Pingding Kuo'erka desheng tu

An extremely rare complete set of eight prints describing the Gurkha-Qing Campaigns in Tibet between 1791 and 1793.

During his long reign the Qianlong Emperor oversaw Ten Great Campaigns which considerably extended the size of the Qing Empire. The most important of these was in Eastern Turkestan where Qing troops fought the Dzungars in a series of battles that lasted over four years (1755-1759). In 1764 Qianlong commissioned a series of sixteen drawings that were executed by four Jesuits (Castiglione, Attiret, Sichelbarth and Damascène) who lived at Court at the time. The drawings were in turn sent to Paris where Charles-Nicolas Cochin of the Academie Royale supervised the production of sixteen engraved plates which were eventually sent back to Beijing. That series has subsequently become known as the 'Victorious battle prints of the campaign in Dzungaria and Chinese Turkestan' (Pingding Zhun Hui liangbu desheng tu).

Emperor Qianlong was so pleased the result that it became his ambition to develop engraving skills amongst court artists at home. During his reign he commissioned a further seven suites of engravings commemorating military campaigns in and beyond his empire as well as one showing European-style gardens in the north-east corner of the Yuan-ming yuan.

Economic and other tensions between Nepal and Tibet led to the first Invasion of Southern Tibet by Gurkha forces in 1788. The Qianlong Emperor sent troops from Sichuan to restore order, but by the time they reached Lhasa, the invadors had already left. After a period of negotiations relations broke down again in 1791 and the Gurkhas launched a second invasion. This time Qianlong dispatched an army of 70,000 men under the command of the trusted Manchu General Fu Kang'an (1753-1796), who had in 1787 suppressed the armed insurrection against Qing rule in Taiwan. General Hai Lancha (1740-1793) was his Second-in-Command. Troops entered Tibet from Qinghai in the north, thereby shortening the march but forcing them to cross high mountain passes during the middle of winter. They reached Central Tibet in the summer of 1792 and within two or three months could report that they had won a series of victories that pushed the Gurkha armies across the crest of the Himalaya and back into the valley of Kathmandu. Fu Kang'an continued to pursue Gurkha troops into Nepal until 1793, and eventually forced them to sign a treaty which made Nepal a vasall state of the Qing empire.

The present set of eight prints was commissioned by the Qianlong Emperor in the year of his abdication In October 1795 Qianlong officially announced that in the spring of the following year he would voluntarily abdicate his throne and pass the crown to his son, not wishing to reign for longer than his grandfather the Kangxi Emperor. The Gurkha wars document the Qing court's continuing sensitivity to conditions in Tibet and they depict seven military victories as well as the ceremony concluding hostilities 'Capturing Camu', 'Capturing Ma Gaer and Xiaer', 'Capturing Jilong', 'Capturing Resuo Bridge', 'Capturing Xiebulu', 'Capturing Dongjiao Mountain', 'Capturing Palanggu', and 'The Gurkha vassals arrive in the Capital'.