The Manchus are a Tungusic East Asian ethnic group native to Manchuria in Northeast Asia. They are an officially recognized ethnic minority in China and the people from whom Manchuria derives its name. The Later Jin (1616–1636) and Qing (1636–1912) dynasties of China were established and ruled by the Manchus, who are descended from the Jurchen people who earlier established the Jin dynasty (1115–1234) in northern China.
The Manchus are the largest branch of the Tungusic peoples and are distributed throughout China, forming the country's fourth-largest ethnic group. They inhabit 31 Chinese provincial regions. Liaoning has the largest population and Hebei, Heilongjiang, Jilin, Inner Mongolia, and Beijing each have over 100,000 Manchu residents. About half of the population lives in Liaoning and one-fifth in Hebei. Manchu autonomous counties in China include Xinbin, Xiuyan, Qinglong, Fengning, Yitong, Qingyuan, Weichang, Kuancheng, Benxi, Kuandian, Huanren, Fengcheng, and Beizhen, including over 300 Manchu towns and townships.
Etymology "Manchu" (, ) was adopted as the official name of the people by Emperor Hong Taiji in 1635, replacing the earlier name "Jurchen". Allegedly, manju was an old term for the Jianzhou Jurchens, although the etymology is not well understood. The Chinese characters chosen to translate the Manchu name are which, like the character for "Qing" (), include the water radical. Possibly this was done because the Ming dynasty's name (), which means "bright", represents fire, and water extinguishes fire.
The Jiu Manzhou Dang, archives of early 17th-century documents, contains the earliest use of Manchu. According to the Qing dynasty's official historical record, the Researches on Manchu Origins, the ethnic name came from Mañjuśrī. The Qianlong Emperor supported that point of view and wrote poems on the subject.
The same interpretation was held by Qing dynasty scholar Meng Sen, who also suggested that the name might stem from Li Manzhu (), the chieftain of the Jianzhou Jurchens.
Scholar Chang Shan theorized that Manju is a compound word, formed from man, from the word mangga (), meaning "strong", and ju (), meaning "arrow". In this interpretation, Manju means "intrepid arrow".
Other hypotheses include Fu Sinian's "etymology of Jianzhou"; Zhang Binglin's "etymology of Manshi"; Ichimura Sanjiro's "etymology of Wuji and Mohe"; Sun Wenliang's "etymology of Manzhe"; "etymology of mangu(n) river" and so on.
An extensive etymological study from 2022 lends additional support to the view that manju is cognate with words referring to the lower Amur river in other Tungusic languages and can be reconstructed to Proto-Tungusic *mamgo 'lower Amur, large river'.
History
Early history
Origin
The Manchus are descended from the Jurchen people who earlier established the Jin dynasty in China. However, this is disputed by historians. The Jianzhou Jurchen originated in part from the Huligai, who were classified by the Liao dynasty as a separate ethnicity from the Jurchen people who founded the Jin dynasty. The same was true during the Yuan dynasty.
The Huligai lived near the lower reaches of the Songhua River and Mudanjiang. Later, they moved west and became a major component of the Jianzhou Jurchens, led by Möngke Temür, during the Ming dynasty; the Jianzhou Jurchens later became the Manchus. According to the records of Ming Dynasty officials, the Jianzhou Jurchens were descended from Mohe people who established the Balhae Kingdom. The name Mohe might refer to an ancestral Manchu population. The Mohe practiced pig husbandry and were mainly sedentary. They used pig and dog skins for coats. They were predominantly farmers and grew soybeans, wheat, millet, and rice, in addition to hunting.
In the 10th century AD, the term Jurchen first appeared in late Tang dynasty documents, referring to the state of Balhae in present-day northeastern China. The Jurchens were sedentary, settled farmers with advanced agriculture. They farmed grain and millet as their cereal crops, grew flax, and raised oxen, pigs, sheep, and horses. These farmers lived differently from the pastoral nomadism of the Mongols and the Khitans on the steppes.
In April 1019, Jurchen pirates raided Japan to kidnap and enslave Northern Kyushu residents. They killed a total of 374 Japanese, including governor Fujiwara Noritada, slaughtered 380 Japanese-owned livestock, and abducted 1,280 Japanese. Goryeo forces later captured eight ships, allowing for the return of a number of captives (variously reported as either 259 or 270). Alt URL The woman Uchikura no Ishime's report was copied. Jurchen raids on Japan in the 1019 Toi invasion, the Mongol invasions of Japan, and Japanese views of the Jurchens as "Tatar" "barbarians" (adopting China's barbarian-civilized binary), may have played a role in Japan's hostility to Manchus in later centuries. For example, Tokugawa Ieyasu viewed the unification of Manchu tribes as a threat to Japan. The Japanese mistakenly thought that Hokkaido (Ezochi) had a land bridge to Tartary (Orankai), where the Manchus lived, and that the Manchus could invade Japan. The Tokugawa shogunate bakufu sent a message to Korea via Tsushima, offering to help Korea against the 1627 Manchu invasion, but the offer was declined.
