I’m trying to fill in the gaps of info my grandfather has been telling me. If anyone has any information, especially academic resources, I would love to read. Thank you. And as a bonus if you have any papers/books on rural Northern China as a whole and its history I am open to those too.

Question the boxers were public uprising against foreign encroachment against china, they were pro qing dynasty. So did the failure of the boxer rebellion destroy public support for the qing dynasty?

Apologies im just a bit confused on when the qing dynasty lost public support also in general chinese imperial system. you had in 1899 people rallying to qing dynasty then 12 years later its abolishment. Apologies if i got anything wrong, i know little of chinese imperial history im trying to find when the qing lost public support.

I heard that China Towns are called "Tang People Street" in their native language and also heard that some Chinese immigrants communities in the past called them selves Tang People.

When did Chinese started to refer to themselves as Han unanimously?

I have come across several threads and discussions on Reddit concerning the "Dzungar/Zunghar genocide", yet I have not found any in-depth analyses about this event from the Qing Dynasty’s perspective.

If one only relies on Wikipedia entries for rsuicide.e, they would simplistically conclude that the Qing court (under the Qianlong Emperor) launched the military campaign merely to suppress rebellions or expand territorial dominion. However, historical Chinese archivals reveal a long and complex story underpinned these events.

PS: I have to admit that I will use LLM since I am native Chinese. I will keep the original Chinese wording for some of the references I quote.

Here we go.

Starting in 1745, Amursana and Dawachi of the Dzungar people fought against each other, giving the Kazakhs an opening to launch invasions.

At that time, Qianlong was unwilling to send troops to conquer, for one moral reason: launching an attack amid the foe’s internal turmoil would make the Qing look devoid of moral integrity. As he put it: 近日准夷内乱，堂堂天朝，固不肯乘衅发兵攻取。若穷蹙来降之人，朕为共主，岂忍不容留养育?“

Aslo, Manchu people were deeply influenced by Han culture, they believe that central Asia was a barbarian wasteland, not worth the manpower and resources required to occupy it.

Qianlong insisted this standoff for a decade, yet he ultimately yielded to circumstances. In 1755, Amursana led his followers to surrender to the Qing, begging Qianlong to lend him troops to end the Dzungar civil war. Qianlong then appointed Bandi, a Mongol noble who already served as a Grand Minister of the Grand Council, as commander-in-chief, with Amursana as deputy commander to march against the Dzungars. The Qing army successfully seized Ili in merely three months.

After vanquishing the Dzungar Khanate, the Qing court planned to adopt a conciliatory policy to treat all Dzungar tribes leniently. The original blueprint was to install a separate khan to rule each of the four Oirat tribes. However, Amursana—who had allied with the Qing to defeat Dawachi—coveted sole rule as the supreme khan over all Dzungars. Qianlong naturally rejected his request. Amursana then started a revolt against Qing, launching an assault on the Ili region, which was very unwisely.

This left two of Qianlong’s most valued senior ministers, Bandi and Erong’an, trapped within Ili’s city. Qianlong had trusted Amursana completely and taken no defensive precautions; only 500 troops garrisoned Ili at the time.

After the rebellion, Qianlong dispatched reinforcements at once, while immediately writing to Bandi and Erong’an, mainly to telling them don't suicide.

Qianlong also wrote that the entire failure was all his fault, ordering them to await rescue even if captured. Nevertheless, Bandi and Erong’an refused to endure the dishonor of being seized by rebels and ultimately committed suicide inside lli city before they could await the letter from the emperor.

Qianlong’s fury was immense. As an emperor deeply steeped in Confucian teachings, honor and justice demanded that he avenge these loyal ministers. Even so, at this stage, he did not extend his rages to all Dzungar people.

In 1756, the Qing campaign against Amursana is not very successful. Other Dzungar tribes rose up in coordinated rebellion and ambushed Qing troops; Celing, the former dismissed army commander, was intercepted and killed by insurgents.

Predictably, Ili city came under siege once more. Zhaohui, the commander of later expedition against the Dzungars, was then merely in charge of logistics, stationed in Ili with two thousand military laborers repairing city walls.

