Talk:Qing dynasty


Proposed Changes for Draft for Qing Dynasty on 5 December 2025

Dear @Patar knight, @Ifly6, @EMicrostate, @PaulRevered and @Qiushufang, I've created a new thread to discuss the proposed draft, and only this draft. Sorry for the late response as I was travelling overseas for work.

  1. There is a clear broad consensus that this page requires a draft, and I shall work on one within the coming week. I will post here finished segments of the draft, and we can all come together to critique it.
  2. @Patar knight, thank you for mediating, and I believe you suggested to refrain from further posting on Reddit on this page's supposed failings. Yes, I will honour this.
  3. @Qiushufang, if I'm understanding your comments right, you were a major editor of this page, and I can understand some of what I wrote on Reddit likely felt personal. I do apologize, and if you'd prefer, I'd be more than happy to take down both Reddit posts on r/badhistory and r/Chinesehistory. You've great knowledge of northeast Asia given your editing of the Jurchen page, it would be great if you could further illuminate on/correct this draft on such matters.
  4. @EMicrostate, thank you for (1) clarifying historiographical trends in Qing history across the past few decades, and (2) insights on the naming of the Qing, zhongguo, and its relationship to our term 'China'. The sources are excellent, and I hope to inject them into the new draft.
  5. I do not accept Wengier's claims, nor do I feel a need to defend myself from them. His accusations are myriad, and as others have repeatedly pointed out, they are distressing and unsettling. I appreciate the efforts of the other editors to steer the conversation back to the issue at hand. Nor has he behaved in the manner he expects other to: Wengier has a comment on Reddit calling another user a Hanjian ('Han race traitor') for not comporting with his views on history. While it does not transgress wiki rules, there is clear ideological intent behind some of his behaviour. I will no longer entertain such comments.

I am in no capacity to write a long draft immediately, but I hope to do it in segments, e.g. 'introduction' being written by this week, and then perhaps a section like 'arts and culture' or 'government' in another week. I hope this format works, and at least we can come together to critique them and offer a nuanced view that this massive page deserves. I hope this is all ok!

