Chengde, China: 40° 58' 56" N, 117° 56' 30" E
Accompanied by local walking partners, I’ve trekked more than two years through China. Plodding more than 6,000 kilometers, I’ve crossed megacities and garlic farms. Sound monotonous? Even a bit dull? It’s not. Time whiplashes me daily.
Leaving behind the glass-cube shopping malls of Beijing, for example, we caliper centuries within a single day’s trek: We step into the Qing dynasty. Beyond the capital’s sixth ring road, white-barked poplar trees quiver beside country lanes. Hard little peaches shine like yellow suns in family orchards. Cicadas buzz. Handshakes come with a slightly musty, formal bow. And thrashing about among the shrubbery, legions of sunburned farmers in straw hats harvest baskets of wild jujube berries. Squint, and it’s easy to imagine the entourage of Qing emperor Kangxi—his column 10 kilometers long—marching past on an inspection tour with legions of bannermen, consorts, courtiers, poets, hundreds of cows and ducks meant for the chopping block, creaking carts of rice and folded tents, and a lone Belgian astronomer in tow. “The tour resembled the exodus of a nation or a cattle drive,” the historian Ruth Rogaski writes of the Qing’s royal processions, “albeit one that was led by the Son of Heaven.”
Who were the Qing?
Given their place as the last imperial rulers of China—the final Qing emperor, a cruel mediocrity named Puyi, abdicated to revolutionaries in 1911, ending 2,000 years of dynastic succession in the Middle Kingdom—you’d think there’d be a consensus about their reign. But history is not so simple in China. Least of all among the Chinese.
Corn ripens in the valleys of Hebei Province in northeastern China, a gateway to the former borderlands inhabited by the founders of the last dynasty in China, the seminomadic Manchus.
Paul Salopek
The Qing are controversial.
In part, this is because its rulers were, at least initially, not Chinese. They were classic insider-outsiders: a seminomadic hunting and farming people called the Manchu from the cold forests near Siberia. Through force, diplomacy, and guile, these subordinated clans of border minorities rose to conquer all of China in 1644. They chose their moment well: The Han majority was locked in civil war.
"The Mongols were people of the steppe, intrepid horse warriors, and expert cavalry. The Manchus were tough and shrewd hunters, traders, and frontier coalition builders from the forests and valleys of northeast Asia," says Jeremiah Jenne, an American historian living in Beijing who specializes in the Qing era. "If the Mongolians were cowboys, the Manchus were the mountain men."
Striking alliances with hostile neighbors was a frontier necessity of the Manchus—and often a source of suspicion for many ethnic Han Chinese.
Qing emperors were master chameleons.
Empress Dowager Cixi, ruler of the Qing, garbed in her imperial yellow dress, ca. 1910.
Photograph courtesy National Geographic
They shored up their power by adopting the habits of—and intermarrying with—the political and military elite of their foes, the vanquished Han of the Ming dynasty. They professed tolerance and indirect rule. The Qing published five-language dictionaries to encourage communication among their diverse population: Manchu, Mandarin, Mongol, Tibetan, and an ancient Central Asian language called Chagatai. One emperor constructed a huge mosque for his Muslim subjects in Beijing. Tibetan Buddhist monks were invited to settle in the capital.
“The Qing literally wore many hats,” says historian Jenne. “The emperor changed his headgear at royal audiences to match the ethnic garb of visiting delegations.”
The most visible Manchu symbol of domination also involved the head: the Qing’s distinctive hairstyle for men, called the queue, or bianzi(辮子) in Chinese. With its shaved forehead and long “pigtail” braid trailing behind, the coiffure became the stereotypical fashion that Westerners associated with imperial China in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
The cold mountains of northeastern China guard the homelands of the Manchus, the ethnic group that established the last imperial dynasty in the country.
Paul Salopek
The Manchus’ distinctive tolerance, however, served a calculating purpose. Easing frictions at home enabled the Qing to launch aggressive campaigns of outward conquest.
By the 18th century, the Qing tripled their empire’s size by exerting control over Tibet, what is today Xinjiang, and parts of Russia and Korea. They established China’s boundaries at sword point. The economy boomed. The Qing grew into one of the wealthiest governments on Earth, innovating the wide use of bank checks. (Traveling merchants need no longer lug cartloads of silver.) The arts flourished. And for a while, the adoption of outside ideas and technology was welcomed. Christian missionaries flocked to China. Foreign scientific experts found gig work. (The Belgian plodding along with scholar-warrior emperor Kangxi was Ferdinand Verbiest, a Jesuit tutor who traveled with a sextant, thermometer, mapping tools, and astrolabe.)
“It’s never easy to live under any empire,” Jenne says. “But under the Qing the ask was relatively low. Pay your taxes. Don’t revolt. Get a haircut.”
