Names of the Qing dynasty
The Qing dynasty was an imperial Chinese dynasty ruled by the Aisin Gioro clan of Manchu ethnicity. Officially known as the Great Qing, the dynastic empire was also widely known in English as China and the Chinese Empire both during its existence, especially internationally, and after the fall of the dynasty.
Earlier names
In 1616 Nurhaci declared himself the "Bright Khan" of the Later Jin state in honor both of the 12–13th century Jurchen-led Jin dynasty and of his Aisin Gioro clan. The dynasty became known as the Later Jin dynasty by historians. His son Hong Taiji renamed the dynasty Great Qing in 1636, sometimes referred to as the Predynastic Qing. In 1644 the Shunzhi Emperor established the dynastic capital in Beijing and was enthroned in the Forbidden City shortly after the fall of the Ming dynasty. The Qing dynasty completely conquered the Ming dynasty's rump regimes by 1662.Origin of the name Qing
The name Great Qing first appeared in 1636. Since there was no official explanation from the Qing government about the origin of the name, there are competing explanations on the meaning of Qīng. The name may have been selected in reaction to the name of the Ming dynasty, whereas the character is composed of elements "sun" and "moon", both associated with the fire element of the Chinese zodiacal system. The character Qīng is composed of "water" and "azure", both associated with the water element. This association would justify the Qing conquest as defeat of fire by water. The water imagery of the new name may also have had Buddhist overtones of perspicacity and enlightenment and connections with the Bodhisattva Manjusri. Alternatively, Great Qing may come from ancient Chinese text Guanzi, which included clauses like "鏡大清者，視乎大明" and "鑑於大清，視於大明", whereas "Great Qing" referred to the sky and "Great Ming" referred to the Sun and Moon, with the sky covering the Sun and Moon. "Qing" is also the name of several rivers in Manchuria, at one of which Nurhaci won a key battle in 1619. Also, in its Manchu pronunciation, Daicing is a near homonym with the Mongol word daicin, meaning "militant" or "warlike".The name China for the Qing
The Qing dynasty was not founded by the Han people, but by the Manchus. Since its time the Qing became widely known internationally in English as "China" or the "Chinese Empire", with China being the standard English translation of Zhongguo or Dulimbai Gurun. They were commonly used in for instance international communications and treaties in addition to English-language mass media and newspapers etc. during the Qing period.While orthodox historians tend to emphasize the power of the Han people to "sinicize" their conquerors in their thought and institutions, scholars of the New Qing History tend to deconstruct the concept of "sinicization" and attempt to approach the Qing as an Inner Asian rather than Chinese empire, arguing that the Qing drew on both Chinese and Inner Asian political traditions. In response, scholar Zhang Jian pointed out the various ways in which the word "sinicization" can be understood. Scholar Yuanchong Wang emphasized that instead of focusing on the Manchu ethnic identity for the concept of "sinicization", he used the term "sinicization" in a different sense, in the hope to show how the Manchu regime, instead of the ethnic Manchus, promoted itself as the exclusively civilized Middle Kingdom or Zhongguo. He wrote that the Qing's depiction of itself as a Chinese empire was not hindered by the imperial house's Manchu ethnicity, especially after 1644, when the name "Chinese" took on a multiethnic meaning. Scholar Hui Wang noted that the recognition of the Qing dynasty as China by neighbouring dynasties and European states was also accompanied by the Qing's conscious effort to position itself as a Chinese dynasty and to inherit Chinese dynasties' role in the world.
Scholar Zhao Gang pointed out that the Qing emperors accepted their own Chinese identity, but it was not passive assimilation, as they actively changed old China from a Han-centered cultural notion to a multi-ethnic political entity; in other words, Manchu rulers gave a new meaning to the word "China" while becoming Chinese. After conquering China proper, the Manchus commonly called their state Zhongguo, and referred to it as Dulimbai Gurun in Manchu. The emperors equated the lands of the Qing state as Zhongguo in both the Chinese and Manchu languages, defining China as a multi-ethnic state, and rejecting the idea that Zhongguo only meant Han areas. The Qing emperors proclaimed that both Han and non-Han peoples were part of Zhongguo. They used both "Zhongguo" and "Great Qing" to refer to their state in official documents. "Chinese language" included Chinese, Manchu, and Mongolian languages, and "Chinese people" referred to all subjects of the empire.
