Nurhaci, the Jurchens, and How They Became the Manchu

The Manchu people who ruled China from 1644 to 1912 were not, in any straightforward sense, an ancient ethnic group waiting to be rediscovered. The Manchus were a new political identity assembled on top of a much older Tungusic-speaking population that had long been known as the Jurchen. The renaming took place in 1635 under Hong Taiji, the eighth son of Nurhaci and the second ruler of what was already, by that point, a coherent Manchurian state. The timing was deliberate. Hong Taiji dropped the Jurchen name because it had been associated, in his phrasing, with vassalage to the Ming dynasty and was no longer appropriate for a sovereign people. The substitution was one of the founding acts of what was to become the Qing empire. Together with the Eight Banners, the new Manchu writing system, and the multi-ethnic banner expansion of the 1630s and 1640s, it constituted the political scaffolding on which the 267-year Qing rule over a vast Chinese state would rest.

This essay traces the Jurchen populations from their late-medieval Jin dynasty apex through the Mongol destruction of that dynasty in the 1230s, through the long fragmentary Ming-era period of the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries, into the military and political consolidations of Nurhaci between 1583 and 1626, and then through the more deliberate ethnic-construction work of Hong Taiji between 1626 and 1643 that turned the Jurchen into the Manchu. The argument it makes is twofold: first, that the Jurchens had already been a major imperial people once before, in the Jin dynasty of 1115 to 1234, and that this Jin heritage supplied a usable precedent for the second Jurchen imperial project of the 17th century; and second, that the Manchu identity as such was a deliberate Hong Taiji-era construction rather than something older, and that this construction is the founding political act of the Qing state.

The Jurchens before Nurhaci

To understand how the Jurchens became the Manchu one has to begin with a picture of who the Jurchens actually were in the centuries before Nurhaci’s military and political career began in the 1580s. The Jurchens were a Tungusic-speaking population who lived across the forested and riverine lands that would later become the Chinese provinces of Liaoning, Jilin, and Heilongjiang, in what the Manchus themselves would come to call their homeland of Manju. The southern Jurchens of this region, who lived closest to the Ming frontier, were tributary subjects of the Ming dynasty and were organised, in the standard Ming administrative arrangement, into a system of hereditary Jurchen Guards that reported to the Liaodong military apparatus. The northern Jurchens, who lived further up the Sungari and Amur river systems, fell under no such direct Ming administration and were instead bound to the various Mongol polities of the post-Yuan period or to their own autonomous clan organisations.

The Jurchens were at this time neither small in number nor politically unified. They were a major non-Han population of the Ming frontier, divided into a shifting patchwork of tribal and clan confederations. Some of these confederations, particularly the Jianzhou, the Hada, the Hoifa, and the Yehe of the southern zone, had crystallised into coherent chiefly houses by the late 16th century and would be the principal building blocks of Nurhaci’s later state. Others, particularly those of the Amur and Sikhote-Alin zone in the north, were looser, more dispersed, and would only be brought under central direction later, in the Hong Taiji campaigns of the late 1630s.

The Jurchen language, a member of the Tungusic branch of the Altaic languages, was by the 16th century the principal language of these communities. The Manchu language that would later emerge from it is a closely related daughter language, not an unrelated tongue, and the transition from one to the other in the 17th century was gradual and largely lexical. The Jurchen language had, by the late imperial period, no working written form: the last functioning Jurchen script of the Jin dynasty had been in ceremonial use only and had fallen out of practical written employ by the early 14th century. The absence of a written language would have serious consequences for the bureaucratic reach of any Jurchen state, and would be addressed directly by Hong Taiji in 1599 and 1632 with the commissioning of two distinct Manchu scripts.

Before Nurhaci, the Jurchens had already produced one of the most consequential states of the medieval Chinese-Northeast frontier: the Jurchen Jin dynasty of 1115 to 1234. The Jin had been founded by Wanyan Aguda, a Jurchen chief of what is now Liaoning province, who in 1115 declared himself emperor and within a generation conquered the northern Chinese plain from the Song. By 1127 the Jin had captured Kaifeng, the Song capital, and had reduced the Song rump-state to a southern fringe below the Huai river. The Jin established their principal capital at Yanjing, the present-day Beijing, and they ruled over the largest non-Han empire on the Chinese frontier for the next hundred years. The Jin were also a literate state. They maintained a Jurchen script devised for them in the 1120s, the script that would outlive the dynasty in ceremonial use until the 14th century. The Jin collapse came in 1234, at the hands of the Mongol armies under Genghis Khan and his successors, after a long war of attrition that the Mongols won more by patience than by any single decisive battle.

