In 1644, the Manchus took over China and founded the Qing dynasty. The Qing weren't the worst rulers; under them the arts flowered (China's greatest novel, a work known variously as The Dream of the Red Chamber, A Dream of Red Mansions, and The Story of the Stone, was written during the Qing) and culture bloomed. Moreover, they attempted to copy Chinese institutions and philosophy to a much greater extent than the Mongols of the Yuan. However, in their attempt to emulate the Chinese, they were even more conservative and inflexible than the Ming. Their approach to foreign policy, which was to make everyone treat the Emperor like the Son of Heaven and not acknowledge other countries as being equal to China, didn't rub the West the right way, even when the Chinese were in the moral right (as in the Opium Wars, which netted Britain Hong Kong and Kowloon). To live during the Qing Dynasty was to live in interesting times. Most importantly, the Western world attempted to make contact on a government-to-government basis, and, at least initially, failed. The Chinese (more specifically, the ultra-conservative Manchus) had no room in their world-view for the idea of independent, equal nations (this viewpoint, to a certain degree, still persists today). There was the rest of the world, and then there was China. It wasn't that they rejected the idea of a community of nations; it's that they couldn't conceive of it. It would be like trying to teach a Buddhist monk about the Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost. This viewpoint was so pervasive that Chinese reformers who advocated more flexibility in China's dealings with the West were often accused of being Westerners with Chinese faces.