page_title: Yunnan
section_title: Ming and Qing dynasties
hierarchical_section_title: Yunnan / History / Ming and Qing dynasties
caption_attribution_description: English: A street in Kunming between the east and west pagodas.
context_page_description: Yunnan is a landlocked province in the southwest of the People's Republic of China. The province spans approximately 394,000 square kilometres and has a population of 48.300 million. The capital of the province is Kunming. The province borders the Chinese provinces of Guizhou, Sichuan, autonomous regions of Guangxi, and Tibet as well as Southeast Asian countries: Vietnam, Laos, and Myanmar. Yunnan is China's fourth least developed province based on disposable income per capita in 2014.
  Yunnan is situated in a mountainous area, with high elevations in the northwest and low elevations in the southeast. Most of the population lives in the eastern part of the province. In the west, the altitude can vary from the mountain peaks to river valleys by as much as 3,000 metres. Yunnan is rich in natural resources and has the largest diversity of plant life in China. Of the approximately 30,000 species of higher plants in China, Yunnan has perhaps 17,000 or more. Yunnan's reserves of aluminium, lead, zinc and tin are the largest in China, and there are also major reserves of copper and nickel.
context_section_description: The Ming installed Mu Ying and his family as hereditary aristocrats in Yunnan. 
  During the Ming and Qing dynasties, large areas of Yunnan were administered under the native chieftain system. Under the Qing dynasty a war with Burma also occurred in the 1760s due to the attempted consolidation of borderlands under local chiefs by both China and Burma.
  Yunnan was a destination for Han Chinese during Yuan rule. Colonizers moved into the area during Ming and Qing rule. During the Ming dynasty, 3 million Han Chinese mostly from Nanjing (before the original Nanjing population was largely replaced by Wu speakers) and some from Shanxi and Hebei settled in Yunnan.
  Although largely forgotten, the bloody Panthay Rebellion of the Muslim Hui people and other local minorities against the Manchu rulers of the Qing dynasty caused the deaths of up to a million people in Yunnan. The Manchu official Shuxing'a started an anti-Muslim massacre which led to the Panthay Rebellion. Shuxing'a developed a deep hatred of Muslims after an incident where he was stripped naked and nearly lynched by a mob of Muslims. He ordered several Muslim rebels to be slow sliced to death. Tariq Ali wrote about the real incident in one of his novels, claiming the Muslims who had nearly lynched Shuxing'a were not Hui Muslims but belonged to another ethnicity but nevertheless the Manchu official blamed all Muslims for the incident. A British officer testified that the Muslims did not rebel for religious reasons and that the Chinese were tolerant of different religions and were unlikely to have caused the revolt by interfering with the practising of Islam. Loyalist Muslim forces helped Qing crush the rebel Muslims. The Qing armies only massacred Muslims who had rebelled or supported the rebels and spared Muslims who took no part in the uprising.
  In 1894, George Ernest Morrison, an Australian correspondent for The Times, traveled from Beijing to British-occupied Burma via Yunnan. His book, An Australian in China, details his experiences.
  The 1905 Tibetan Rebellion in which Tibetan Buddhist Lamas attacked and killed French Catholic missionaries spread to Yunnan.
caption: Kunming Street
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