6 Historical Leaders Who Financially Ruined Their Countries

Qianlong Emperor of China

The Qianlong Emperor was the sixth emperor in the Manchu Qing Dynasty who ruled over China from 1735 to 1796. Although his early years saw the continuation of an era of relative prosperity in China, his final years saw troubles at home and abroad.

China was increasingly lagging behind the West, but instead of modernizing the country and reforming inept governance, the Qianlong Emperor busied himself with a military expansion of his empire. It was also a very expensive enterprise. The funds in the Imperial Treasury were almost all put into military expeditions. As a result the economy suffered, and the decline in living standards was immense. The Qing Dynasty’s overall contempt for commerce, foreign trade, and technological innovations, as well as its isolationism and self-absorbed imperial arrogance had also contributed to its eventual downfall.

In his later years Qianlong gave free reign to the corrupt officials whose personal fortunes exceeded that of the country’s depleted treasury. Qianlong began his reign with about 33,950,000 taels of silver in Treasury surplus. However, due to long term embezzlement and corruption by officials, frequent wars and rebellions, huge palace constructions, as well as his own extravagant lifestyle, all of these cost the treasury a total of 150,200,000 silver taels. This misrule and the lack of political reforms ushered the beginning of the gradual decline and eventual demise of the Qing dynasty and empire.