Kind wishes,

Lay Academic



LayAcademic (talk) 14:36, 5 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you very much! I'm looking forward to seeing the draft, and am fully willing to help out with copy-editing, etc. PaulRevered (talk) 15:47, 5 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I would strongly suggest working on sections first before working on the lead. As I mentioned in one of my initial comments above, a Wikipedia lead section is different from the abstract of an academic paper or the introduction to a scholarly book. It is strictly meant to be a summary of the key points already in the article body (MOS:INTRO), which is why citations are generally not used except in rare cases such as quotations or highly contentious material (MOS:LEADCITE). A lead that is out of step with what is in the article body is a lead that would not comply with Wikipedia's guidelines. -- Patar knight - chat/contributions 17:38, 5 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks PaulRevered for your offered help! And thanks for clarifying how this editing works @Patar Knight LayAcademic (talk) 21:55, 5 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
A conflict I have not seen resolved yet is the difference in perspective between what EMicrostate (talk · contribs) and probably LayAcademic (talk · contribs) believe Wikipedia should be versus what it is. Wikipedia is not an academic article or monograph. It is an online encyclopedia that can be edited by anyone. Even if it does reference academic articles and even prefer it for certain topics such as the humanities and sciences, the policies, goals, and arguably how things actually tend to work out are different from academic writing. Once an academic work is published, it is set in stone barring new editions, but that is not true for Wikipedia. Users will continue to modify the article intermittently for years working within the confines of the general policies Wiki editors tend to abide by. Even an "extended confirmed" lock like the one that exists here can be circumvented without too much effort (30 days/500 edits).
Due to policies like WP:WEIGHT and WP:ACHIEVE NPOV, in my experience when an article like Qing dynasty is already sufficiently sourced with the exception of one or two sections, wholesale "rewrites" are fairly uncommon. In my eight years on Wikipedia, I have personally never seen it happen to a page I am monitoring. Even section rewrites often result in significant back and forth, more often than not resulting in a hodgepodge of sources supporting contending statements. This is due to a couple of reasons. One is that for a page to have reached a respectable size while maintaining a sufficient level of citation quality there usually exists a handful of dedicated editors contributing to the page. Needless to say they will be highly invested in any changes made to their work. The second is that interpreting WEIGHT and NPOV is inherently subjective to some degree barring the most obvious cases, which leaves leeway for editors to argue for the inclusion of sources and statements from many angles. In practice this means that for niche topics, additions or adapting existing content rather than outright deletions are more easily accepted. The third and somewhat overlooked reason is that individual reliable sources such as academic articles are often not sufficient by themself to provide a comprehensive overview of the subject owing to their narrow nature, requiring additional sources to offer specific details, not to mention affirming that what is being written accurately represents the actual source. The desire by multiple editors to have all reliable sources represented causes further article bloat if not citation spam. All of this is to say that a rewrite can be ephemeral or become too unwieldy by the time it is finished.
For the above reasons, a long draft and even a step-by-step top-down overhaul of this article involving multiple editors is not desirable, although it might seem natural from an academic perspective. It could risk bloating the article causing awkward reduction by cleaners or attract further rewrites reverting the eventual end draft down the line through minute changes. The article is already at WP:SIZERULE limits anyways and there are still sections with paragraphs that do not contain citations such as Qing_dynasty#Rebellion,_unrest,_and_external_pressure and Qing_dynasty#Military that can be worked on first by deleting or finding sources for them. The MOS:LEADLENGTH is almost double the accepted size and should be pared down. Certain sections like Qing_dynasty#Economy that have their own article can be reduced as well. In fact many topics related to the Qing have their own individual articles already and are not locked like History of the Qing dynasty. I suggest LA and EM work on those articles first and if their changes are accepted by the editors there or whatever the result is, they can port them over in a pared down form to this article. This would also make the changes more piecemeal in a digestible manner and probably less controversial since they would have gone through revisions on other pages first. By then they may well have over 500 edits over 30 days as well, making the lock a non-issue. Qiushufang (talk) 07:44, 6 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
