New research on an army that details the military system of Qing China, which fought a variety of enemies ranging from Ming Chinese, Mongols, and Tibetans to Russians and Western Colonial armies.
This book describes and analyses the Manchu, or Qing, army in all its aspects. The emphasis lays on the Qing army in the seventeenth and early eighteenth century, because this is the time when the Manchu military system developed its own characteristics and reached maturity. Furthermore, having achieved this and in the process conquered one of the largest empires ever gained, the Qing army changed but little before c. 1850, when the Taiping War marked the beginning of the end of the Qing empire, as well as changed the character of the Manchu military system.