In November 1635, the ruler of a rising state in what is now north-east China issued an order about a name. His people had long been called Jušen, known in Chinese as Nüzhen and in English as Jurchen. Henceforth, Hong Taiji declared, they were to be called Manju, Manchu, and anyone who used the old name would be punished. Six months later he renamed his state the Great Qing. Within a decade his family, the Aisin Gioro, sat on the throne in Beijing, where they would stay until 1912.
The story of the Jurchen and the Manchu is one of the most striking in Asian history: forest and river peoples of Manchuria who twice conquered northern China, founded two dynasties, created two scripts, and in the second attempt ruled the largest empire in Chinese history. It is also a story about how peoples and their names are made. This article traces that history from the earliest Chinese records, through the Jurchen Jin dynasty, Nurhaci and the Eight Banners, the 1635 edict that created the Manchu name, and the Aisin Gioro clan and its borrowed origin myth, to what remains of Manchu identity and language today, noting where the evidence is thin and where historians disagree. It complements the site’s article on the Han people, which touches on Qing rule from the Han side.
Ancestors in the Chinese records
Chinese texts describe a succession of peoples in the forests and river valleys of the north-east, the land of the Changbai mountains and the Amur, Sungari and Ussuri rivers. The earliest are the Sushen, mentioned in texts of the Zhou period as bringing arrows of hu wood with stone heads as tribute. Han and Jin dynasty histories describe the Yilou, the histories of the Northern Dynasties the Wuji, and Sui and Tang sources the Mohe, a group of tribes of which the Heishui (“Black River”) Mohe of the Amur were one branch. Later Chinese historiography, including official Qing scholarship, linked these peoples in a chain of descent running from the Sushen to the Jurchen and the Manchu, and the modern National Ethnic Affairs Commission presents the same lineage.
That chain needs caution. The names were applied by Chinese writers to peoples they knew mostly at second hand, and they may have covered different populations at different times. There is no continuous written record from the peoples themselves. What can be said is that the north-east was home over many centuries to peoples speaking languages ancestral to the Tungusic family, living by hunting, fishing, pig-raising and some farming, and that Chinese writers saw them as related.
The most substantial of these early states was Bohai, known in Korean as Parhae. Britannica describes it as founded around the end of the seventh century by Dae Joyeong (Da Zuorong), a former Goguryeo general, with a following of former Goguryeo aristocrats and Mohe tribespeople, in what is now Jilin province. Bohai modelled its government on the Tang, traded with Japan and China, and at its height stretched from the Amur to northern Korea, until the Khitan Liao dynasty conquered it in 926. Its legacy is contested: Korean historiography treats it as a successor to Goguryeo and part of Korean history, while Chinese historiography stresses its Mohe population and its status as a Tang vassal. Both elements were real.
Wanyan Aguda and the Jin dynasty
The Jurchen appear in Chinese records from the tenth century, as subjects of the Khitan Liao. The Liao distinguished between “civilised” Jurchen settled in the south and “wild” Jurchen further north. Among the latter, the Wanyan clan rose to dominate the tribes of the Anchuhu river, near modern Harbin. In 1115, its leader Aguda proclaimed himself emperor of a new state, Jin, meaning “gold”, at his base near what is now the Acheng district of Harbin.
The Jin rose with astonishing speed. The Northern Song, hoping to recover territory lost to the Liao, allied with the Jurchen, and the Liao fell in 1125. The alliance then collapsed, and the Jurchen turned on the Song. In the Jingkang incident of 1127, Jin forces took the Song capital Kaifeng and carried off the retired emperor Huizong and the reigning emperor Qinzong, with much of the court, into captivity in the north. A surviving prince re-established the dynasty in the south, which became the Southern Song, and after further war the two states settled on a border along the Huai river in 1141.
The Jin ruled northern China for more than a century. Its rulers adopted Chinese-style government with a dual system, keeping Jurchen military organisation, known as meng’an mouke (units of a thousand and a hundred households), while governing Chinese subjects through a bureaucracy modelled on the Liao and Song. In 1119, on Aguda’s order, the scholar-official Wanyan Xiyin created a Jurchen script based on the Khitan large script and Chinese characters; a “small script” was issued in 1138 under the emperor Xizong. In 1153 the capital moved from Huining, near Harbin, to Yanjing, the site of modern Beijing, renamed Zhongdu, the “central capital”.