There may be a matter of cultural differences here, but I find, for instance, there are still sections with paragraphs that do not contain citations such as Qing_dynasty#Rebellion,_unrest,_and_external_pressure and Qing_dynasty#Military that can be worked on first by deleting or finding sources for them. a little bit puzzling, because surely one finds sources and then describes them rather than writing a passage and then finding supporting sources? For what it's worth, I don't know that I support a fundamentally comprehensive rewrite, but rather a cleaning up of parts of the article that reflect what I think the general consensus would agree to be some combination of outdated or Sinocentric. I'd also agree that individual academic sources may not be sufficient... but that's just the nature of tertiary synthesis, isn't it? I don't think anything fundamentally has to change here; we simply need to present the conclusions of scholarship in a way that is concise and impartial. EMicrostate (talk) 16:34, 6 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I'm assuming good will here towards whoever first wrote the content without citations. Sometimes editors just don't bother putting citations behind paragraphs that they already put in the first paragraph of a section, so finding the source can be as simple as using the first citation in the section. Other times I find that when you find a source, the already existing content basically says the same thing and the editor was likely using the same source and roughly accurate, so the content only needs to be reworked a little and an appropriate citation added. This is somewhat less common.
By individual sources added, I mean that it is easy to argue based on Wiki policies that such and such sources and their statements deserve to be represented. The standards of inclusion on Wikipedia are quite low and tend to cause citation spamming and disparate statements, causing bloating. An example would be editor A says "tributary system didn't actually exist" based on X sources and editor B adds "but the Qing did reference these dynasties and their practices in their tributary relationships with Joseon" according to Y sources. The result is likely that there will be one statement saying something and then another statement saying something else in response since according to WP:SYNTH, you're not really supposed to synthesize material at all to reach a conclusion not directly stated in either. Therefore what's left is a paragraph or multiple paragraphs saying contending things. Some very "invested" editors will also scrounge for sources to prove their point no matter what. In this case simply need to present the conclusions of scholarship in a way that is concise and impartial can be a problem. Sometimes having different perspectives represented this is the best option imo, but again this article is at size limit, which is why I think trimming down or working on other articles first would be ideal since there are no locks on most of those pages and they haven't reached size limit yet. Qiushufang (talk) 17:25, 6 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
There isn't any historiographical or practical conflict between mine and @EMicrostate's views, so no problem on that front.
The bloating and rewrite issue are good concerns, but the changes are simply sectional rather than an entire rewrite. I have identified 'Government', 'Historiography' and 'Names' as problematic sections not in line with contemporary scholarship, nor do they have to be entirely revamped.
As an extension of my prior point, you mentioned there being sufficient citations. While true, the cited scholars' views are almost distorted at certain points especially those by NQH scholars. So again, it won't bloat the article as its not increasing the scholars, but simply citing them in line with what they actually say in those citations. LayAcademic (talk) 12:59, 8 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I am glad to see LayAcademic's willing to improve some of his behaviors. On the other hand, I certainly do not accept his above claims on my part. Others like @Qiushufang had already pointed out his behavior issues, but I won't continue to talk about this here, considering he already apologized for at least some of them. I do agree that we should be on topic about the Qing dynasty. He talked about Hanjian above, but it appeared that he had interpreted the word in the context of Qing topic in a different way than I intended, unfortunately. As I already mentioned in the previous section, the word has multiple meanings indeed, and in the context of the Qing dynasty (the topic), the word very often refers to (Han) people who appear to have a sentiment conflicting with (or opposed) the Qing's own conceptions, or something like this. The meaning of the word evolved. Sorry about the confusions, and I am also sorry for the misunderstanding that it may have caused (but it happened quite a while ago indeed). In any case, I think it is actually a good idea to clearly mention about Qing's own conceptions (about China, colonialism, etc) and the meaning of the word in the Qing context somewhere (not necessarily in this page) when there is time, which could also help avoid confusions like this. As also discussed in the previous section, how the Qing presented itself to the world (and viewed by the world then, which in fact affected each other) is itself an important topic, especially considering that the Qing played a fundamental role in the conception of "China". --Wengier (talk) 00:12, 6 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I have very few contributions on this page and have little