Delighted that this paper with Kristina Butaeva @Butaeva_K and Alexander Shapoval is now public. Before discussing the paper, it is important to note that Kristina, who is currently a postdoc at @UCStoneCenter, will be on the job market this year. She is an absolutely first-rate scholar whose presence would make any social science community in the world a more vibrant one. Our analysis uses a remarkable data set from the Liaoning province in Northeast China developed by James Lee and Cameron Campbell, which allows us to study the evolution for status mobility for six generations from the late 1700's to the end of Imperial China. These data allow us to estimate a nonhomogeneous Markov transition matrix for mobility and thereby reveal how mobility evolved. We employ some novel intergenerational mobility calculations that derive from alternative mobility concepts—the persistence of class origin across generations and intergenerational class movement. These tools reveal some broad patterns. While each generation possesses a specific mobility structure, we identify two epochs that characterize them. Before 1850, the generation-specific transition matrices appear to exhibit convergence toward a steady state. In contrast, the second epoch, beginning around 1850, exhibits unstable intergenerational class dynamics that persist until the dynasty’s collapse. This epoch reveals a collapse of upward mobility for the late empire. Interestingly, the transition between epochs coincides with the Opium Wars and Taiping Rebellion, demonstrating how the footprints of major crises in the late Qing era appear in the mobility dynamics.