Later emperors, notably Shizong in the late twelfth century, worried that the Jurchen were losing their language and customs among the Chinese majority, and promoted Jurchen-language examinations and schools, an anxiety the Qing would later echo. The end came from the steppe. Mongol armies under Chinggis Khan took Zhongdu in 1215, the Jin court fled to Kaifeng, and in 1234 the last Jin stronghold at Caizhou fell to a Mongol and Southern Song alliance. The site’s article on the Yuan dynasty takes up what followed. Many Jurchen in north China merged into the wider population; those in Manchuria remained in their old homeland.
The Jurchen under the Ming
After the Ming drove the Mongols from China in 1368, as described in the site’s piece on the rise of the Ming, the dynasty extended its influence into Manchuria through a system of indirect rule. In 1409 it established the Nurgan Regional Military Commission on the lower Amur. Jurchen chiefs were granted titles as commanders of “guards” (wei) and received seals and patents (敕书) that entitled them to present tribute and trade at frontier horse markets. The chiefs kept real control of their people; the Ming gained a buffer and a source of horses, furs and ginseng.
Ming sources divided the Jurchen into three broad groups. The Jianzhou Jurchen lived in the south-east, around the Changbai mountains and the upper Yalu. The Haixi Jurchen lived along the Sungari and formed confederations including the Hada, Ula, Hoifa and Yehe. The “Wild” Jurchen lived further north and east, along the Amur and Ussuri. These groups competed fiercely for patents and trade privileges, and the Ming encouraged the competition to keep any single leader from becoming too strong.
A heavenly ancestor
The Aisin Gioro clan, whose name means “Golden Gioro”, traced its origins to a myth. In the version promoted at the Qing court, three heavenly maidens, Enggulen, Jenggulen and Fekulen, were bathing in a lake called Bulhūri at the foot of Mount Bukūri, near the Changbai range. A magpie dropped a red fruit on Fekulen’s clothes; she swallowed it, became pregnant and bore a son, Bukūri Yongšon, who went on to pacify warring clans and found the state.
Historians treat this as a legitimising myth, not history. Research using the Old Manchu Archives, published in the Journal of Chinese History and elsewhere, shows that the earliest written version was recorded in 1635 from Muksike, a man of the Hurha people from the Amur region, who told the story as an oral tradition of his own clan and placed the lake near the Amur, not at Changbai. The court version, compiled soon afterwards, relocated the story to the Changbai mountains and made Bukūri Yongšon an Aisin Gioro. The adaptation tied the ruling house to a sacred mountain in its southern homeland and gave it a heavenly origin at a moment when it was claiming imperial status. It also suggests that the peoples of the north-east shared a common stock of origin stories, which the Aisin Gioro adopted and reshaped.
Nurhaci and the Later Jin
Nurhaci, born in 1559, was a chief of the Jianzhou Jurchen whose grandfather and father held Ming titles. In 1583 both were killed during a Ming attack on a rival Jurchen stronghold, in circumstances involving a Jurchen rival, Nikan Wailan. According to the Palace Museum’s biography, Nurhaci began his campaigns that year with thirteen suits of armour left by his father and grandfather. Over the next three decades, through war, marriage alliances and diplomacy, he united the Jianzhou and then most of the Haixi tribes, while continuing to present tribute to the Ming.
His state-building was as important as his conquests. In 1599 he ordered two officials, Erdeni and Gagai, to create a script for the Jurchen language using the Mongolian alphabet, since the old Jurchen script had fallen out of use and the Jurchen wrote in Mongolian. In 1632, under his successor, the scholar Dahai added dots and circles to distinguish sounds, creating the standard Manchu script. In 1601 Nurhaci organised his followers into companies of about 300 men (niru), grouped under four coloured banners, and in 1615 he expanded the system to eight, adding bordered versions of yellow, white, red and blue. The Eight Banners were not only an army but a social organisation: every household belonged to a company and a banner, which governed military service, land, and much of daily life.