When the Qing conquered Dzungaria in 1759, they proclaimed that the new land was absorbed into "China" in a Manchu-language memorial. The Manchu-language version of the Convention of Kyakhta, a treaty with the Russian Empire concerning criminal jurisdiction over bandits, referred to people from the Qing as "people from the Central Kingdom". The Qing also established legations and consulates known as the "Chinese Legation", "Imperial Consulate of China", "Imperial Chinese Consulate " or similar names in various countries with diplomatic relations, such as in the United Kingdom and the United States. Both English and Chinese terms such as "China" and "Zhongguo" were frequently used by Qing consulates and legations there to refer to the Qing state during their diplomatic correspondences with foreign states. The English name "China" was also used domestically by the Qing, such as in its officially released stamps since Qing set up a modern postal system in 1878. The postal stamps had a design of a large dragon in the centre, surrounded by a boxed frame with a bilingual inscription of "CHINA" and the local denomination "CANDARINS".
By the early 20th century, various textbooks with the names "Chinese geography" and "Chinese history" as approved by the Qing's Board of Education had emerged for educational purposes. For example, Chinese geography textbooks published in the period gave detailed descriptions of China's regional position and territorial space. The Qing dynasty created the first Chinese nationality law in 1909, which defined a Chinese national as any person born to a Chinese father. Children born to a Chinese mother inherited her nationality only if the father was stateless or had unknown nationality status. Jus sanguinis was chosen to define Chinese nationality so that the Qing could counter foreign claims on overseas Chinese populations and maintain the perpetual allegiance of its subjects living abroad through paternal lineage. A Chinese word called xuètǒng, which means "bloodline" as a literal translation, is used to explain the descent relationship that would characterize someone as being of Chinese descent, and therefore, eligible under the Qing laws and beyond, for Chinese citizenship.
List of names in English
Alternative names in English
;China;Chinese Empire
;Central State, or Middle Kingdom
;Qing Empire, Ching Empire, or Ch'ing Empire
;Empire of the Great Qing
;Great Qing
;Great Qing state
;Manchu dynasty
;Manchu empire
Historical names or romanizations officially used during the Qing dynasty in English
;Ta Ching;Tai Ching Ti Kuo
;Ta Tsing Empire
;China
;Chinese Empire
;Empire of China
Other (unofficial) historical names in English
;Cathay;Celestial Empire
;Flowery Kingdom
;Tartar Chinese Empire
;Tartar Chinese dynasty
;Manchu Tartar dynasty
;Tsing dynasty
;Ta-tsing dynasty
;Great Pure dynasty
Native language names within the Qing dynasty and contexts
The Qing dynasty was founded by the Manchu people, a Tungusic people who conquered the Ming dynasty, and by the 18th century it had extended its control into Inner Asia. During the Qing period languages like Chinese, Manchu, Mongolian, Tibetan, and Turki were often used in the Qing realm.The Qing dynasty was established in Chinese as "Da Qing" in 1636, but other Chinese names containing the name "Qing" had appeared in official documents such as treaties, including Da Qing Guo, Da Qing Di Guo, and Zhong Hua Da Qing Guo, in addition to the name Zhongguo. In the Chinese-language versions of its treaties and its maps of the world, the Qing government used "Great Qing" and "Zhongguo" interchangeably. Instead of the earlier Ming idea of an ethnic Han Chinese state, this new Qing China was a self-consciously multi-ethnic state. Han Chinese literati had some time to adapt this, but by the 19th century the notion of China as a multinational state had become the standard terminology for Han Chinese writers.
Apart from Zhongguo, the Qing court routinely used other terms as well in referring to its state in Chinese, such as guochao, wojie , and wochao or benchao. But it treated these titles and Zhongguo as interchangeable. For example, the Chinese version of the 1689 Treaty of Nerchinsk as inscribed in the border markers used Zhongguo as the state title: "All of the land to the south of the Xing’an mountains and all branches of the Heilong River belong to Zhongguo", but in a different version of the same treaty, it was replaced by the term "our territory" : "All of the land... belong to our territory". The Manchu term Dulimbai Gurun is the standard translation for the Chinese terms Zhongguo, Zhongyuan, and Hua and appeared in official documents produced by the Qing court beginning in 1689, if not earlier.
