Talk:Qing dynasty

Extended-confirmed-protected edit request on 20 August 2024

the Manchukuo to Manchukuo in footnote e Noob282 (talk) 10:31, 20 August 2024 (UTC)

 Done I just removed the footnote though, as I do not think it is necessary; ideally this would be explained where appropriate not hidden in a footnote cluttering the already cluttered lead. Remsense ‥ 论 11:10, 20 August 2024 (UTC)

Impossible to link

The format of the page makes it impossible to link to subsections. Why? Is this a purposeful design (for a reason I don't understand) or a mistake that needs repairing? Metokpema (talk) 20:59, 6 November 2024 (UTC)

Could you rephrase? I have no idea what specifically you're referring to. Remsense ‥ 论 21:19, 6 November 2024 (UTC)

please correct me if I'm wrong, but your subtitles are sub-sub-subtitles, and cannot be linked per wiki standards. Metokpema (talk) 17:55, 14 November 2024 (UTC)

Military section

I know this article already has a lot written, but should there be a section briefly describing the Qing dynasty military? It's common to have that on other state articles. Romanov loyalist (talk) 16:38, 13 November 2024 (UTC)

I agree. The brief section, which appeared under "Government," was removed Here in February 2022, with no explanation. I will restore it, but would be happy to hear any further comment or suggestions for a better way to handle the matter.ch (talk) ch (talk) 01:52, 14 November 2024 (UTC)

Yes, that should be restored immediately. Furius (talk) 08:19, 14 November 2024 (UTC)

Done!ch (talk) 05:43, 15 November 2024 (UTC)

Manchu Restoration + Anthem

The lede mentions the Manchu Restoration near the end of the article as a "restoration of the Qing dynasty" (In 1917, it [the Qing dynasty] was briefly restored in an episode known as the Manchu Restoration), but it hardly seems to classify as a restoration of the Qing. "Restorations" when referring to monarchies refer to restorations that had legal effects across the nation and who's monarchs were, at least for a significant amount of time, recognized de-jure or de-facto as the 'leader' of the nation; see the Stuart Restoration, or the Bourbon Restoration.
The Manchu Restoration does not fit any of these. It was a coup localized almost entirely to Beijing which ultimately had no bearing on the political system of the country. It was, at its core, an attempt to restore the Qing dynasty, a fact which is highlighted in the very lede of the mentioned article. It seems to me then that this mention of the Manchu Restoration should be reworded with a highlight that it was an attempt to restore the Qing, or removed entirely.

In addition, the article's exclusion of Cup of Solid Gold also needs to be taken into consideration. I recognize that Remsense has called into question whether or not Gong Jin'ou should be included in the infobox, but the anthem's exclusion from the article outright does not seem to be the right path to take.
We don't simply omit an official national anthem from the infobox, regardless of how long that national anthem was legally 'in force' for- take for example the Beiyang government's page, which lists anthems such as the Song of Five Races Under One Union in its infobox. It seems thus for an official anthem of the Qing dynasty, the very topic of this article, to not be included in the infobox to be strange to me.

Those are the two concerns I had. TheodoresTomfooleries (talk) 03:09, 23 November 2024 (UTC)

1. You're totally right about the Manchu Restoration, I will fix that.
2. We can (and should responsibly) exclude any piece of information from an infobox that isn't actually important to the subject, and Cup of Solid Gold is pure trivia that should not be taking up space here.

Remsense ‥ 论 06:03, 23 November 2024 (UTC)

This argument that the national anthem of a country is simply 'trivia' makes very little sense to me, especially considering you would then now have to address its usage in other articles, again, such as the Beiyang Government or most modern country pages.

I recognize that the MoS says that "the less information that an infobox contains, the more effectively it serves its purpose", but you are missing the point that the information not in the infobox is to be found in the body of the article, and there is no mention of Cup of Solid Gold, or a mention of an anthem anywhere in the article; which means that we have removed information from the infobox, only to then not include it in the main body.

I, of course, am not advocating for adding more to this article. It very clearly is in need of trimming down and being reworked, and adding a section about the national anthem to the body of the article simply bloats the article more, and is generally against established traditions here. This is what the infobox is for.

There will be exceptions where a piece of key specialised information may be placed in the infobox, but is difficult to integrate into the body text.

The examples given here are ISO 639 and most of the parameters in Chembox. Do you need to know the ISO codes (or other language codes) of Georgian or Italian or whatever other language it is you're looking up on Wikipedia? Generally speaking, no; but it stays there anyway because it is a piece of specialised information that serves a purpose deemed notable enough for its inclusion in almost every language article.

