fulfillment of an ancient, moral, cosmological ordainment. Qianlong's response to this challenge was not just political or military, but profoundly cultural. Over the course of two decades, he would launch a series of imperial initiatives that aimed to rewrite, or at the very least, heavily reframe, China's historical, literary, and moral foundations. It was a campaign to master meaning itself.

The most famous and most ambitious of these projects was the Sikku-Tuan Shu, or the Complete Library of the Four Treasuries. It was billed as a scholarly preservation project, a vast state-sponsored attempt to gather, copy, and archive the information. entirety of Chinese literature across four categories. The classics, history, philosophy, and, of course, miscellaneous. Tens of thousands of titles were submitted by officials, scholars, and even private collectors. The emperor oversaw the creation of three massive scriptoria, one each in Beijing, Hongzhou, and Shenyang, where teams of literati labored day and night to hand-copy the selected texts onto high-quality paper. The results were nothing short of monumental.

Over 36,000 volumes, compiled into seven complete sets, housed in imperial libraries across the empire. One scholar later described it as, quote, a literary mountain range, and quote, rivaling the entire collected works of the whole European Enlightenment. But the Sikku Trenshu was not just a, about preservation. It was also about purification. Quietly, but with bureaucratic precision, Qianlong's editors compiled a parallel blacklist. Any book that criticized the Manchu's, glorified

the Ming, questioned the emperor's legitimacy, or challenged orthodoxy, was marked for elimination. By the end of the project, over 2,800 titles had been suppressed or destroyed, and in some cases, the owners of those works were punished. Libraries were seized. In extreme cases, entire clans were targeted. This was more than simple censorship. It was an attempt to fix the boundaries of thought itself, to redefine what counted as legitimate knowledge, and who had the authority to transmit it. The emperor was no longer behaving just as the Son of Heaven. He had effectively declared himself the ultimate editor of Chinese civilization.

But Qianlong didn't stop with texts. Of course not. He also sought to imprint imperial authority through ritual and image. Across nine imperial tours of eastern China, Qianlong retraced the steps of his grandfather, the great Kangxi Emperor, presenting himself to the public not just as ruler, but as cultural sage and moral exemplar. These journeys were carefully staged.

Local magistrates lined the roads with floral arches. Scholars presented poems and essays praising as wisdom. Portraits were painted, scrolls engraved, and official histories heavily re-edited and revised. One of his most symbolic destinations was the ancient city of Chufu, the birthplace of the one and only Confucius. There, Chanlong conducted full ritual ceremonies at the Confucian temple, including the rare act of kowtowing before the spirit tablet of the sage.

For a Manchu emperor to bow before a Chinese philosopher was no small gesture. It was a performance of legitimacy meant to broadcast the Qing's moral alignment with the deepest core values of Chinese political tradition. At the same time, Qianlong was careful to assert his, own place within the Confucian lineage. In decrees and official commentaries, he styled himself as a ruler whose conduct reflected ren or benevolence, Li, ritual propriety, and Zhong loyalty. His behavior was said to embody the rectification of names, a classical Confucian ideal in which people fulfilled their social roles with precision and moral clarity. In short, they knew what they were,

and acted the part. It was not enough for Qianlong to rule. He also had to perform. Art, as it ever does, played a central role in this project. The Qianlong court produced some of the most elaborate and ideologically charged visual material in the whole sweep of imperial Chinese history. Court painters, including Jesuits like Giuseppe Castellione, created a new genre of imperial portraiture that blended European realism with Chinese symbolism.

In these images, Qianlong appeared not just as a Confucian gentleman, but also as Manchu Archer, Mongol Khan, and Buddhist bodhisattva, and even an Enlightenment prince. In some paintings, he's hunting on horseback with bow and falcon. In others, he sits in contemplative pose surrounded by scrolls and inkstones. In yet others, he appears in the guise of religious icons participating in esoteric Buddhist rituals. It sounds very much like his father, the Yongjung emperor, the cosplay king.

Yet these portraits were not mere flattery and certainly not just for fun. They were political claims, to universality, to cosmopolitanism, to dominion over every major tradition within and beyond the borders of the empire. This visual strategy was reinforced by architecture. In the Imperial Gardens at Yuan Mingyuan, Chan Long ordered the construction of a Western-style palace complex designed by European architects. Marble balustrades, fountains, and painted ceilins mimicked Versailles in the Vatican, not as homage, but a statement.