The Mongol destruction of the Jin was the foundational trauma of Jurchen political history. The residual Jurchen populations that survived the Mongol conquest were dispersed: some fled north into the Amur basin, some were absorbed into Mongol military formations, and some were absorbed into the agricultural population of the northern Chinese plain where they would, over the centuries, become indistinguishable from their Han Chinese neighbours. The later Qing-era historians claimed descent from those who had fled north, and the genealogical and ethnographic work behind that claim, although contested in modern scholarship, has been the basis of the standard Qing-origin story of the Manchus as a Jurchen remnant.

The Yuan dynasty ruled China and the Mongolian plateau as a single empire from 1271 to 1368, and within that empire the surviving Jurchen populations were organised into a chain of provincial administrations. The Liaoyang branch of the Yuan provincial secretariat handled the southern Jurchen populations directly, while the northern Jurchen populations were administered through the various Mongol princely appanages. Jurchen soldiers served in the Mongol armies that invaded Japan in 1274 and 1281, and Jurchen commoners were settled in agricultural colonies throughout the northern Chinese plain. By the late Yuan period the Jurchens were a small but distinct population distributed across three settings: the Jurchen homeland, the northern Chinese plain, and the Mongol military formations. The diaspora in the northern plain was the population that, over the next three centuries, would be largely absorbed into Han Chinese society; the diaspora in the Mongol military would, over the same centuries, be drawn into the post-Yuan Jurchen household networks of the frontier.

The Ming dynasty of the late 14th and 15th centuries, having driven the Mongol remnants out of the Chinese frontier by 1388, found itself dealing with the Jurchen populations on its northern frontier through a system of hereditary Jurchen Guards. The Jurchen Guards were a tiered system of military-administrative units under Jurchen chiefs who were formally commissioned by the Ming court to maintain order on the frontier and to render tribute. The system was stable and durable: by the late 16th century it had evolved into a complex network of some hundreds of guard posts that stretched from the Korean border in the east to the Liaoyang region in the west. The Jurchen Guard system was the institutional context of every Jurchen polity of the late 16th century, including the polity that Nurhaci was to inherit and transform.

Korean-Jurchen relations shaped the eastern parts of the Jurchen homeland from a different angle. The Joseon dynasty of Korea, founded in 1392 and consolidated over the next generation, ran a tributary administration over the Jurchen populations in the eastern parts of the homeland, the Hamgyong region and the Tumen river basin. The Joseon court claimed the right to manage the Jurchen populations in its border region, and it actively tried to settle the Jurchens, to educate them in Chinese-Confucian learning, and to absorb them into the Korean tributary system. The Jurchens resisted this absorption, and the resulting border tensions would be one of the persistent low-level conflicts of the period. The Ming court, for its part, claimed the right to manage all Jurchen populations in its own frontier zone, and the contest between the Ming and Joseon for Jurchen political loyalty was a fixture of the period. The Jurchen populations were thus caught between two competing tributary states, and their political manoeuvring between Ming and Joseon was the principal skill of their chiefs in the 15th and 16th centuries.

The late-16th-century Jurchen polities of the period divided into two principal groupings. The southern Jurchens were the Jianzhou, the Hada, the Hoifa, and the Yehe, all of them organised under powerful chiefly lines and all of them operating within the Ming guard framework. The northern Jurchens were the populations of the Amur basin and the Sikhote-Alin coastal region, less organised politically and less directly subject to the Ming frontier system. The southern Jurchens would be the building blocks of Nurhaci’s state. The northern Jurchens would be brought under central direction only in the Hong Taiji campaigns of the 1630s, and the inclusion of these northern populations is one of the principal differences between the Aisin Gioro state of the 1620s and the multi-ethnic Manchu-Qing state of the 1640s.

Nurhaci: the early life

Nurhaci was born in 1559 into the Aisin Gioro lineage of the Jianzhou Jurchens, the clan that would eventually give its name to the Qing imperial house. The Aisin Gioro were hereditary chiefs of one of the Jianzhou guard units under the Ming system, and Nurhaci inherited this chiefly position in 1583 on the death of his father and grandfather in a Ming-orchestrated military incident at the frontier fort of Fushun. The Ming had been unable, or in some accounts unwilling, to protect Nurhaci’s family from a rival chiefly line, and the young chief’s subsequent refusal to accept Ming overlordship in matters Jurchen was the foundational political fact of his reign.

Nurhaci’s consolidation campaign began modestly. In 1583 he had, by the standard historical accounts, a small force and a small territorial base around his family seat in the Fushun area. By 1591, eight years later, he had brought the Jianzhou Jurchens under his leadership through a combination of military action and political alliance. By 1593 he had won the significant Battle of Huling against a coalition of rival Jurchen confederations. By the late 1590s he was turning his attention to the wider Jurchen frontier: the Hada, the Hoifa, and the Yehe were the next major targets, and they were progressively absorbed into Nurhaci’s political system between 1599 and 1619.

