New Biography of Ming Dynasty

In the late Qing Dynasty, Li Hongzhang once said that "the great changes that have not happened in three thousand years" were recognized by people at the time. However, in my opinion, the prelude to this change was not in the years of Xianfeng and Tongzhi, but as early as 1644, when Chongzhen hanged himself on the mountain. Five years later, the bourgeois revolution led by Cromwell took place in Britain, which took the lead in kicking off the constitutional republic. In other words, it was the prelude to a quasi-constitutional republic, and Tsarist Russia was about to usher in the era of "Peter the Great" getting closer to and learning from the West. This country, which had been ruled by the Mongols for 600 years, also began an ambitious expansion path, opening up the Baltic Sea outlet to the north, opening up the Mediterranean outlet to the southwest, and attacking the fat piece of feudal China in the south. The Chongzhen Dynasty is undoubtedly a watershed in Chinese history, the watershed between bankrupt feudal China and the nirvana of Western civilization. After it, China did not usher in a new era, but ushered in a copy of the previous feudal dynasty, and the Kangxi and Qian Dynasties that followed were just a swan song for us in the feudal prosperous era.