Abstract: Initially, vocational education is not of the modern significance, and it experienced the implementation process of the transformation and expansion from a name to the significance. In ancient China there was no the name of vocational education. In the late Qing Dynasty these types of education were called industrial education. The threat of modern western firepower and the revolution movement of Taiping Heavenly Kingdom let the advocators of the Westernization Movement recognize the importance of military technology and machine manufacturing, who had the need and motivation to learn western technology. And there emerged the wave of learning the "western art", which promoted industrial education thoughts through early bourgeois reformists, the reformers of the reform movement, and the evolution and development of new education movement in the "New Deal" period to the climax; directly promoted the establishment of the industrial education practice and industrial education system in the corresponding historical stage of the late Qing Dynasty.

Key words: late Qing Dynasty, industrial education, education ideological trend, industrial school, modern education, “new educational system” in the late Qing Dynasty