In 1616, at his capital Hetu Ala, Nurhaci proclaimed himself khan of a state called Jin, known to historians as the Later Jin to distinguish it from the Wanyan dynasty. In 1618 he issued the “Seven Grievances”, a declaration listing complaints against the Ming, beginning with the killing of his father and grandfather, and attacked the Ming frontier town of Fushun. In 1619 he defeated a much larger Ming army at the battle of Sarhū. He took Shenyang and Liaoyang and moved his capital to Shenyang in 1625. The following year his assault on Ningyuan, defended by the Ming general Yuan Chonghuan with cannon, failed, and Nurhaci died later in 1626.
Hong Taiji and the making of the Manchu
Nurhaci’s eighth son, Hong Taiji, succeeded him and transformed a Jurchen khanate into an empire. He added Mongol banners and Chinese (Hanjun) banners to the original Manchu ones, drawing in Mongol allies and Chinese defectors, and adopted Ming-style ministries. He subdued Korea’s Joseon kingdom and extended his power over the Mongols of the south.
On the thirteenth day of the tenth lunar month of 1635, 22 November in the Western calendar, he issued the edict renaming his people. Manju had existed earlier as the name of a group within the Jurchen and had been used for the state, as research on the original Manchu records at Renmin University has shown, but Hong Taiji elevated it to the name of the whole people and banned the use of Jušen. His reasons have never been fully explained. Historians generally see the change as a way to create a new, unified identity for a people drawn from many tribes, and to distance the state from the Jin dynasty, whose memory was hostile among Chinese subjects. In May 1636 he proclaimed the Great Qing (Daicing in Manchu), with himself as emperor. The meaning and origin of the word Manju remain debated.
Conquest and empire
Hong Taiji died in 1643. His young son became the Shunzhi emperor, with his uncle Dorgon as regent. In April 1644, the rebel Li Zicheng captured Beijing and the last Ming emperor hanged himself. The Ming general Wu Sangui, guarding the Shanhai pass, allied with Dorgon, and together they defeated Li’s army. Qing forces entered Beijing in June 1644 and the dynasty moved its capital there. The conquest of the south took decades and involved great violence, including the massacre at Yangzhou in 1645. In the same year the Qing ordered all Chinese men to adopt the Manchu hairstyle, shaving the front of the head and wearing a queue, as a sign of submission.
Under the Kangxi (1661 to 1722), Yongzheng (1722 to 1735) and Qianlong (1735 to 1796) emperors, the Qing suppressed the Revolt of the Three Feudatories, took Taiwan, defeated the Zunghar Mongols and extended its rule over Xinjiang, Mongolia and Tibet, roughly doubling the territory of the Ming. The site has covered episodes from this era, including Kangxi’s dispute with the papacy in When the Pope and the Emperor Disagreed About Confucius and Qianlong’s reply to Britain in “I have no use for your country’s manufactures”.
Being Manchu under the Qing
The Qing emperors ruled as Confucian Sons of Heaven to their Chinese subjects, as khans to the Mongols and as patrons of Tibetan Buddhism. Among their own people, they insisted on Manchu distinctiveness. Bannermen lived in separate garrisons in Beijing and provincial cities, received state stipends, and were expected to preserve “the national language and mounted archery” (国语骑射). Manchu was an official language of the state, used alongside Chinese in documents and inscriptions, and a vast archive in Manchu survives. Manchu women did not bind their feet.
Yet the language steadily declined. The National Ethnic Affairs Commission notes that after the mid-Qing period Manchus increasingly spoke northern Chinese, with Manchu required only among bannermen and officials on formal occasions. Emperors from Kangxi onwards issued repeated exhortations to bannermen to maintain their language and martial skills, which suggests how much they were slipping. Many banner households also became impoverished as their population grew and stipends failed to keep pace.
How to interpret this is one of the liveliest debates in Chinese history. The traditional view, defended by the historian Ping-ti Ho, held that the Qing succeeded because the Manchu embraced Chinese culture, a process called sinicisation. Scholars associated with the “New Qing History”, including Evelyn Rawski, whose 1996 presidential address to the Association for Asian Studies launched the debate, Mark Elliott and Pamela Crossley, argued that Manchu identity remained politically central and that the Qing was an Inner Asian empire as much as a Chinese dynasty, drawing heavily on Manchu-language sources. Critics in China have argued that the approach overstates Manchu separateness. Most historians now accept that both acculturation and a deliberately maintained Manchu identity were at work.
