Kangxi Emperor's Reign
The Kangxi Emperor acceded in 1661 at seven, and the sixty-one years that followed are the longest reign in Chinese history. The Qing had taken Beijing seventeen years earlier and were a Manchu conquest dynasty of perhaps a million people ruling something over a hundred million Han Chinese. The problem of the reign was how to make that permanent. Four regents governed at first, dominated by Oboi, a conservative Manchu general who reversed his predecessors' accommodations with Chinese practice. Kangxi removed him at fourteen by having a group of young palace wrestlers, trained ostensibly for sport, seize him at an audience. He then survived the Revolt of the Three Feudatories from 1673 — an eight-year civil war begun by Wu Sangui, the Ming general who had opened the passes to the Manchus and been rewarded with the south, and who at one point held everything below the Yangtze. Taiwan was annexed in 1683, ending Ming resistance. The Treaty of Nerchinsk with Russia in 1689 was the first China concluded with a European power as an equal. His domestic method was to make the Qing state legible to Chinese scholars: he sponsored the Kangxi Dictionary, the Ming history and a complete Tang poetry collection, sat the examinations seriously, toured the south repeatedly, and froze the land tax permanently in 1712. He employed Jesuits as astronomers and mathematicians and issued an edict of toleration in 1692, then restricted the missions after Rome condemned Chinese ancestral rites. He left the dynasty secure and the succession contested among some twenty sons. The century after him is the Qing at its height.
- Year: 1661 CE
- Category: Governance