The Qing court, he meant to show, could not only absorb foreign styles, but take them and reframe them within a Chinese cosmology. The emperor was not provincial, he was not local, he was global, he was all. And yet, this grand image-making campaign had a darker side. As Qianlong's centralized symbolic authority, he also launched a series of literary inquisitions, purges targeting scholars and writers who challenged the state's preferred narratives. These were not large-scale massacres, but they were insidious. A single metaphor, a fallen flower that lingered on the ground,

or a passing allusion to a lost dynasty could prove to be enough to warrant official investigation. Local officials, eager to show ideological vigilance above and beyond the call of duty, often competed with one another to uncover such quote-unquote transgressions. The atmosphere became intellectually and creatively stifling. Writers self-censored. Printers avoided risky topics. The boundaries of thought narrowed. Even works written decades before, during the Ming or the early Qing, could be opened to official scrutiny.

In one infamous case, a family in Jiangnan was punished for owning a genealogy that described the Manchu conquest as a barbarian incursion. The book was burned. The family exiled. What emerged was a chilling double logic. On the one hand, the state glorified Chinese civilization through compilation and preservation. But with the other, it destroyed parts of that very heritage in order to secure loyalty to itself. The message could hardly be any clearer. History belonged to the empire, and only the empire could tell it.

Before moving on, let's pause here and reflect for a moment on the nature of Qianlong's ambition. His was not the naked despotism of a tyrant for tyranny's own sake, nor was it the laissez-faire indifference of some senile old daughtered monarch. This was something different, a careful, calculated choreography of image, ritual, and literature, designed to elevate one man and one dynasty above not just their contemporaries, but history itself. In doing so, Qianlong forged a version of China that was doubt. dazzling in both scope and structure, but it was also a palace of mirrors, one in which criticism disappeared, dissent was distorted beyond recognition, and performance gradually replaced

truth. Those glass houses are beautiful, but they sure are delicate. And we'll now start to examine how this crystalline vision quickly began to crack under its own weight. Let's descend now from the palaces and painted scrolls of the capital into the rhythms of the empire itself. Because even as Qianlong choreographed the ideal imperial world, another version of China was unfolding beneath it, one of rural hardship, administrative overreach, strained resources, and overall growing resentment. This is about that which the Qianlong emperor would prefer remain unseen. The contradictions behind the veneer of profession, the price of that ceremonial harmony, and the pressures that would test the very foundations

of the Qing state. First, it's important to understand what Qianlong inherited, and therefore what he was attempting to preserve. For over a century before his reign, the Qing had benefited from a powerful combination of agricultural expansion, social stability, and centralized bureaucracy. Both the Kangxi and Yongzheng emperors before him had worked tirelessly to streamline the tax system, standardized weights and measures, root out official corruption, and expand the granary networks. In the process, they had fostered a remarkable demographic surge.

By Chen Long's middle years, China's population had doubled since the early Qing period, from roughly 150 million to well over 300 million. This was an extraordinary accomplishment. It reflected, among other things, the empire's ability to absorb new world crops like maize, sweet potatoes, and peanuts, into otherwise marginal farmlands. But it also reflected something deeper. The Qing states consistent ability to maintain order, manage famine relief, and administer an ever-expanding network of towns, villages, and frontier settlements. Yet such growth was double-edged. While it increased China's labor pool and economic output, it also placed immense pressure

on the land, water, and administrative apparatuses of the state. And it's here, beneath the symmetry and pageantry of court ceremony, that the cracks began to show through. By the 1780s, reports began to trickle in from the provinces. Population densities were outpacing food production in key regions. In Jiangnan and parts of northern China, Tenancy arrangements grew increasingly exploitative. Wealthy landowners accumulated holdings, while peasants competed for shrinking plots.

