The market in Europe and America for tea, a new drink in the West, has expanded greatly during the eighteenth century.

Additionally, there is a continuing demand for Chinese silk and porcelain, but China, still in its preindustrial stage, wants little that the West has to offer, causing the Westerners, mostly British, to incur an unfavorable balance of trade.

To remedy the situation, the foreigners develop a third-party trade, exchanging their merchandise in India and Southeast Asia for raw materials and semi-processed goods, which finds a ready market in Guangzhou.

Raw cotton and opium from India have become the staple British imports into China by the early nineteenth century, in spite of the fact that opium is prohibited entry by imperial decree.

The opium traffic is made possible through the connivance of profit-seeking merchants and a corrupt bureaucracy.

The Qing regime is determined to protect itself not only from internal rebellion but also from foreign invasion.

After China Proper had been subdued, the Manchus had conquered Outer Mongolia (now the Mongolian People's Republic) in the late seventeenth century.

In the eighteenth century, they gain control of Central Asia as far as the Pamir Mountains and establish a protectorate over the area commonly known in the West as Tibet, but which the Chinese call Xizang.

The Qing thus become the first dynasty to eliminate successfully all danger to China Proper from across its land borders.

Under Manchu rule the empire grows to include a larger area than before or since; Taiwan, the last outpost of anti-Manchu resistance, is also incorporated into China for the first time.

In addition, Qing emperors receive tribute from the various border states.

The chief threat to China's integrity does not come overland, as it has so often in the past, but by sea, reaching the southern coastal area first.

Western traders, missionaries, and soldiers of fortune had begun to arrive in large numbers even before the Qing, in the sixteenth century.

The empire's inability to evaluate correctly the nature of the new challenge or to respond flexibly to it will result in the demise of the Qing and the collapse of the entire millennia-old framework of dynastic rule.

The success of the Qing dynasty in maintaining the old order proves a liability when the empire is confronted with growing challenges from seafaring Western powers.

The centuries of peace and self-satisfaction dating back to Ming times have encouraged little change in the attitudes of the ruling elite.

The imperial Neo-Confucian scholars accept as axiomatic the cultural superiority of Chinese civilization and the position of the empire at the hub of their perceived world.

To question this assumption, to suggest innovation, or to promote the adoption of foreign ideas wis viewed as tantamount to heresy.

Imperial purges deal severely with those who deviate from orthodoxy.

The Manchus are sensitive to the need for security along the northern land frontier and therefore are prepared to be realistic in dealing with Russia.

The Treaty of Nerchinsk (1689) with the Russians, drafted to bring to an end a series of border incidents and to establish a border between Siberia and Manchuria (northeast China) along the Heilong Jiang (Amur River), is China's first bilateral agreement with a European power.

In 1727 the Treaty of Kyakhta delimits the remainder of the eastern portion of the Sino-Russian border.

Western diplomatic efforts to expand trade on equal terms are rebuffed, the official Chinese assumption being that the empire is not in need of foreign—and thus inferior—products.

Despite this attitude, trade flourishes, even though after 1760 all foreign trade is confined to Guangzhou, where the foreign traders have to limit their dealings to a dozen officially licensed Chinese merchant firms.

Trade is not China's sole basis of contact with the West.

Since the thirteenth century, Roman Catholic missionaries have been attempting to establish their church in China.

Although by 1800 only a few hundred thousand Chinese have been converted, the missionaries—mostly Jesuits—contribute greatly to Chinese knowledge in such fields as cannon casting, calendar making, geography, mathematics, cartography, music, art, and architecture.

The Jesuits are especially adept at fitting Christianity into a Chinese framework and are condemned by a papal decision in 1704 for having tolerated the continuance of Confucian ancestor rites among Christian converts.

The papal decision quickly weakens the Christian movement, which it proscribead as heterodox and disloyal.

The Khalkha royal families and the first Jebtsundamba Khutughtu, having crossed the Gobi Desert to seek help from the Qing Dynasty, submit to the emperor.

The Society of Jesus (Jesuits) has been successful in penetrating China and serving at the Imperial court.

They have impressed the Chinese with their knowledge of European astronomy and mechanics, and in fact run the Imperial Observatory.

Their accurate methods allow the Emperor to successfully predict eclipses, one of his ritual duties.

Other Jesuits function as court painters.

The Jesuits in turn are impressed by the Chinese Confucian elite, and adapt to that lifestyle.

The primary goal of the Jesuits is to spread Catholicism, but here they have a problem.

The Chinese elite are attached to Confucianism, while Buddhism and Taoism are mostly practiced by the common people and lower aristocracy of this period.

Despite this, all three provide the framework of both state and home life.

Part of Confucian and Taoist practices involve veneration of one's ancestors.

The Kangxi Emperor had at first been friendly to the Jesuit Missionaries working in China, as he is highly grateful for the services they have brought to him, in the areas of astronomy, diplomacy and gun manufacture.

The contribution of the Jesuits to artillery had allowed the Chinese Emperor to reconquer Taiwan.

Jesuit diplomacy, through the negotiations of Jean-François Gerbillon and Thomas Pereira, had allowed him to stop Russian expansionism in the East through the Treaty of Nerchinsk in 1689.

The Jesuits will also have made many converts by the end of the seventeenth century,.

The Kangxi Emperor on March 22 ssues the Edict of Toleration recognizing all the Roman Catholic Church, not just the Jesuits, and legalizing missions and their conversion of Chinese people.

Emperor Kangxi has ordered the compilation of a dictionary of Chinese characters, which will become known as the Kangxi Dictionary.

This is seen as an attempt by Kangxi to gain support from the Han Chinese scholar-bureaucrats, as many of them had initially refused to serve him and remained loyal to the Ming Dynasty.

However, by persuading the scholars to work on the dictionary without asking them to formally serve the Qing imperial court, Kangxi has led them to gradually taking on greater responsibilities until they are assuming the duties of state officials.

Beijing becomes the largest city of the world in 1710, taking the lead from Constantinople.