East Asia (1828–1971 CE)

Empires Unraveled, Revolutions Forged, and Economic Miracles Begun

Geography & Environmental Context

East Asia encompasses the great continental and insular arc from the Tibetan Plateau to the Pacific—two subregions held constant in this framework:

• Upper East Asia: Mongolia and western China (Tibet, Xinjiang, Qinghai, Gansu, Ningxia, and adjoining uplands).

• Lower East Asia: eastern and southern China, Taiwan, the Korean Peninsula, Japan, and the Ryukyu and Izu island chains.

The region spans deserts, plateaus, and alpine basins in the interior to humid river plains and monsoon coasts in the east. Its great rivers—the Yellow, Yangtze, and Pearl—linked agricultural cores to seaports that became gateways of both commerce and foreign control.

Climate & Environmental Shifts

Monsoon cycles continued to shape harvests. The 19th century saw floods, droughts, and famine in China (notably the North China Famine, 1876–79). Deforestation and siltation worsened flood damage in the Yellow River basin. The 20th century brought dam projects, terracing, and reforestation but also wartime devastation and later industrial pollution. Typhoons and earthquakes periodically struck Japan, Taiwan, and coastal China.

Subsistence & Settlement

• Rural continuity: Rice, wheat, and millet remained staples; peasants formed the majority until mid-century land reforms.

• Urban growth: Treaty ports (Shanghai, Tianjin, Yokohama, Nagasaki) became colonial enclaves; later, modern metropolises—Tokyo, Osaka, Seoul, Shanghai, Beijing—drove industrialization.

• Migration: Millions moved within and beyond China as laborers and merchants; Mongolian and Tibetan pastoralists faced sedentarization under imperial and later socialist regimes.

Technology & Material Culture

Western industrial technology entered through ports and reforms. Railways, telegraphs, and steam navigation spread from the 1870s. After 1945, mechanization, electrification, and mass production reshaped daily life. Traditional crafts—porcelain, silk, lacquer, calligraphy—remained cultural touchstones even amid industrial growth. In the interior, Buddhist monasteries and nomadic tents coexisted with new socialist collectives and mines.

Movement & Interaction Corridors

• Continental routes: Trans-Siberian and Chinese trunk railways integrated the interior.

• Maritime networks: The Pacific and South China Sea tied treaty ports to global trade.

• Diasporas: Chinese merchants, Korean and Japanese migrants, and Tibetan traders extended East Asian networks across Asia and beyond.

• Military corridors: Repeated wars—the Opium Wars, Sino-Japanese conflicts, Pacific War, and Korean War—turned transport arteries into front lines.

Cultural & Symbolic Expressions

Confucian and Buddhist traditions persisted but were challenged by Christianity, socialism, and nationalism. The Meiji Restoration (1868) in Japan redefined tradition as modernization; Chinese reformers sought to “self-strengthen” through Western science; Mongolian and Tibetan Buddhism adapted to socialist oversight. Literature and art blended realism and modernism: Lu Xun in China, Tanizaki and Kawabata in Japan, Kim Sowol in Korea. Folk and classical forms—from Chinese opera to Japanese kabuki—remained central to identity.

Environmental Adaptation & Resilience

Irrigation and terracing stabilized yields; community granaries and kinship networks mitigated famine. After mid-century, land reform and collectivization in China, North Korea, and Mongolia transformed agrarian systems. Japan’s and South Korea’s reforestation and flood-control programs paralleled rapid industrial pollution control efforts by the late 1960s.

Political & Military Shocks

• China: Opium Wars (1839–60) opened treaty ports; the Taiping (1850–64) and Boxer (1899–1901) uprisings shattered Qing control. The 1911 Revolution ended dynastic rule; the People’s Republic (1949) followed decades of warlordism, invasion, and civil war.

• Japan: The Meiji state (1868) industrialized, defeated China (1894–95) and Russia (1904–05), built an empire, and after WWII reconstruction became an economic power.

• Korea: From late-19th-century reforms through Japanese annexation (1910–45) to division after liberation and the Korean War (1950–53).

• Mongolia: Gained independence from Qing (1911), became a Soviet-aligned republic (1924).

• Tibet & Xinjiang: Integrated into the PRC (1950s) through force and reform; revolts in Tibet (1959) and Xinjiang repression marked ongoing contestation.

• Cold War: East Asia was divided—communist mainland versus capitalist maritime rim—anchoring the global bipolar order.

Transition

Between 1828 and 1971, East Asia was remade through revolution, industrialization, and ideological division. Dynastic empires gave way to republics, colonies to nation-states. Japan and the “Little Tigers” entered early economic miracles; China and its interior pursued socialist transformation; Korea remained split; Mongolia and Tibet navigated life within Soviet and Chinese spheres. Across the region, modernization carried the weight of memory—Confucian ethics, Buddhist cosmology, and ancestral landscapes enduring beneath steel, slogans, and neon.

The Chinese continue to hold Kashgar with occasional interruptions from Muslim-centered groups.

