Qing China, the Opium Wars, and the Unequal Treaties

The Qing dynasty, of Manchu origin, had ruled China since 1644 and by 1800 presided over the most populous empire on Earth, governed through the absolute power of the emperor and a mandarin bureaucracy selected by Confucian examinations, with the ruling Manchu elite maintaining separate institutions such as the Eight Banners above the Han majority. China's traditional worldview held it to be the "Middle Kingdom," a civilizing center to which other peoples owed tribute, and its foreign trade was confined to the Canton System, which restricted all commerce with the West to a single port managed by a guild of licensed merchants, the Cohong. This confidence was captured in Emperor Qianlong's famous 1793 reply to the British Macartney embassy that China had "no need of your country's manufactures," a response that badly underestimated the emerging Western technological threat, even as the White Lotus Rebellion (1796-1804) had already exposed cracks in the Eight Banner army.