I know I am repeating myself here, but I feel that I must repeat the point that there's really no established norm here on Wikipedia to remove the national anthem from the infobox, and your justification for its removal (in my opinion) is not strong.

It would probably be best here to bring in another editor to resolve this, though I do not want to do that, as I believe that the inclusion of something such as a national anthem is not deserving of any further discussion like this. TheodoresTomfooleries (talk) 04:52, 24 November 2024 (UTC)

We're talking about this article, not any other (cf. WP:OTHERCONTENT). Unfortunately, there are more poorly designed infoboxes than ones that abide by best principles; you're free to help me out and remove irrelevant anthems elsewhere. Again, the established norm is WP:INFOBOXPURPOSE, where we don't presume fields should have to be filled as a default, and generally do not unless they are key facts about a topic. I'm well aware of the exceptions given, but this is not some technical code, but rather a large audiovisual block of space suggesting cultural importance that is in no way actually deserved, even for its technical period of two years at the very end of a three-century-old state. Its presence at the top of the article in any form is an undue suggestion of its importance.

If one wants to spend 30 minutes learning about the Qing, they should not be made aware of "Cup of Solid Gold", which is not nearly important enough to be privileged in that span of time. If one wants to gaze in awe at an endless table of trivia, they should consider browsing Wikidata instead.Remsense ‥ 论 05:01, 24 November 2024 (UTC)

That's a strange use of OTHERCONTENT, considering my point was not to illustrate that a single article follows the method of having a national anthem in the infobox, but that nearly every single article where a country has an anthem indeed has such in the infobox.

I very much know what the infobox's purpose is, so again, by removing information from the infobox that you are not then supplying in the body of the text.

Be a man of your word; bring up this idea of 'irrelevant anthems' to the talk pages of countries like Germany or Italy or Canada. I'm quite certain that the editors there will quite warmly receive your views. TheodoresTomfooleries (talk) 05:55, 25 November 2024 (UTC)

Not sure at all what the point you're making in the last sentence is. Again, those are different articles, and I'm talking about this article. If you made some greater point by gesturing to another article and saying "look, it's even here!", then I didn't catch it. Random editors add cruft and bloat to infoboxes all the time because they see vaguely similar content elsewhere and hysterically shove the square peg into every round hole they can find—it's done a lot of damage we're going to be cleaning up forever—so pointing to the results of that is not a compelling argument in the slightest. You're free to start an RFC if you want to establish a greater consensus here. Remsense ‥ 论 05:56, 25 November 2024 (UTC)

Extended-confirmed-protected edit request on 30 November 2024

add religion as a tab on the side it is helpful for AP World students. Awsomesauz (talk) 01:55, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

 Not done: Remsense ‥ 论 02:16, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

Extended-confirmed-protected edit request on 30 November 2024

The Qing are listed as starting from 1644 rather than 1636 based on p. 292 of William T. Rowe's China's Last Empire (2009). However, on p. 291, Hong Taiji is listed as an emperor of the Great Qing from 1636 to 1643; clearly, Rowe does not firmly support either 1636 or 1644 as a start date. Most Qing historians do in fact use 1636 as the inaugural year for the Great Qing, for example:

Macabe Keliher, The Board of Rites and the Making of Qing China (University of California Press, 2019), p. ix

Eric Schluessel, The Tarikh-i Hamidi: A Late-Qing Uyghur History (Columbia University Press, 2023), pp. xv, xvii

Johan Elverskog, Our Great Qing: The Mongols, Buddhism and the State in Late Imperial China (University of Hawaii Press, 2006), p. 17

1644 was the year of the conquest of China, but the fact is that a state calling itself the Great Qing had existed since 1636. The controversy is not over whether the Qing state itself began in 1644, but whether we should accept the 'only one legitimate ruler' model of dynastic history and consider the Qing to only 'really' be a legitimate empire at the moment the main line of the Ming collapsed.