Ethnic Manchus seized control of China in 1644. Chengde, an imperial Qing retreat north of Beijing, draws crowds today.
Out of Eden Walk
Jenne, a walking partner from Shanghai named Frank Geng, and I are hiking together toward Chengde.
What is Chengde?
A gigantic park. A garden of delight. A graveyard of memory.
The summer hunting ground of Qing emperors, Chengde is located 230 kilometers north of Beijing. Manchu aristocrats traveled there to indulge their passion for stalking deer on horseback. Today, it is a haven for picnickers fleeing the steam bath of the capital. We approach the former royal resort via old Qing roads: solarized farm lanes that dogleg past cornfields and reservoirs. We scale karst hills with jagged crests like cardiograms. We sleep in the nicotine-stained guest houses of truckers and traveling salesmen. Chengde proves beautiful: a green oasis of paths and pagodas. Its ornamental lakes have been restored. But it is haunted too. The vast lawns, strolled by tourists, seem to ring with emptiness. It is hard not view Chengde through the fated lens of history.
Adroit overlords, improbable minority masters of the Celestial Empire, the Qing began to stumble in the 19th century. The reasons were complex.
Manchu deal-making that bought peace with decentralized control began to fail. Epic floods destroyed harvests, stoking famines and uprisings. The weakened dynasty became vulnerable to rapacious outsiders. To British opium pushers. To French, Russian, Japanese, and American gunboats forcing lopsided economic concessions. By the end, a suffocating corruption flourished. In the case of Empress Dowager Cixi, a force behind the throne from the 1860s to the early 1900s, this meant diverting the budget for modernizing China’s navy to the sculpting of a gigantic, ornamental marble ship at her summer palace.
Tourists in ethnic costume have their picture taken at Jiuhua Mountain, a cultural theme park in Liaoning Province, the homeland of the Manchu people who ruled China between the 17th and early 20th centuries.
Paul Salopek
And herein lie some final polemics about the Qing.
Glorious or decayed, had the wily border Manchus ultimately assimilated—becoming fully Han? What lessons could be drawn from the China’s last feudal dynasty about relations with neighbors? About minorities and modern national identity? Who or what is Chinese? The winners of the civil war that detonated after the Qing’s downfall 112 years ago, the Chinese Communist Party, can’t seem to decide. An official history of the dynasty commissioned by the government more than 20 years ago at the cost of millions of dollars has been much revised and is yet to be published.
Looking for fading signs of the Qing, I plod onward to Hetu Ala, the tribal seat of the seminomadic horsemen who became the Manchus.
Hsuan Tung, also known as Puyi, the last Qing emperor of China, at age four. He ruled from 1908 to 1912.
Photograph courtesy National Geographic
The historical site outside the city of Shenyang has been restored for cultural tourism. Reconstructed 17th-century houses display clay roof tiles and cold-weather beds heated by wood ovens. Visitors can turn a horse-powered flour milling stone. Signage offers a few words in the Manchu’s Siberian language. Hello is saiyun. Almost nobody else is there.
“I don’t know much Manchu language, unfortunately,” says Zhao Mei Hui, a tour guide, adding that her great-grandfather was a Qing official. “It’s not taught in Han schools.”
This reminds me somehow of Puyi, the last emperor of China, who died in 1967.
After abdicating, he went through Communist reeducation camps and ended up a street sweeper in Beijing. Treated almost as god in his youth, he had ordered palace staff flogged on a whim and, after the revolution, had to be taught how to lace his own shoes. He often got lost on his street-cleaning rounds.
“I’m Puyi, the last emperor of the Qing,” he told startled passersby in the city. “I’m staying with relatives and can’t find my way home.”
Hsuan Tung, also known as Puyi, the last Qing emperor of China, at age four. He ruled from 1908 to 1912.
Photograph courtesy National Geographic
The historical site outside the city of Shenyang has been restored for cultural tourism. Reconstructed 17th-century houses display clay roof tiles and cold-weather beds heated by wood ovens. Visitors can turn a horse-powered flour milling stone. Signage offers a few words in the Manchu’s Siberian language. Hello is saiyun. Almost nobody else is there.
“I don’t know much Manchu language, unfortunately,” says Zhao Mei Hui, a tour guide, adding that her great-grandfather was a Qing official. “It’s not taught in Han schools.”
This reminds me somehow of Puyi, the last emperor of China, who died in 1967.
After abdicating, he went through Communist reeducation camps and ended up a street sweeper in Beijing. Treated almost as god in his youth, he had ordered palace staff flogged on a whim and, after the revolution, had to be taught how to lace his own shoes. He often got lost on his street-cleaning rounds.
“I’m Puyi, the last emperor of the Qing,” he told startled passersby in the city. “I’m staying with relatives and can’t find my way home.”
