Following the death of his father, the Shunzhi Emperor, young Xuanye ascended the Qing throne under the reign name Kangxi. Guided initially by regents, he would go on to personally rule for six decades, consolidating Qing control over China, expanding the empire's borders, and presiding over a cultural and economic flowering still regarded as a golden age.
Xuanye was only seven when his father died of smallpox, and the boy—who had himself survived the disease, leaving him immune and considered a stronger candidate for the throne—was enthroned under a council of four regents in early 1662. The formal reign title Kangxi, meaning 'peaceful and prosperous,' would eventually describe not just a name but sixty-one years of Chinese history, the longest reign of any emperor in the country's annals.
Once he came of age and wrested actual power from his regents in 1669, arresting the domineering regent Oboi in a coup staged by a group of teenage wrestlers he had personally trained, Kangxi proved a ferociously capable ruler. He crushed the Revolt of the Three Feudatories, brought Taiwan under Qing control, pushed Qing borders deep into Mongolia and Siberia, and negotiated the Treaty of Nerchinsk with Russia, one of the first modern-style border treaties China ever signed.
He was also a genuine scholar-king, patronizing vast compilation projects like the Kangxi Dictionary and inviting Jesuit missionaries to court to teach him astronomy, mathematics, and cartography, even as he insisted on Manchu martial traditions like mounted archery. His reign is remembered in China much as Louis XIV's is in France—as the ripening of a dynasty into its most confident and expansive age.
Key people: Kangxi Emperor, Oboi