The Rise and Fall of the Qing Dynasty in Three Hundred Years and the Tide of the World

This book breaks out of the traditional Central Plains narrative framework of Qing history and takes a global perspective to re-deconstruct and interpret the rise and fall of the Qing Dynasty in the past three hundred years within the overall tide of world history from the 17th to the 20th century. The book begins with Nurhachi's founding of the Yuan Dynasty in 1616 and ends with Emperor Xuantong's edict to abdicate in 1912. It takes the rise and fall of the dynasty as the main axis and synchronously connects the key changes in the world during the same period: when the White Mountains and Black Waters rose up, the Thirty Years' War in Europe was triggering turmoil in the global silver system and became the Ming Dynasty. The hidden driving force behind the financial collapse and the strong rise of the Later Jin Dynasty; behind the glory of the Kangxi and Qianlong dynasties, the Western Scientific Revolution and the Industrial Revolution were quietly completing a generational leap, laying the foundation for the reversal of national power in the East and the West; the Opium War was essentially an inevitable collision between a maritime colonial empire and a traditional land power dynasty. Different from the simple narrative of dynasty replacement, this book breaks through the boundaries of regions and civilizations, and places all key nodes such as the Battle of Saarhu, the entry of Qing troops into the customs, the Taiping Rebellion, and the Westernization Reform into the causal chain of global history. It not only describes the ambitions of the Eight Banners and the expansion of borders in the prosperous times, but also digs into the deep-rooted problems of institutional rigidity and isolation. It not only talks about the internal struggles of party disputes in the court, civil uprisings, and self-help reforms, but also talks about the external waves of the silver tide, the expansion of sea power, and the scientific and technological revolution. The whole book uses "foreshadowing of rise and fall" as the core clue, peeling off the superficial cause and effect of history, showing how the rise and fall of a dynasty resonates with the pulse of the world, and re-understanding the historical logic of China's modern transformation.