At the same time, water disputes became more frequent. In counties that once had sufficient irrigation systems, canal theft and sabotage were reported. Local magistrates petitioned the throne for new dikes, sluice repairs, and punitive edicts, but they were often delayed by bottlenecks in funding or bureaucratic inertia. In the hills of western Hunan and northern Guaido, ethnic unrest began to spike, fueled by a mix of land and encroachment, administrative overreach, and cultural friction. In places like Yunnan and Guangxi, Han migration into indigenous territories triggered cycles of violence. The empire's own vastness, ostensibly its great strength, was in fact becoming more and more of a liability.

The Qing court relied on a carefully managed system of aid. governor-general ships, each presiding over multiple provinces. These were the top-level overseers of both civil and military affairs. But as demands on the system multiplied, cracks in the chain of communication became ever more dangerous. Even minor rebellions or tax shortfalls could escalate before the central court had time to effectively respond. Meanwhile, another subtle transformation was underway. The social fabric of elite governance was shifting. For generations, the imperial examination system had been the ladder of upward mobility for Han Chinese scholars. In theory, it was a meritocratic avenue through which any literate man could rise to the highest

levels of office by mastering Confucian texts and writing elegant, persuasive essays. Yet by Chen Long's time, the competition had become nothing less than suffocating. Tens of thousands of students competed each year for a tiny number of degrees. And while the state invested heavily in promoting orthodox curriculum, especially the four classics and approved Qing commentaries, the actual returns on study were diminishing. One commentator described the exams of the era as, quote, a frozen river of style, end quote,

where creativity was punished, and conformity rewarded. The result was an increasingly frustrated class of scholars, brilliant minds who, nevertheless, failed to achieve degrees, or who passed only to find themselves sidelined or shunted off into unimportant jobs in a system that heavily favored Manchu appointments at the highest levels. This was especially acute in wealthier regions such as Jiangsu and Jiajiang, where higher literacy rates meant that the elite families poured their sons into the examination systems year after

year, but with fewer and fewer results. A kind of credentialed underclass emerged, men with the education of officials, but none of the authority. These disaffected literati were not revolutionaries, at least not yet, but their growing cynicism and their exclusion from meaningful power created fertile grounds for alternative ideologies, seditious rumors, and nostalgia for dynasties of yesteryear. At the same time, the economic elite was consolidating power in a different way. Nowhere was this more visible than in the salt industry, one of the Qing state's most crucial revenue sources. Salt had long been a government monopoly in China, and during Qianlong's reign, it was managed by a powerful cohort of merchant families centered in the Lianghui region.

These salt merchants controlled distribution license, coordinated logistics, and financed imperial expenditures through informal credit arrangements. The Qianlong Emperor, in turn, protected them and their interests. He intervened when officials proposed stricter price controls, arguing that the market would regulate itself. When famine threatened to undercut rural purchasing power, he permitted the sale of small amounts of salt by itinerant vendors, but never challenged to the merchant cartels directly. The result was a curious kind of state capitalist hybrid.

The merchants had become indispensable, not only as economic actors, but as financiers of imperial projects. In exchange, they were shielded from prosecution, enriched through legal monopolies and granted honorary imperial titles. One estimate suggests that between 1750 and 1800, profits from the salt trade reach nearly 250 million silver tails. And though currency conversion across centuries

is always very tricky and error-prone, a range of estimates as to what value we could associate that with would be somewhere on the order of $10 to $20 billion today. A staggering concentration of wealth. Meanwhile, provincial coffers in famine-prone areas like Shandong and Shanzhi routinely ran deficits. Such an imbalance was obvious to everyone. But the emperor calculated that the empire's ceremonial and military ambitions required these partnerships, no matter the inequality they produced.

When Johann Rohl received the letter on Christmas Day 1776, he put it away to read later, Maybe he thought it was a season's greeting and wanted to save it for the fireside. But what it actually was, was a warning, delivered to the Hessian Colonel, letting him know that General George Washington was crossing the Delaware and would soon attack his forces. The next day, when Rawl lost the Battle of Trenton and died from two colonial Boxing Day musket balls, the letter was found, unopened in his vest pockets. As someone with 15,000 unread emails in his inbox, I feel like there's a lesson there. Oh, well, this is the Constant, a history of getting things wrong.