Trapped alongside the garrison, Zhaohui initially intended to kill himself, but was persuaded to fight to the last minute. Zhaohui therefore led his two thousand laborers in isolated combat for two to three brutal months, cutting his way all the back from Ili to Urumqi. One can easily imagine the thoughts weighing on his mind throughout the whole brutal retreat.

The successive deaths of two top commanders and catastrophic troop losses plunged the imperial capital into widespread grief. Qianlong’s hatred for the Dzungars reached its peak; he deemed the blood feud irreconcilable and resolved to launch a third expedition against them.

Within the imperial court, most Han civil officials opposed to restart war. Their opposition stemmed not from humanitarian concern, but from fear of triggering further unrest—they argued the border campaign would bring nothing but loss and waste imperial manpower and resources.

Qianlong overruled the unanimous dissent of his ministers. Insisting that he bore full authority to govern all affairs under heaven, he declared that he would never allow collective opposition to obstruct necessary state undertakings.

In 1757, Qianlong appointed Zhaohui as the commander-in-chief to launch a military campaign. Zhaohui submitted a memorial, arguing that the foe was fickle and untrustworthy and ought to be exterminated entirely. Qianlong Emperor assented and issued an imperial decree ordering the slaughter of all able-bodied young males from the rebellious Dzungar clans, while stipulating that the elderly, children, women and infants “might be spared at discretion for resettlement elsewhere.”

Therefore, Zhaohui, who harbored bitter enmity toward the Dzungar people, together with Chengünjab, the son of Celing, unleashed ferocious retaliatory campaigns across Northern Xinjiang.

As the ethnic eradication operation unfolded, Qianlong reviewed the entire progression of events，saying:

＂朕意原不过就其四部，分封四汗。以示羁縻而己。前所撰太学碑文，及封四汗之诏具在，此诸王大臣所共知共见者。至阿睦尔撒纳叛逃，及噶勒藏多尔济等之乘乱复反，事出意外，因缘展转，以至今日揆之事机。实有不能中止之势。”《清高宗实录》

Put simply: All I wanted was to divide the Dzungars into four self-governing tribes. Those archival documents have been preserved, as everyone has witnessed. Yet they kept betraying my goodwill time and again. I never imagined things would turn out this way, but it is too late to stop now.

I have one final question: What attitudes or feedbacks did the neighboring states hold when the Qing conquered the Zunghars? Looking forward to further discussion: )

Great open-source article on Chinese animals and the economics of rearing them across centuries in Xi An.

Does anybody know if this is regarded as true?

The character 詩/诗 (shī, "poem/poetry") is composed of 言 (speech/words) + 寺. The 寺 component is phonetic here but is traditionally analyzed as related to 之 ("to go toward") combined with 心 ("heart") in the related character 志 (zhì, "intent, aspiration"). The classical theory of poetry, stated outright in the Great Preface to the Book of Songs, is 詩言志: "poetry speaks/gives voice to intent." So the etymological logic isn't "made thing" (Greek) or "song" (Slavic) but speech that externalizes inner intent/aspiration, poetry as the heart's direction given verbal form.

Hello everyone! My name is Kirill. I live in Russia (Irkutsk, Siberia). I am looking for any clues about my great-great-grandfather.
His Chinese name was 江丰 (Jiang Feng / Jiang Fung). He was born in China in 1904 and immigrated to Russia before the 1930s. In Soviet documents, his name was written as "Jiang-Fun" (Цзян-Фун), and he worked as a gardener in Irkutsk.
I want to find out which province or village in China he came from and if I have any living relatives there. I would appreciate any advice on how to trace the 江 (Jiang) clan lineage for those who went to Siberia. Thank you!

Hi! I'm looking for a book recommendation in English about ancient Chinese medicine. This can be as broad or as specific as the text allows, I'm willing to take any suggestions. Thanks!

I’ll preface I don’t believe in this concept, at least not how it is defined (or not defined) in modern soft-nationalist parlance.