Liao dynasty Following the fall of Balhae, the Jurchens became vassals of the Liao dynasty, which was founded by Para-Mongolic Khitans. The Liao dynasty became the first state to control all of Manchuria.*Ruins of Identity: Ethnogenesis in the Japanese Islands By Mark Hudson Ledyard, 1983, 323. The Yalu River Jurchens became tributaries of Goryeo during the reign of Wang Geon, who called upon them during the wars of the Later Three Kingdoms period. The Jurchens switched allegiance between Liao and Goryeo multiple times. Posing a potential threat to Goryeo's border security, the Jurchens offered tribute to the Goryeo court, expecting gifts in return. Before the Jurchens overthrew the Khitan, married Jurchen women and Jurchen girls were raped by Liao Khitan envoys as a custom which caused resentment. The Jurchens and their Manchu descendants had Khitan linguistic and grammatical elements in their personal names, such as suffixes. Many Khitan names had a "ju" suffix. In the year 1114, Wanyan Aguda united the Jurchen tribes and established the Jin dynasty (1115–1234). His brother and successor, Wanyan Wuqimai defeated the Liao. After the fall of the Liao, the Jurchens went to war with the Northern Song dynasty, and captured most of northern China in the Jin–Song wars. During the Jin dynasty in the 1120s, the first Jurchen script came into use. It was mainly derived from Khitan script.
Yuan dynasty In 1206, the Mongols, then vassals of the Jurchens, revolted. Their resistance was led by Genghis Khan. The Jurchens were ultimately defeated by Ögedei Khan in 1234. Jurchen Jin emperor Wanyan Yongji's daughter Jurchen Princess Qiguo married Genghis Khan in exchange for relieving the Mongol siege upon Zhongdu (Beijing) in the Mongol conquest of the Jin dynasty. The Mongols then founded the Yuan dynasty. The Yuan grouped people into different categories based on how recently their state surrendered to the Yuan. Subjects of the southern Song were classified as southerners (nan ren) and also referred to as manzi. Subjects of the Jin dynasty, Western Xia, and the kingdom of Dali in Yunnan, southern China, were categorized as northerners, using the term Han. However, the use of the Han as the name of a class category by the Yuan dynasty was a different concept from Han ethnicity. To control the population of Manchuria, the Yuan Empire appointed its supporters from among the Koreans, Khitans, and Mongols as leaders of the Jurchens.Empire's Twilight: Northeast Asia Under the Mongols, by David M. Robinson, p34-35
Ethnic Han people were divided into two classes in the Yuan, Han Ren and Nan Ren. Additionally, the Yuan directive to treat Jurchens the same as Mongols referred to Jurchens and Khitans in the northwest (not the Jurchen homeland in the northeast), presumably in the lands of Qara Khitai, where many Khitans lived. However, it remains a mystery how the Jurchens lived there. Many Jurchens adopted Mongolian customs, names, and the Mongolian language. As time went on, fewer and fewer Jurchens could recognize their own script. The Jurchen Yehe Nara clan is of paternal Mongol origin.
Many Jurchen families descended from the original Jin Jurchen migrants in Han areas, such as those using the surnames Wang and Nian 粘 reclaimed their ethnicity and registered as Manchus. Wanyan () clan members who changed their surnames to Wang () after the Mongol conquest of the Jin dynasty applied successfully to the national government for their ethnic group to be marked as Manchu despite never having been part of the Eight Banner system during the Qing dynasty. The surname Nianhan (), shortened to Nian (粘), is a surname of Jurchen origin, also originating from one of the members of the royal Wanyan clan. It is an extremely rare surname in China, and members of the Nian clan live in Nan'an, Quanzhou, Jinjiang, Shishi, Xiamen, Fuzhou, Zhangpu, and Sanming, Fujian, as well as in Laiyang, Shandong and in Xingtai, Hebei. Some of the Nian from Quanzhou immigrated to Taiwan, Singapore, and Malaysia. In Taiwan, they are concentrated in Changhua county. There are fewer than 30,000 members of the Nian clan worldwide, with 9,916 in Taiwan and 3,040 of those in Fuxing township of Changhua county.
Ming dynasty
The Ming dynasty replaced the Yuan dynasty in 1368. In 1387, Ming forces defeated the Mongol commander Naghachu's resisting forces who settled in the Haixi area and summoned the Jurchen tribes to pay tribute. At the time, Jurchen clans such as Odoli and Huligai were vassals to the Joseon dynasty of Korea. Their elites served in the Korean royal bodyguard.
The Joseon Koreans addressed the military threat posed by the Jurchen through forceful means, incentives, and military attacks. At the same time, they tried to appease them with titles and degrees, traded with them, and sought to acculturate them by having Jurchens integrate into Korean culture. The Ming government eventually ended this relationship due to their wishes for the Jurchens to defend the border. In 1403, Ahacu, chieftain of Huligai, paid tribute to the Yongle Emperor. Soon after, Möngke Temür,, chieftain of the Odoli clan of the Jianzhou Jurchens, stopped paying tribute to Korea, instead becoming a tributary to China.
Yi Seong-gye, the Taejo of Joseon, asked the Ming Empire to send Möngke Temür back, but was refused. The Yongle Emperor was determined to move the Jurchens from Korean to Chinese influence. Korea unsuccessfully tried to persuade Möngke Temür to reject the Ming overtures, and he submitted to the Ming Empire. More and more Jurchen tribes began to offer tribute to the Ming Empire. The Ming divided them into 384 guards, and the Jurchen became vassals to the Ming Empire. During the Ming dynasty, the name for the Jurchen land was Nurgan. The Jurchens became part of the Ming dynasty's Nurgan Regional Military Commission under the Yongle Emperor, with Ming forces erecting the Yongning Temple Stele in 1413, at the headquarters of Nurgan. The stele was inscribed in Chinese, Jurchen, Mongolian, and Tibetan.