I'm Mark Chrysler. Every episode, we look at the bad ideas, mistakes, and accidents that misshaped our world. Find us at Constantpodcast.com or wherever you get your podcasts. We turn now to a much less visible but equally consequential contradiction of the state. that is its approach to its own internal security. In theory, the Qing maintained tight control through the banner system, a military and social structure composed of hereditary Manchu, Mongol, and Chinese bannermen, organized into elite units.

But by Chen Long's later reign, the banner forces had become increasingly ceremonial in nature. In southern cities like Hangzhou and Guangzhou, Bannermen no longer patrolled or trained with regularity. Many lived on state stipends, increasingly detached from any sense of real military readiness. Reports of bannermen, pawning their uniforms or selling their swords began to circulate. In 1761, Chianlong issued a stern edict warning that any bannerman who sold his military equipment would face banishment or death. But the issue was not just disciplinary.

It was economic. Poor Manchu Bannerman, especially those stationed in prosperous Han regions, simply could not afford the lifestyle that their ancestors had enjoyed and to which they felt that they were also entitled. They found themselves squeezed between rising prices and stagnant stipends, with few opportunities for any kind of side employment. At the same time, Han Chinese officials, particularly in rural prefectures, began relying more on hired militias.

and secret informants to maintain political order. This informalization and privatization of security forces created yet more tension. The banner establishment remained symbolically central, but the real work of suppressing rebellion and collecting intelligence was shifting into less accountable hands. The final pressure we must examine is perhaps the most subtle of all, and the most dangerous. that is the slow hollowing out of the bureaucratic ideal itself.

One of the great achievements of the early Qing, especially under Qianlong's father, Yong Zheng, had been the establishment of a lean and responsive administrative culture. Officials were monitored, rotated between their posts, and evaluated on their real performance. The Grand Council served as a nimble decision-making body, helping to avoid the gridlock of previous dynasties. But under Tianlong, especially in his later years, that structure began to calcify.

Appointments became more about loyalty than capability. Ministers who flattered the emperor, or who proved their fidelity through ritual observance, found themselves quickly promoted. Those who questioned policy, even respectfully, quietly found themselves sidelined.

At the same time, the emperor's obsession with ideological control led to an overproduction of reports, memorials, and ritual documentation. Scholars were required to submit volumes of poetic odes, accounts of imperial hunts, and interpretations of Confucian classics. The paperwork multiplied, while its relevance to any actual governance, fell off sharply. Such ceremonial bureaucracy drained talent. It created what one historian called, quote, a performance state, and quote, one in which the forms of rule were preserved, even as their substance faded into memory. So what held it all together?

If rural discontent was rising, if the bureaucracy was stagnating, if ethnic and economic divisions were deepening, how did the Qing survive it? Well, at least in part, sheer inertia. The imperial state still had enormous resorts. of legitimacy. It had delivered decades of peace and relative prosperity. Its symbolic capital remained potent. The emperor was still viewed by most as a moral sovereign, even by those who doubted his ministers. But more than that, Chen Long's regime had successfully constructed a world of appearances. The empire still functioned. Greeneries were filled, taxes collected,

rituals performed, imperial tours documented. For the average villager or city dweller, daily life continued pretty much as it always had. And yet, just beneath that calm surface, the warning signals were unmistakable. Yet any such existential test would wait for when crisis struck. So let's turn now to how those very crises began to emerge, such as rebellions in the countryside,

failures in foreign policy, and fractures within the inner court that would begin to test the imperial system that Qianlong, his father, and his grandfather had spent their lifetimes constructing. Even as these challenges mounted, the Qianlong emperor did not retreat from his project of symbolic mastery.

If anything, he doubled down. The court's response to these cracks was not reform or reduction, but rather intensification. More ceremony, more portraits, more pronouncements of moral perfectitude. Yet these very imperial habits, intended to unify and preserve, instead began to erode the state's very capacity to adapt and survive. As we move now deeper into the 1780s and 1790s, we'll begin to see a turning point.