interest in Qing history aside from the early transitional period involving the Ming and maybe a bit of Manchu ethnic history. That's why I said as much that my contributions towards Qing specific history will likely be limited because I don't have much knowledge in this area. But I have edited a broad range of Chinese history related articles such as Jurchen unification, Western Xia, Liao dynasty, Jin dynasty (1115–1234), Mu'ege, and others I can't remember off the top of my head. The comparisons between how the Qing are treated in history writing and non-Han ruled dynasties are therefore natural since I've read a broad range of texts related to general dynastic history. Qiushufang (talk) 09:36, 6 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Personally I had mostly focused on the Qing dynasty, and (sometimes) the Yuan dynasty. Both were non-Han ruled dynasties, and I had been interested in how they presented their empires to the world (or viewed by the world) in general. For the Yuan, it became clear to me then that they presented themselves as a Mongol dynasty to most peoples in the world. As for Liao and Jin, they appeared to be viewed as sinicized to varying degrees by their neighbours, but they were more complicated considering that they only ruled North China (or part of it), and it is also more difficult to find historical records for them compared to Yuan and Qing considering the period, not to mention that the Khitan script has not really been decrypted. Historical records are easier to find for the Qing, followed by the Yuan. —Wengier (talk) 13:18, 6 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
The issue with the word 'dynasties' is that it lacks the semantic resonances you find in Chinese or non-Han sources. In English it means regime, while in Chinese it is rendered more like state, imperial centre, or court. The English rendering creates a nationalist illusion of these being regimes ruling over a trans-imperial concept called 'China', which was only adopted by the Chinese around the turn of the 20th century in writings by early nationalist intellectuals like Liang Qichao or even Chiang Kiashek. It is more precise to view them as a range of kingdoms and empires, many Han and some non-Han.
So the question here is whether [1] we play something akin to Snake & Ladders: drawing lines semi-arbitrarily through multiple continental East Asian states and rendering them as successions of this trans-imperial concept, or [2] we acknowledge they had distinct identities themselves and should not be portrayed as simply reincarnations of the same essentialised entity. My survey of Qing scholarship is that the majority in the West, alongside Mongol, Japanese and some Chinese scholarship, tends to [2], while [1] tends popular within the PRC state narratives.
That is why the NQH, itself more a label than a historiographical tradition, is so important. Because it recognizes that the Inner Asian social, cultural and political traditions that the Qing inhabits, is not just a peripheral quality to an otherwise essentialised Chinese empire, but central to its identity, at least leading up to the mid-19th century. Ideas of 'sinification' misleadingly portray acculturation as single-directioned, when history is replete with cases of Chinese de-centering culturally and politically, such as the Chinese literati serving in the Tangut court of Xi Xia, or the northern Chinese farmers who 'turned Mongol' during the Qing period. LayAcademic (talk) 13:22, 8 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
To be frank you are reaching here. "Dynasty" has been accepted nomenclature for 朝 whether Han or non-Han since basically the beginning of my time researching history, so at least over 20+ years now. While it does not contain the same connotations as it does in Chinese, it is the commonly accepted translation. There are sections that explain what a Chinese "dynasty" is.
Wikipedia also adheres to WP:COMMON in which the most common name in English is used and "dynasty" is such a common appelation that there is even a guide on capitalization for it here. So it does not even matter what is accepted in academia. Your logic also seems to fall line with WP:RGW where your primary objective is to fix some issue with real or perceived PRC bias where changes do not actually help the reader, which goes back to my point that everything you're saying seems to go back to something about proving that something is "not Chinese". As a Taiwanese person, I can safely say that I have never once thought sinization or the word "dynasty" meant that something was intrinsically Chinese or going to become Chinese, or that it meant that dynasty did not equal an empire. They are simply accepted terms at this point and more useful because of it. Imperial dynasty of China is a good category because it is useful and the reader can expect to find information about a set of related polities related to China by clicking it. A page like Eurasian Empires or Inner Asian Empires is not as useful because it would be too broad or niche, which is probably why one links to a TV show and the other doesn't exist. Please understand that Wikipedia is not the academia even if it does use academic sources. Representing academic sources accurately does not mean it should follow academic standards or conclusions. Qiushufang (talk) 15:08, 8 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