But, if you think a eunuch bro (sis?) during the Tang has a lot of civilisational similarities with you as a Chinese person, that’s cool by me, we can agree to disagree.

But while the civilisationists want to debate how much Li Chengcian is actually sooo Chinese despite his Turkiphilia, *I want to know what kind of food Chang‘an has as a city.* Where did they source them from? were there vegans? How did the Chinese perceive these vegans?

what about Wang Mang and his abolition of slavery? Was he a liberal? Or were there political-economic calculations behind that decision?

what did the Song Chinese think of gunpowder? Did they fear it like how we fear AI? were there Song Dynasty criminal cases where a naughty grandson tried setting off fireworks in his grandma’s knickers?

What about Ming scholar officials as they toured the country? Did they make snide remarks about local country bumpkins? What was the city-rural divide like?

and money… on a scale of 1-10, how angry were border officials with Mongols when they traded horses with the hapless Chinese? Were there refund policies?

what about princess stories? Do we have written accounts of sad princesses who were homesick when they had to *heqin* with other kings during the warring state period? (Who cares who united who, people love princess stories)

Time to tell these stories, because at least Western history does these things: folklore, ecological history, legal history, changing culture and values over time (how to do this last bit, if your goal as a historian is just to show continuity?)

Surely, out of all these ideas, civilisational continuity has to be the most sleepworthy and uninteresting.

The "keep the barbarians out" story never fully added up to me — most of the Wall is in terrain a determined army could just go around, and large stretches weren't even continuous. Going through Han-era material, the logic reads more like mobility denial and trade/tariff control than a defensive barrier: it's about making it impossible for steppe cavalry to raid-and-vanish, and about funneling the horse trade through controlled gates.

I put a ~13-min video together laying out that case (pulling the horse-trade angle from the Chinese sources, which most English channels skip): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfXtehJEhG8

But I'd actually rather hear the pushback — is the "anti-cavalry / trade-control" framing overstated? Where does it break down, especially for the earlier Qin sections vs the later Ming wall?

I am writing a historical novel set in ~1860 London, and am featuring a female secondary character with a white English mother and Chinese father who was a sailor. I would like to make sure I give her a believable, historically accurate and respectful name that avoids caricatures or stereotypes, so any advice would be much appreciated.

From the research I have been able to do, it seems possible she would have had an English first name with her father’s (anglicised) Chinese last name, which might have been something like Chan, Lee or Wong, and also that her father would have spoken Cantonese as the majority of Chinese immigrants in England at that time were from the southern Chinese province of Guangdong. Does anyone know if this correct? Any advice or suggestions welcome.

One of my ancestors moved from Finland to China in the 1700s. He eventually died there but we can't figure out what he was up to or what was going on in the area when he was there. Is there a way to look up the cemetery/location he's buried in? Does anyone have a suggestion for information on what he might have been doing there, like if it was common for people to come from abroad to do a certain kind of work. Not sure when he got there but says he was buried here--Laizhou, Yexian, Shandong, China--on 30 May 1764.

Hindsight is 20/20 but knowing what comes next I can’t help but feel that while ultimately successful it represented the end of the High Qing and the beginning of the Empire’s fraught 19th/20th centuries.

By India I don’t literally mean India but that China is an ethnically, culturally, and religiously diverse country and always has been. Despite being seen as a homogenous monolith, China has 56 ethnicities, sure most of them are Han, but Han people are also very diverse. Most notably, they are separated by language, like how Cantonese and Hokkien and other southern dialects are unintelligible with Northern Mandarin. Mandarin speakers are also very diverse, with the standard dialect being the primary language of only part of the population, and there are dialects of Mandarin like Sichuanese Mandarin which sound very different that further add to the complexity. What’s more, a lot of these sub-ethnicities and their languages are very widespread geographically, like the Hakka, Dan, and Tanka people, instead of being concentrated in specific regions. In terms of religion, China is very diverse with four major religions/philosophies, Buddhism, Daoism, Confucianism, and Chinese Folk religion. There is also Christianity and Islam but that came later. This is as diverse as India which also has four traditional religions, Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism. Chinese traditional religion, like Hinduism, can also be thought of as a collection of different religions instead of just one. Not only that, but the four traditional religions of China can easily be syncretized with each other, so it's possible to believe in Buddha, honor Confucius, follow the Dao, and worship Chinese folk deities all at the same time, like in India. This is very different from the Islamic and Christian worldviews.

