Across one hundred episodes, Yang Zhao moves from the Ming-Qing transition and the Kangxi-Qianlong era to the crises of the late nineteenth century. He asks how a Manchu dynasty unified and governed China, why its institutions proved resistant to change, and how court, local society, and foreign powers interacted.
By comparing imperial worldviews with a new international order, the course explains how reform, war, diplomacy, intellectual change, and revolution emerged from a confrontation unlike anything China had faced before.