There has been a certain pushback against the use of 'dynasty' within the Qing field which I think is worth acknowledging even if the term is standard shorthand in colloquial use – James Millward has certainly been the most polemical about it recently, but there's also Pamela Crossley in A Translucent Mirror 11n15. I do not presently know whether this reflects a gradual underlying shift in academic consensus or not. However, while Wikipedia certainly isn't academia, the reason it uses academic sources is surely because it is not supposed to simply be a circular reaffirmation of colloquial understanding? And if so, then avoidance of terminology that academia also avoids is not something that necessarily detracts. EMicrostate (talk) 15:23, 8 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Academia does play a huge role in the contents of these articles, but per WP:SOURCETYPES, they are not considered the only reliable sources. Newspapers can be considered RS. A cursory search of Qing dynasty brings up the name a multitude of times this year in the news section. But I want to reiterate why talking about this has become so frustrating for me - a lot of things that I'm seeing suggested here just aren't useful from a Wikipedia perspective.
If we accept that the academia believes the Qing dynasty is a Eurasian Empire more so than a Chinese dynasty, it does not follow that replacing Imperial dynasty of China with Eurasian Empires would be better for an encyclopedia. The simple fact is that most people think and talk about the Qing as a Chinese dynasty, not just in academia, but generally, in pop culture, in video games, in tv shows, in movies, in novels. A person who goes to search for the Qing dynasty are not going to be searching for Eurasian Empires or Inner Asian Empires because neither are as well established. In fact, even if such a category were to exist, I am not sure it would be useful for the reader to see empires such as the Ottomans or Russian empire grouped with the Qing, as obviously those topics are large enough in and of themselves to attract their own reader base anyways.
I'm personally also feeling a bit of fatigue from seeing you two fighting phantoms to Right Great Wrongs. I am Taiwanese, I live in Taiwan. But it has never even once occurred to me that it was some PRC narrative to purposefully obfuscate the Manchu, Mongol, or Khitan, or whatever non-Han ethnic character of these states by using the words sinicization or "dynasty". In fact, most of these articles already have Khitan-led or Manchu-led or Mongol-led qualifiers. Many of them, such as Yuan dynasty, go into detail in the article body about the Mongol nature of the state, including hierarchy, government, discrimination, and things specific to a Mongol led state. Simply replacing the word dynasty with empire does not solve the issue of obfuscation either and creates further confusion. A casual reader would still assume that a name such as "Liao empire" or "Western Xia empire" or indeed, "Qing empire", would be Chinese anyways from the name alone. To get into the weeds of renaming things such as "dynasty" because it somehow infers an intrinsic belonging to China is frankly ridiculous since the names themselves without dynasty already do that. It feels like even more of a waste of time knowing what the underlying purpose of such a change is. Qiushufang (talk) 16:11, 8 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
From Google ngram I can see there has been a rise in use of Qing empire, but Qing dynasty is still far above it in terms of use in books. Qiushufang (talk) 16:28, 8 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
If you want to change the article's title, I don't think there will be much appetite for it. WP:COMMONNAME is the relevant policy or guideline and I think Qing dynasty is still the common name for it. However, it is not a requirement that you use the title throughout. A rewrite could largely use Qing empire or something like that in the text if it wanted.
As to EMicrostate (talk · contribs)'s statement above, the relevant guidance is a combination of WP:SCHOLARSHIP and WP:BESTSOURCES (see also the closely related WP:ACADEMICBIAS). They instruct us to prefer academic sources and, in assessment due weight and the neutral point of view (NPOV), we defer not just to "reliable" sources but also essentially to rank them and defer to the best of or the most reliable sources. Ifly6 (talk) 18:08, 8 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I question the prevalence or preference for "Qing empire" over "Qing dynasty" exists in academia to the extent that is being claimed or supports using specifically "empire" over "dynasty". A Google ngram shows that Qing dynasty is by far the most common title used in books with "Qing empire" and "Qing China" being roughly equal. A search on Jstor over the last 5 years shows that the most common titles in descending order are Qing China, Qing dynasty, and Qing empire. Many of these sources use a combination of these titles like on the aforementioned Wiki dynasty pages because, I suspect, outside the narrow confines of de-colonial Qing history, most people can't really tell the difference even in academia. It is not as if Tang dynasty and Yuan dynasty and Qing dynasty pages do not already call them empires or states. A change to exclusively use "empire" rather than "dynasty" or "China" would be against current practices in academia, something that I've also been guilty of for avoiding "dynasty + China" which still seems to be common. Qiushufang (talk) 02:47, 9 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