Not a collapse, but a subtle inversion, where the Qianlong Emperor's own strategies began. to work against him. What's to follow is not a sudden fall, but a long, slow turn, from mastery to brittleness. One of the clearest indicators of that turning point was the emergence of internal unrest. By the 1790s, the Qing court began receiving reports of sectarian gatherings, secret religious societies, and protests in remote villages. Most of these were small and quickly suppressed. But the tones of the petitions began to shift. Officials were no longer speaking of resolving local disputes or village disturbances. Instead, they were now warning of something deeper, a crisis of belief, fraying of the moral consensus that had once knit the very seams

of the empire together. Surely the most famous expression of this emerging crisis would come just a few years later, in 1796, with the outbreak of the White Lotus Rebellion, a massive uprising rooted in Melanarian Buddhism, socio-economic depression, and local grievance. This would rage for nearly a decade and stretch across five provinces, but its causes were long in the making. At its heart was a basic disconnect, between an imperial state that governed through ritualized appearances and a society increasingly battered by economic uncertainty, land scarcity, and the alienation from their own elites. This would not be some clash of armies, but rather a collision between two versions of reality.

One scripted from the cloistered palaces of Beijing. The others lived in real life in the villages all across the empire. In the face of such undercurrents, Qianlong clung ever more tightly to his preferred method of rule. One of the most of the most of the most of the most telling examples came in the form of imperial historiography, particularly the official chronicles and commemorative projects produced later in his reign. The Chenlong court had long maintained a practice of documenting military campaigns, ceremonial acts, and ritual tours with elaborate engravings and woodblock prints. These works were circulated among officials and preserved in court libraries. But by the late 1780s, they'd taken on a different tone.

Victory was assumed, dissent erased. Even minor engagements were transformed into glorious triumphs through careful editing and selective narration. One court artist noted privately that a single failed Burmese campaign required more than 20 victory scrolls, even though the expedition had ended in logistical disaster. The idea was simple enough. If the world didn't match the desired image, the world is what needed to change, and the image must prevail. Qianlong had internalized the lessons of his early years, that appearance created legitimacy. In other words, that manners maketh monarch.

But as the empire's own contradictions continued to deepen, this logic became self-defeating. It prevented accuracy in reporting. It punished honesty and candor. It turned policy into performance. Inevitably, the emperor would find himself more and more isolated. A major contributor to that isolation was the rise of Hachan, perhaps the most infamous figure of Chen Long's later years. Hachan began his career as a low-ranking banner official,

but quickly rose through the ranks due to his charm. intelligence, and, most importantly of all, his uncanny ability to flatter the imperial person. By the 1780s, he'd become Chan Long's most trusted aid, accumulating a dizzying array of titles, vice president of the Board of Revenue, Grand Counselor, Controller of the Imperial Household, just to name a few. Hushan was not just powerful. He was omnipresent. He vetted petitions, issued edicts, and overest.

saw appointments himself. He was, in effect, the imperial gatekeeper. But he was also, surprise, surprise, very corrupt. Famously so. His wealth, which would later be confiscated by Chen Long's successor, the Jia Qing Emperor, was said to be equivalent to more than 15 years of imperial revenue. His relatives occupied key posts. His enemies were marginalized or ruined. He turned the Qing court into what one historian has called a quote-unquote shadow empire, a network of influence and extraction that operated parallel to the state. And Qianlong allowed it. His reasons remain debated even today.

Some say that the emperor was simply deceived. Others suggest that he appreciated Hachan's loyalty and administrative efficiency in spite of his corruption. Still, others argue that Hushan represented the emperor's own retreat, a man who could manage the system so that Chen Long could focus on his own legacy building. Whatever the case, the consequences of such a decision were profound. By the 1790s, many officials no longer saw civil service as a path to moral distinction, but rather as a competition in patronage and survival. The reformist spirit of earlier reigns, the energy of the Yongzhung era, and the early Qianlong years, had now been utterly sapped. In its place stood Hushan's bureaucracy, polished, loyal, and hollow. Such developments might have passed with little consequence had they not coincided with two other shocks, one from within and one from outside.

