Manchu

The Manchus (or Man) are a minority people concentrated in the northeastern provinces of Liaoning, Heilongjian, Jilin, and Inner Mongolia in China. In the 1990 national census, the number of Manchus in China was 9.84 million. The Manchus are descended from a group of peoples of northeast Asia collectively termed the Tungus. The Manchus also claim descent from rulers of the Jurchen Jin dynasty (1126–1234). In the late sixteenth century, the Manchu tribes were organized into a collective nation under the rule of the greatest of their chiefs, Nurhaci (1559–1626). Nurhaci's successor, Abahai (1592–1643), changed the name of his people to Manchu in order to remove the historical memory that as Jurchens they had been under Chinese rule. The Manchus continued to grow in military power in the border region northeast of the Great Wall and eventually overthrew the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) and established China's last imperial era, the Qing, or Manchu, dynasty (1644–1912). The Manchus remained an important symbolic people in China during the twentieth century, as was demonstrated by their being named in 1912 as one of the five races that constituted the new Chinese Republic.

The Manchu language is a member of the Tungusic branch of the Altaic language family and has some structural similarities to Japanese, Korean, and Mongolian. During the Jin dynasty, Jurchen official documents were transcribed using a modified form of the Khitan script. In 1599, as part of his nation-building, Nurhaci commissioned two scholars to modify the Mongolian script in order to create a written form of the Manchu language. This form of written Manchu is called the Old Manchu script because it was further modified in the 1620s by the addition of dots and circles, which eliminated some of the linguistic ambiguities that had resulted from the first attempt to modify the Mongolian script. This new script remained the standard form of the written language throughout the Qing dynasty. Few native speakers of Manchu remain in China, although volumes of the written script are preserved as official documents of the Qing dynasty and are housed in the national archive in Beijing and provincial archives in the northeast.

Crossley, Pamela Kyle. (1990) Orphan Warriors: Three Manchu Generations and the End of the Qing World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Li, Gertraude Roth. (2000) Manchu: A Textbook for Reading Documents. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.

Michael, Franz. (1972) The Origin of Manchu Rule in China: Frontier and Bureaucracy as Interacting Forces in the Chinese Empire. New York: Octagon Books.

State Statistical Bureau. (1998) China Statistical Yearbook. Beijing: China Statistical Publishing House.