There is no concerted effort to replace 'dynasty' with 'empire'. Nor is there, as you implied several times, a desire to recast the Qing from a 'Chinese' empire to an 'Inner Asian' empire. The adjectives are not mutually exclusive. What I'm suggesting is to do what the Tang Dynasty page does, to put both terms onto the introductory section, without changing the name of the wiki page itself.
The distinction is important because wikipedia is for lay users, not academics who are familiar with the idea that the imperfectly translated 朝 rendered as 'dynasty' means very different from European usages of the term, such as the Romanov or Stuart dynasties.
I get that Google ngrams might show popular usages, but any familiarity with academic work will show a significant lag of popular misconceptions relative to academic consensus. If you read ANE history and archaeology, you'll likely see Google ngram prioritizing the more misleading terminologies of Abrahamic religious and Middle Eastern nationalist provenance. LayAcademic (talk) 06:56, 9 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
The English term 'dynasty' had somewhat different usages for different regions. The usage of the term 'dynasty' for China is similar to some other regions such as Egypt and Korea. For example, Egyptian dynasties like the Fifteenth Dynasty of Egypt and Twenty-fifth Dynasty of Egypt were all kingdoms or empires (in fact led by foreign groups for these dynasties), but they use the term "dynasty" nevertheless. The English term "dynasty" has been used for the Qing dynasty (and earlier dynasties of China) for several centuries (including during the Qing dynasty itself). For example, the Qing dynasty had been referred to as the "Tsing dynasty"[1], "Ta Tsing dynasty"[2], or "Great Tsing dynasty"[3] (in addition to names like "China" and "Chinese Empire") during the 19th century. There is often no single academic consensus (there are different views even among scholars, who often debate over several things), but as clearly shown by sources given by @Qiushufang above, I do think we can add alternative names like "Qing Empire" and "Qing China" to the lead (per Wikipedia policy: Treatment of alternative names: "By the design of Wikipedia's software, an article can only have one title. When this title is a name, significant alternative names for the topic should be mentioned in the article, usually in the first sentence or paragraph..."). --Wengier (talk) 08:14, 9 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I've already agreed with removing Chinese empire from the lead and to mostly use simply "Qing" as the default name in the article body. Most of these articles use a combination of "dynasty" and "empire" so I am against strictly adhering to either. I don't agree that the possible mix-up between the common meaning of "dynasty" in English and 朝 is a good enough reason to remove it. Qiushufang (talk) 09:31, 9 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I think a wording like "While the Qing became the new rulers of China, resistance from Ming rump regimes..." (instead of "became a Chinese empire") should work for the lead. For the article body, terms like "Qing", "Qing dynasty", "Qing empire", "Qing China" should all work, reflecting the practices in both academia and popular usages. It is not the case that one has to avoid one or another usage in Wikipedia: they are all commonly used, and no such policy exists in Wikipedia to avoid them anyway. --Wengier (talk) 10:26, 9 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I would put quotes in the Jstor searches. After doing so the figures are 818, 2 978, and 832 for Qing China, Qing dynasty, and Qing empire respectively. Ifly6 (talk) 18:41, 9 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Dear all, @EMicrostate @Ifly6 @Patar knight @Qiushufang
I apologise for my absence. Personal circumstances have made it difficult for me to focus on this page, and I appreciate the longstanding efforts the following people have made to discuss the major historiographical issues present in the Qing dynasty page.
I hope to get back to this as soon as possible, but for now, I'd greatly appreciate if someone enterprising could collate materials and at least revise some of the key sections that needed revision.
Thank you very much.
Warm regards to all, LayAcademic LayAcademic (talk) 09:40, 19 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Move discussion in progress

There is a move discussion in progress on Talk:Beiyang government which affects this page. Please participate on that page and not in this talk page section. Thank you. —RMCD bot 14:33, 7 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Official name of Qing

Wasn't Qing Empire officially known as State (or Empire) of the Great Qing? I mean they used Great Qing but didn't they also use the long name? ~2025-34329-69 (talk) 10:47, 1 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

"Tatar dynasty" listed at Redirects for discussion

The redirect Tatar dynasty has been listed at redirects for discussion to determine whether its use and function meets the redirect guidelines. Readers of this page are welcome to comment on this redirect at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2026 February 20 § Tatar dynasty until a consensus is reached. — An anonymous username, not my real name 03:34, 20 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

allikas: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Qing_dynasty