This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
The Manchu people who founded the Qing dynasty were, by any reasonable count, a small minority ruling an overwhelmingly Han Chinese population, and the dynasty's history through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is largely a study in how that minority sustained its rule for more than two and a half centuries. Encyclopaedia Britannica's account of the dynasty describes a dual strategy: the Qing court retained and even reinforced core Chinese administrative institutions, the imperial examination system that selected officials by classical scholarship, Confucian court ritual, and the basic structure of provincial government, presenting itself to Han subjects as a legitimate continuation of Chinese imperial tradition, while simultaneously maintaining distinct Manchu institutions that kept the ruling group separate and identifiable, a banner military and social system reserved for Manchu, Mongol and some Han bannermen, restrictions on Manchu-Han intermarriage for much of the dynasty's history, and the imposition of the queue hairstyle on Han men as a visible mark of submission after the conquest. The strategy worked well enough to preside over a period of major territorial expansion, incorporating Mongolia, Tibet, Xinjiang and Taiwan into an empire larger than the preceding Ming had ruled, and over sustained population growth and economic activity through the eighteenth century Kangxi, Yongzheng and Qianlong reigns. It worked far less well once nineteenth century pressures, foreign military defeat, internal rebellion, fiscal strain, exposed how much the dual system depended on the Qing court continuing to deliver stability and prosperity Han elites and ordinary subjects would tolerate a conquest dynasty for.