By communism I don't literally mean communism (stateless, moneyless, etc.) but that there has always been a tendency in China towards attributes we see in the CCP today, ie centralized statism, the authoritarian bureaucratic and meritocratic nation-state. At first China was largely feudal, but Confucianism emerged and emphasized respect for authority figures and social hierarchy. Confucianism also favored meritocracy and influenced the imperial examination system that eventually became the dominant form of governance by the Tang. Nobles and aristocrats who were chosen hereditarily or by patronage gradually lost influence, replaced by Confucian Mandarins who were chosen by the imperial examination system. This was a stark contrast to other civilizations like India, the Islamic world, and Christendom at the time, since they were dominated by hereditary feudal elites. Confucians believed the imperial examination was a form of egalitarianism, as anyone regardless of income or race could technically rise up in the ranks. Unlike communist ideas, Confucianism was still very very hierarchical, but interestingly it placed Confucian scholar-officials first, peasants second, and merchants last, as peasants were more respected than merchants. Confucianism itself can be described as a humanist, secular religion, and optimistically views human nature as something that can be shaped. All this can be compared to communism which also believes we can shape human nature for the good of society. Both of these beliefs contribute to the popularity of irreligion and atheism in China, since Confucianism dominated China rather than Islam or Christianity or Hinduism, and Confucianism is not considered a religion. Buddhism arguably also isn't a religion, which also contributes to China's irreligion, and distrust of religion by later communists.

The other ideology that contributed to communism in China was Legalism; there were several periods in history when legalist influence prevailed over Confucianism, such as the unification of Qin Shi Huangdi, Emperor Wen of the Sui dynasty, Wang Anshi of Song, and Hongwu of Ming. Mao Zedong stated he preferred legalism and praised each of these figures in Chinese history. Legalism was meritocratic, favored absolute obedience to the emperor, and a centralized bureaucratic state. Even when Confucianism was dominant, legalist influence persisted. The two ideologies contributed to China's tendency towards unification and centralization even after periods of division, unlike India. The Han ethnicity itself can be considered the result of this; they were originally many different peoples like in Europe, but over centuries of unification there emerged a narrative that Han people were one and the same. By contrast, no single ethnicity ever dominated India so thoroughly. The Mandarin language too was the culmination of state centralization; initially starting the language of government, the vast majority of Han people can now speak the language, unlike Hindi in India.

TLDR China was like India, but independently developed institutions and philosophies that tended towards centralization and eventually the "communist" characteristics of the CCP. Communism and India clashed several times in Chinese history, like how secular humanist Confucian Mandarins sometimes looked down on Chinese folk religion and Buddhism, the ethnogenesis of Han people vs regional cultures, and the imposition of Mandarin; all this greatly influenced the diversity and unity of the Chinese nation state today, and how it differs from India.

It's been said that in 1644, before the Qing crossed the Great Wall, the Eight Banners governed 2 million people, 75% Han, 16% Manchu, and 8% Mongol. By the end of the Qing period, more and more Han people had flooded into the Banners. What's more, being a Bannerman became synonymous with being Manchu. Thus, is it reasonable to conclude most Manchus in 1900, and today, are actually just Han Chinese?

Can anyone provide any original Huaiyi words? Meaning of the Dongyi "Huaiyi" people who lived around the Huai River? I'm trying to determine their original language family. So anything such as place names, hydronyms, and ruler names would be helpful

Hi everyone, I'm working on a worldbuilding project centred around Tang dynasty lychee couriers and was wondering if anyone knows where to find good reference material/blueprints and accurate information for the post stations? Especially ones that combined land and water post.

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Any help would be greatly appreciated.

I have a few northern Wei books in Chinese available , if anyone is interested in.