One of the most serious of these had occurred in 1827, when the territory and the city had been taken by Jahanghir Khoja, a member of the influential East Turkestan Appaki khoja clan; however, Chang-lung, the Chinese general of Ili, regains possession of Kashgar and the other rebellious cities in early 1828.

The forty-year-old Jahanghir Khoja, captured and delivered to Beijing, is carried for several weeks in a mobile iron cage through the main streets of Beijing.

He is finally brought to the Daoguang Emperor for interrogation, but, having gone mad due to bad treatment, he cannot answer any questions.

Immediately after the interrogation is completed, he is executed, his body cut into numerous pieces and his bones thrown to dogs.

 

The unsuccessful Chinese resistance to international opium smugglers—among whom Britain is the most flagrant offender—end with the Treaty of Nanking, signed on August 29, 1842, and the British Supplementary Treaty of the Bogue, signed on October 8, 1843.

The treaties provide for the payment of a large indemnity by China, cession of five ports for British trade and residence, and the right of British citizens to be tried by British courts.

Other Western countries will quickly demand and be given similar privileges.

The war has not legalized the opium trade, but it has halted Chinese efforts to stop it.

China's economic tensions, military defeats at Western hands, and anti-Manchu sentiments all combine to produce widespread unrest, especially in the south.

South China had been the last area to yield to the Qing conquerors and the first to be exposed to Western influence.

The southern Chinese province of Guangdong, the homeland of the Taiping people, is beset with accelerating social unrest.

After the first Opium War, government prestige declines, and officials lose their capacity to reconcile communal feuding.

The greatest among such conflicts is that between the native settlers and the so-called guest settlers: the clannish, industrious Hakka, a Han subgroup who had migrated in the late twelfth century from North China, to Kwangsi and western Guangdong, mainly from eastern Guangdong.

Hong Xiuquan, founding ruler of the Heavenly Kingdom, the youngest son of four children in a poor but proud Hakka family, had shown early signs of great intelligence, and his entire village sponsored him in his studies, hoping that he would eventually pass the Confucian civil service examination, enter the government bureaucracy, and bring wealth and honor to his family and friends.

Hung, an epileptic, had failed the civil service examination several times however, and, influenced by Christian teachings, had a series of visions and believed himself to be the son of God, the younger brother of Jesus Christ, sent to reform China.

His schoolmate Feng Yunshan, an able organizer, utilizes Hong's ideas to organize a new religious group, the Pai Shang-ti Hui ("God Worshipers"), which he forms among the impoverished miners, charcoal workers and peasants of central Kwangsi, most of whom belong to the Hakka.

In 1847, Hung joins Feng and the God Worshippers, and is immediately accepted as the new leader of the group.

Conditions in the countryside are deplorable, and sentiment runs high against the foreign Manchu rulers of China.

As a result, Hung and Feng begin to plot rebellion.

Hong's movement—perhaps under the impact of Protestant missions—is quite austere, and it opposes magic, idols, and belief in spirits.

He considers the New Testament to be authoritative for his new sect, and its rapid growth-aided by connections with other revolutionary movements-soon results in a genuine danger to the Manchu emperor.

Seven of the "best known" opium clippers go missing in 1849: Sylph, Coquette, Kelpie, Greyhound, Don Juan, Mischief, and Anna Eliza.

Sylph was a clipper ship built at Sulkea, opposite Calcutta, in 1831 for the Parsi merchant Rustomjee Cowasjee.

After her purchase by the Hong Kong-based merchant house Jardine Matheson, in 1833 Sylph went on to set an unbroken speed record by sailing from Calcutta to Macao in seventeen days, seventeen hours.

Her primary role was to transport opium between various ports in the Far East.

She disappears en route to Singapore, possibly captured and burned by pirates based on Hainan Island.

Other sources believe that she was shipwrecked on the rocks of Pedra Branca off the coast of Singapore while carrying a cargo of opium to the value of five hundred and fifty seven thousand two hundred Spanish dollars.

Qing emperor Daoguang, having ascended the throne in 1820 with the Imperial treasury having greatly depleted during previous reigns, has attempted to restore the nation's finances by personal austerity.

His attempts to stop the opium trade carried on by Western merchants results in the first Opium War between Britain and China.

The cost of the war and the large indemnity paid under terms of the peace treaty further increases discontent.

The need to repair the dikes along the Yellow River to prevent flooding and further famine becomes urgent, as does repair of the Grand Canal, which brings rice from South China to the capital at Peking.

Yet corrupt officials embezzle money for repairs, and the Daoguang emperor fears to reduce the size of the labor force lest repair problems increase.

By 1849, the Grand Canal is impassable, and the rice shipments have to be made by sea, where pirates endanger them.

The thousands of unemployed canal boatmen help fan the flames of unrest.

China's problems are compounded by natural calamities of unprecedented proportions, including droughts, famines, and floods.

Government neglect of public works is in part responsible for this and other disasters, and the Qing administration does little to relieve the widespread misery caused by them.