Revolution, the last emperor and Manchukuo
By the late nineteenth century, defeats by foreign powers, described in the site’s article on the Second Opium War, and internal rebellions had weakened the dynasty, and revolutionaries cast the Manchus as alien oppressors. When revolution came in 1911, anti-Manchu violence followed in several cities. The historian Edward Rhoads, in Manchus and Han, describes the fall of the Manchu quarter of Xi’an in October 1911 as the bloodiest episode; a missionary estimated that at least 10,000 of a banner population of about 20,000 died, many by suicide. The child emperor Puyi, who had come to the throne in 1908, abdicated on 12 February 1912. The new republic proclaimed a union of five peoples, including the Manchu.
Puyi lived on in the Forbidden City until 1924, apart from a brief restoration in 1917. After his expulsion he came under Japanese protection, and in 1932 Japan installed him as head of Manchukuo, a puppet state in Manchuria, where he was proclaimed emperor in 1934. After Japan’s defeat in 1945 he was captured by the Soviet Union, later handed to China and held in the Fushun war criminals’ centre until he was pardoned in 1959. He worked as a gardener and archivist in Beijing and died in 1967. Manchukuo, which claimed to be a Manchu homeland but was controlled by Japan, left a lasting stain on Manchu identity in Chinese memory.
The Aisin Gioro and the Manchu today
After 1912 many Manchus concealed their identity, and many Aisin Gioro descendants adopted Chinese surnames, most commonly Jin, “gold”, a translation of Aisin; some families are reported to have used other surnames, such as Zhao. Puyi’s younger half-brother Puren, who took the name Jin Youzhi, ran a primary school and taught for years in Beijing, and died in 2015 at the age of 96. The calligrapher and scholar Qi Gong (1912 to 2005), a ninth-generation descendant of the Yongzheng emperor through Prince Hongzhou, refused to use either Aisin Gioro or Jin, and was known simply by his given name.
The Manchu are one of China’s 56 officially recognised ethnic groups. The 2020 census recorded 10,423,303 Manchus, the second-largest minority after the Zhuang, living mainly in Liaoning, Hebei, Heilongjiang, Jilin, Inner Mongolia and Beijing. The number is itself a product of history. It rose sharply in the 1980s, when a 1981 policy allowed people to restore or correct their registered ethnicity, and many families with Manchu ancestry re-registered, encouraged by local governments seeking autonomous status and by preferential policies in education and family planning.
The Manchu language is critically endangered. Only a small number of elderly native speakers remain, in villages such as Sanjiazi in Heilongjiang; estimates vary with the date and definition, but most are in the dozens at most. The closest living relative is Sibe (Xibe), spoken by descendants of Sibe bannermen sent from the north-east to garrison the Ili valley in Xinjiang in 1764. In the Qapqal Sibe Autonomous County, Sibe remains in daily use and is written in a script adapted from Manchu, and Sibe speakers have played a large role in reading the Qing’s Manchu archives. Universities and enthusiasts in China and abroad now teach Manchu, and the language lives on in place names and loanwords in the Chinese of the north-east and Beijing.
Conclusion
The Jurchen and the Manchu twice rose from the forests of the north-east to rule northern China, and the second time all of it and far beyond. Their history defies simple categories. The Jin and Qing adopted Chinese institutions while trying to preserve their own identity; the Qing expanded China’s borders to roughly their modern extent; and the Manchu people were, in a real sense, created by an edict in 1635, gathering many tribes under one name. The origin myth of the Aisin Gioro was itself a borrowed and reworked story.
Today the Manchu number more than ten million, yet their language survives mainly in archives, classrooms and the speech of the Sibe in Xinjiang. That paradox, a people who shaped modern China and then largely merged into it, is what makes their story worth telling carefully, without either the old caricature of alien conquerors or the equally simple idea that they simply became Chinese.