EMicrostate (talk) 03:15, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

 Not doneThis has been discussed many times. Feel free to search the talk page archives if you want to know our specific reasons for using 1644. Remsense ‥ 论 03:56, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

The last discussion, in April, did not come to consensus. The talk pages seem to imply that the change to 1636 was made in March 2024; this was then disputed, and so this ought to have meant reverting to 1636, not accepting 1644 as the new edit and then rejecting attempts to revert it. As demonstrated here, the source for 1644 does not unambiguously prefer it, and indeed explicitly cites (p. 6) that there were scholars as of 2009 who preferred the 1636 start date. Bear in mind that Rowe is an older scholar; newer scholarship almost always prefers 1636 as the starting year for the Qing state even if they date the Qing conquest of China to 1644. To list just a few other examples:

Dittmar Schorkowitz and Chia Ning (eds.), Managing Frontiers in Qing China: The Lifanyuan and Libu Revisited (Brill, 2017), pp. 2, 94, 337

Lhamsuren Munkh-Erdene, The Taiji Government and the Rise of the Warrior State: The Formation of the Qing Imperial Constitution (Brill, 2022), pp. 13, 109, 139, etc.

Jonathan Schlesinger, A World Trimmed With Fur: Wild Things, Pristine Places, and the Natural Fringes of Qing Rule (Stanford UP, 2017) p. 21

Keith MacMahon, Celestial Women: Imperial Wives and Concubines in China from Song to Qing (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016), p. 161

Richard J. Smith, The Qing Dynasty and Traditional Chinese Culture (Rowman & Littlefield, 2015), pp. ix, 1

I contend, in the strongest possible terms, that the idea that 1636 as a start date is a fringe position is unsustainable: while there are still works that opt to begin the Qing with the conquest of Beijing in 1644, the overwhelming majority of specialist scholarly output accepts 1636. At minimum, the date should be amended to "1636/1644". EMicrostate (talk) 23:08, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

I would first note that this article originally showed 1644 as the start year. However, it was changed to 1636 by an IP editor previously without any explanations. It was reverted back to 1644 earlier; an explanation would be better indeed. Speaking of sources, the Rowe source was only one of the many sources suggesting 1644, and there were previously more sources cited for it that unambiguously prefer 1644 as the start year. I think most sources were recently removed due to article cleanups (for reducing the article size). But I have already added some of them back (see more below). In any case, 1636 is only one option (although I would not claim it is a fringe position, but one of the positions), there are also other options including 1616, and many of such sources (for 1616 for example) were in fact quite new (including those published in this year) as you may see in the note (or below). And many new sources (in addition to older ones such as Qing-era ones) continued to show 1644 as the start year, such as the book "Eminent Chinese of the Qing Period: 1644-1911/2" by Arthur W. Hummel Sr. and Pamela Kyle Crossley (2017) [1], which shows both 1911 and 1912 as end year, but only 1644 as start year in the title. Anyway I think one should not push a particular one in this case. While I agree a number of authors do accept 1636 (while others accept 1644 or 1616), the claims "newer scholarship almost always prefers 1636 as the starting year for the Qing state" and "the overwhelming majority of specialist scholarly output accepts 1636" are almost certainly exaggerations or overstatements. There may be some people trying to push this position, but it is not actually true. Instead, it is one of the options, and showing more than one years would be fine for me, so I have listed both 1636 and 1644 for now (one may add 1616 as well if desired). Meanwhile, some articles (such as the Mongol Empire article) actually do not list start and end years in the infobox at all, and this is an option as well. --Wengier (talk) 23:25, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

To list just a few examples for more recent sources for showing 1644 as the start year (apart from sources like "Eminent Chinese of the Qing Period: 1644-1911/2"):

Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, The Oxford History of Modern China (OUP Oxford, 2022), p. ix

Daniel McMahon, China's Borderlands Under the Qing, 1644–1912 (Taylor & Francis, 2020), p. 10

Douglas R. Reynolds, China, 1895-1912 State-Sponsored Reforms and China's Late-Qing Revolution (Taylor & Francis, 2017), p. 86

Anjiang Hu, Cold Mountain Poems (Taylor & Francis, 2023), p. 107

Yongqin Guo, Land and Labor Tax in Imperial Qing China (1644-1912) (Brill, 2022), p. XVI

Emily Byrne Curtis, Chinese-Islamic Works of Art, 1644–1912 (Berkshire Publishing Group, 2017), p. 3

Christine Moll-Murata, State and Crafts in the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) (Amsterdam University Press, 2018)

--Wengier (talk) 00:14, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

And a few examples for recent sources for showing 1616 as the start year:

Alan A. Lew, Tourism Places in Asia (Taylor & Francis, 2021), p. 124

Zhanghui Yang, Convergence of East-West Poetics (Taylor & Francis, 2024), p. 37

Min Ding, The Chinese Way (Taylor & Francis, 2014), p. 245

Jenanne Ferguson, The Siberian World (Taylor & Francis, 2023), p. 319

Chikaosa Tanimoto, Ancient Underground Opening and Preservation (CRC Press, 2015), p. 289