The Manchu name for the state was . While the Manchu term sounds like a phonetic rendering of Chinese Dà Qīng or Dai Ching, may in fact have been derived from a Mongolian word ", дайчин" that means "warrior". Daicing Gurun may therefore have meant "warrior state", a pun that was only intelligible to Manchu and Mongol people. In the later part of the dynasty, however, even the Manchus themselves had forgotten this possible meaning. Similar to in the Chinese language, Dulimbai Gurun is used alongside Daicing Gurun to refer to the Qing dynasty during the Qing. From a Manchu perspective, the concept of "China" embraced the entire empire, including Manchuria, Mongolia, Xinjiang, and Tibet.
In the Mongolian language, the state was usually known as or, along with other variation terms for the empire like "man-u Dai Chin ", "Manj uls", "the state of our Manchu Emperor", or "Emperor's state", which were traditionally used by some Mongol subjects under the Qing. On the other hand, unlike in Chinese and Manchu languages, the counterpart in Mongolian language for the name "Zhongguo" or "Dulimbai Gurun" did not appear to be commonly used among Mongol writers in such sense during the Qing period. The traditional Mongolian name for China is, which only refers to the areas of native Chinese. Whereas the counterpart for the name "Zhongguo" or "Dulimbai Gurun" in Mongolian appeared as, which was used by the Qing government to refer to the whole empire, including usages like "the Mongolian Kalun of China", when the term "Dumdadu ulus" started to be used among Mongol nobility themselves it seemed to be limited to the area south of the Great Wall, such as in the works of the Eight-Banner bannerman Lomi and Injannashi since 1735. Nevertheless, while early Mongol historians presented the idea of the Mongols as a distinct entity under the Qing, in the 19th century Mongol historians began to focus on the entire Qing, of which the Mongols, along with the Manchus, Han Chinese, and Tibetans, were only one part.
In the Tibetan language, the Qing dynasty is known as, and the Qing emperors were referred to as the Emperor of China and "the Great Emperor" during the Qing era. For example, in the Treaty of Thapathali of 1856 both Tibetans and Nepalese agreed to "regard the Chinese Emperor as heretofore with respect, in accordance with what has been written". The traditional Tibetan term for "China", ་ was commonly used among Tibetans at the time, which generally referred to the areas of Han Chinese and Manchus in the east, and the term itself did not indicate any specific connection between Tibet and China, even though Tibet was subordinated to the Qing dynasty since the 18th century. However, the counterpart for the name "Zhongguo" or "Dulimbai Gurun" did appear in the Tibetan language as which was used by Qing rulers like Qianlong Emperor in for example the Tibetan translation of the Śūraṅgama Sūtra he compiled in 1763 and the Tibetan-language inscription of his 1792 article The Discourse of Lama to refer to China.
In the Uyghur language, the Qing dynasty is known as چىڭ سۇلالىسى, and the Qing emperors were referred to as the "Chinese khagan" during the Qing era, where "khāqān" is a Persianized form of the traditional title used by the Turkic peoples to refer to a ruler, and Chīn is a traditional Turco-Persian word for China and was used by the Turki subjects in Xinjiang to refer to the country or area ruled by the Qing emperors during the period. The terms Khiṭāy and Bijīn were sometimes also used by the Turki subjects to refer to the Qing dynasty at that time. The name "Chinese khagan" referring to the Emperor of China as a symbol of power appeared in medieval Persian literature works like the great 11th-century epic poem Shahnameh which were circulated widely in Xinjiang, and during the Qing dynasty the Turkic Muslim subjects in Xinjiang associated the Qing rulers with this name and commonly referred to the Qing emperors as such.
There are also derogatory names in some languages for the Qing, such as Mǎn Qīng and Dá Qīng, used by anti-Qing revolutionaries in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. On the other hand, before the signing of the Sino-Japanese Friendship and Trade Treaty in 1871, the first treaty between Qing China and the Empire of Japan, Japanese representatives once raised objections to China's use of the term "中國" in the treaty, declaring that the term Zhongguo was "meant to compare with the frontier areas of the country" and insisted that only "Great Qing" be used for the Qing in the Chinese version of the treaty. However, this was firmly rejected by the Qing representatives: "Our country China has been called Zhongguo for a long time since ancient times. We have signed treaties with various countries, and while Great Qing did appear in the first lines of such treaties, in the body of the treaties Zhongguo was always being used. There has never been a precedent for changing the country name". The Chinese representatives believed that Zhongguo as a country name equivalent to "Great Qing" could naturally be used internationally, which could not be changed. In the end, both sides agreed that while in the first lines "Great Qing" would be used, whether the Chinese text in the body of the treaty would use the term Zhongguo in the same manner as "Great Qing" would be up to China's discretion.