The internal shock, as we've already discussed, was the mounting scale of rural disaffection. Banditry, tax evasion, and sectarian organizing increased. In some counties, magistrates no longer dared to so much as travel outside their Yaman compounds without guards. Temple fairs became forums for grievance and rumor. But it was the external shock that would puncture the empire's image of global centrality. and that would be the arrival of the McCartney Embassy in 1793. Led by Lord George McCartney, the British diplomatic mission sought to establish a permanent trade relation with China,

open new ports, and install a former ambassador in Beijing itself. The mission brought gifts, including telescopes, globes, and even a planetarium, as well as letters from King George III, proposing equality of nations. The Chang'ong Emperor's response was cold, definitive, and revealing. In a famous letter addressed to King George, the Emperor declared that China lacked nothing, desired nothing, and that the tribute system, not diplomacy,

was the only acceptable basis for foreign contact. The letter emphasized moral hierarchy, quote, latest need of your country's manufacturers, end quote. For Qianlong, this was not arrogance, it was coherence. The Qing worldview depended on the emperor's status as the pivot point of civilization itself. To recognize diplomatic equality would be to unravel that entire universal order. Yet from Britain's perspective, and increasingly from wider Europe,

This rejection signaled a refusal to engage with modern realities. Within decades, it would be remembered not as cultural confidence, but as strategic blindness leading to ruin. Such historical irony is very clearly evinced in the writings a century later of the British historians, John Otway Percy Bland and Sir Edmund Backhouse. In their compilation work, annals and memoirs of the Court of Peking, published in 19. When they write, quote, The imperial mandate to King George III, issued by his majesty a few days after his reception of the British Embassy at Jeholl, makes strange reading today. How swift and complete has been the process of the great celestial empire's decline and humiliation,

since its sovereign could describe himself in all sincerity as swaying the wide world. In those days, only a brief century ago, China's ignorance of the outer world was bliss indeed. End quote. The McCartney episode itself was not catastrophic. Trade continued. Conflict would not erupt for another 50 years. But it marked a pivotal moment of mutual misrecognition, and served as a preview of the storm to come. The final years of Chenlong's reign were, in many ways, a study of contradictions.

On the surface, everything held firm. The court remained rich, the rituals performed intact, and chronicles produced in abundance. The emperor still toured the land, still wrote his poetry, and still presided over elaborate ceremonies that broadcast the empire's endurance and perfection. But underneath all that, his system had begun to cannibalize itself. Loyalty was no longer about service to the people, but service to the act of performance. The state had become a mirror. The state had become a house of mirrors, endlessly reflecting its own increasingly warped image. And at the very center stood Qianlong himself, still commanding, brilliant, and adored,

and yet increasingly removed from the very empire that he ruled. In the year 1796, the Qianlong Emperor made one final grand gesture. At the age of 85, having ruled for exactly 60 years, he formally abdicated the throne in favor of his son, the Jia Qing Emperor. It was a carefully timed move, designed to echo the precedence set by his grandfather Kang Shi, and to signal modesty, continuity, and dynamic strength. Yet even this abdication would prove to be largely symbolic, more about image than reality. Qianlong would retain his actual effective power right up until his death three years later.

And in those final years, he resided over both the heights of imperial spectacle, as well as the first tremors of true institutional decay. When he finally died in 1799 at the age of 88, he left behind a legacy of contradictions. An empire larger, wealthier, and more ritually complete than it had ever been before. And yet one whose foundations had already begun to buckle and rot. His own son, Jia Qing, finally truly the emperor in effect as well as title, acted swiftly. He arrested He Hashan, confiscated his wealth, and issued a set of reforms, yet it would prove to be too little too late to return to the world

of the early Qianlong era. That world of promise, vigor, and institutional confidence had long since passed into the memories of history. We've seen an emperor who began his reign in prosperity and ambition, and yet who ended it in ritual and reflection. We've seen a state that mastered the technologies of power, yet grew addicted to its own image. And we've seen a society that delivered peace and prosperity while allowing tensions to simmer just beneath that placid surface. And next time, we'll examine what happened after Chan Long's death, how his successors managed the inheritance of greatness, how rebellion and reform collided, and how the

Qing state, once the very center point of the world, found itself forced to reckon with an increasingly uncertain modernity. Thanks for listening. When the creators of the popular science show with millions of YouTube subscribers comes the Minute Earth 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?

Why did the T-Rex have such tiny arms? And why do so many more kids need glasses now than they used to? Spoiler alert, it isn't screen time. Our team of scientists digs into the research and breaks it down into a short, entertaining explanation, jam-packed with science facts and terrible puns. Subscribe to Minute Earth wherever you like to listen.