Pingyuan Chen, The Change of Narrative Modes in Chinese Fiction (Springer Nature Singapore, 2022), p. 180

Gordian Schreiber, Japanese Morphography (Brill, 2022), p. xv

The lists can be made much longer as well, but I think I will stop here now.--Wengier (talk) 00:34, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

 Done List both years. --Wengier (talk) 02:57, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

Several of the sources you list here are republications of much older work: Arthur Hummel's book is from 1943 and Reynolds' is from 1993. More importantly, there is a semantic distinction that needs to be drawn between the Qing Empire and Qing China – you will note that with few exceptions of (McMahon and Moll-Murata), everyone in that list using 1644 (and that includes earlier citations like Ronald Po's The Blue Frontier) is using some formulation of either 'Qing China' or 'China under the Qing', phrases that only make sense in a post-conquest of Beijing context and for which 1644 is a theoretically appropriate starting point.

I would also note that, while I don't have full-text access to all of these books, some of them accept a Qing state in existence by 1644 even without specifying a 1636 start. Moll-Murata, p. 69, notes that the Qing conquered Beijing from the Ming in 1644, not that the Qing were founded after conquering Beijing.

I appreciate that the 1636/44 has been edited in, but I would ask: were one to insist on 1644, then what exactly was the situation in Manchuria between 1636 and 1644, when a state called the Great Qing existed, and yet somehow is not supposed to count? This article, surely, is not about the Qing as a period of Chinese history (which you can viably argue began only in 1644) but the Qing Empire as a state unto itself, which most sources which actually go into the state's foundation (as opposed to writing about issues for which the periodisation of the Qing is merely incidental) state was in 36. EMicrostate (talk) 12:44, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

First of all, there are many many more sources (new or older) than those are listed above; there is simply no need (nor possible) to list them all. Even for republications like Arthur Hummel's book, the title changed from "Eminent Chinese of the Ch'ing Period (1644–1912)" in 1943 to "Eminent Chinese of the Qing Period: 1644-1911/2" in 2017, but not to "Eminent Chinese of the Qing Period: 1636/44-1911/2" (nor to "Eminent Chinese of the Qing Period: 1636-1911/2"). Thus, (at least theoretically) it should be completely fine for the article to list 1644 only, instead of 1636 or even both. But we can list both anyway in order to show the existence of other views. At the same time, you appeared to have made an implication that newer sources should be "better", which is certainly not the case. There are always diversity of ideas among people and scholars, which is actually encouraged, instead of having to force a single perspective. There is certainly no such thing as a single idea or thought must be "correct", and Wikipedia would try to represent different perspectives as well. So, in such cases we can represent more than one perspectives, as already done, and all of them have their own rationals. I think there were some previous discussion(s) about the reasons for 1644, but in any case, it was nothing unique to the Qing. For example, there were Predynastic Shang, Predynastic Zhou and Qin (state), before Shang dynasty, Zhou dynasty and Qin dynasty were established respectively. It is an established usage. The Qing was transferred to a Chinese empire during the 17th century, especially after 1644, and this is a very important point, certainly not to be overlooked. Even various Qing-era sources considered 1644 the start year of the dynasty, which more or less represented Qing’s sponsored view at the time, which is certainly informative and need be presented. There are also other reasons for supporting the 1644 idea, but in any case, this is a model widely and very commonly used, and of course it should be properly represented, although other perspectives can surely also be represented (like the 1636 or 1616 ideas) based on their weights, instead of having to represent only one of them, or pushing a certain idea. There may be some simplifications of history, which are quite normal though, generally speaking. In any case, Wikipedia is not based on personal opinions, but on reliable sources, where sources also differ their views, although they may have different weights. And as mentioned below, there are more than one models (but one may be more common than others), and it is not the case that a particular model must be "right" or "wrong" (it is not a black and white case). In any case, talk page is not a personal essay or discussion forum (WP:NOTFORUM), and the requested change is already done by now. --Wengier (talk) 19:29, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

I think a NoteTag can be added to show alternative start years, apart from 1644 (which many sources use). Some sources do suggest 1636 or even 1616. There are more than one history models (the dynastic model being the traditional and the most common one), but Wikipedia will base on reliable sources, not that a particular model must be "right" or "wrong". Several sources for each of the said years can be found, and I added all the years in a note.--Wengier (talk) 05:49, 30 November 2024 (UTC)