The absorption of the Hada, the Hoifa, and the Yehe between 1599 and 1619 gave Nurhaci’s state a coherent southern Manchurian base. The Hada were defeated in 1599 and progressively absorbed between 1599 and 1611; the Hoifa came in by 1607; the Yehe held out longest and were finally absorbed in 1619 after the death of their chief in the major Battle of Sarhu. By 1619 the southern Jurchen world was integrated into Nurhaci’s political system, and the principal Jurchen chiefly lines of the pre-Nurhaci period had been brought under the Aisin Gioro ruling house. The absorption was not without violence — Nurhaci fought major battles at Hulin in 1593 and at Sarhu in 1619 — but it was primarily a political absorption rather than a destruction. The defeated chiefly lines were incorporated as banner lords, retaining their internal hierarchies and their territories but losing their independent foreign relations.

The campaigns against the Mongol polities on the western frontier occupied Nurhaci’s attention between 1618 and 1624. The Khalkha Mongols of the Mongolian plateau, who had been rising as a power under their Dayan Khan since the late 15th century, were the principal opponent on this front. The Khalkha were not conquered by Nurhaci, but they were held at the frontier and a series of border agreements in 1624 established a defined boundary. The inner-Mongol polities, particularly the Khorchin, were progressively drawn into Nurhaci’s orbit through a mixture of marriage alliance, mutual trade, and intermittent military pressure. The western frontier thus stabilised on terms that left the Khalkha Mongol plateau outside the Aisin Gioro state but brought the Khorchin and the Chahar into the orbit of the rising power.

Nurhaci’s consolidation was military in its primary instruments but political in its longer-term effects. He reorganised the populations he brought under his authority into a new structure that was neither the old tribal confederation nor a Chinese-style bureaucracy, but a hybrid institution tailored to the Jurchen conditions of his day. The instrument of this reorganisation was the Eight Banners.

The Eight Banners

The institutional innovation most consequential for the subsequent Manchu state was the Eight Banners system, which Nurhaci created in 1601 in its initial four-banner form and expanded to the full eight banners in 1615. The banners were, simultaneously, a military organisation and a household registration system. Each banner contained a fixed number of infantry and cavalry companies that fought as a coordinated unit in the field, but each banner also contained the families of those soldiers, who lived in assigned settlements under the banner’s administration, worked the agricultural land assigned to the banner, and contributed labour to the banner’s military camps and arsenals. Each banner was a self-contained social-military-economic unit, which gave the system a resilience that the looser tribal confederations of the pre-Nurhaci period had lacked.

The four original banners of 1601 were distinguished by colour: plain yellow, plain white, plain red, and plain blue. The expansion to eight banners in 1615 was made by adding a bordered version of each of the four colours: bordered yellow, bordered white, bordered red, and bordered blue. The result was a recognisable system that remained in place for the rest of the Qing period. The banners are sometimes dismissed in modern historical writing as a transitional military form, but in their actual operation they were a sophisticated piece of social engineering that bound together military service, household registration, agricultural settlement, and political loyalty in one administrative matrix.

The internal structure of the Eight Banners was a hierarchy of subdivisions that remained substantially unchanged for the rest of the Qing dynasty. Each banner was divided into regiments, which were in turn divided into companies, which were in turn divided into platoons of roughly 300 households. The captain of each level was appointed from the Aisin Gioro imperial clan or from the bonded Manchu families of long standing, and the company was the basic operational unit both in the field and at peace. Each banner had a separate administrative apparatus: a banner commander, an accountant, a judge, a granary officer, and a wide range of supporting officials drawn from the banner’s own population. The Eight Banners were, in effect, a state within the state: a self-contained administrative system that overlapped with but did not coincide with the territorial administration of the Liaodong region.

Women of the banner households had a definite role in the Eight Banners structure that was unusual for the seventeenth-century world. Banner women had property rights, could own land, and could inherit from their parents and husbands. Banner wives were expected to manage the household agricultural work while the men were on campaign, and the system depended on this division of labour. Daughters of banner households were routinely married to banner men of other banners, and the resulting marriage network integrated the eight banners at the household level. Banner women who reached the age of marriageable majority without being matched were provided with state support and were expected to remain productive members of the banner households. The Eight Banners was, on the social side, a system that built the entire life of the population around the banner affiliation.

The banners were later supplemented. Hong Taiji in 1634 to 1635 created a parallel set of Mongol Banners for the Mongol populations that had either submitted to or been conquered by the Later Jin in the early 1630s. In 1639 to 1642 he created a further set of Han Chinese Banners for the Han Chinese populations, primarily Liaodong-based soldiers and their families, who had been brought under the Aisin Gioro state. By the end of Hong Taiji’s reign in 1643 the original eight Manchu Banners had been joined by eight Mongol Banners and eight Han Chinese Banners, for a total of twenty-four banners that would remain the principal Manchu military-administrative structure for the rest of the Qing dynasty.

The banners served a further function: as a vertical mechanism of social integration that absorbed new populations into the Aisin Gioro state without requiring those populations to abandon their prior identities. A Mongol soldier who joined the Mongol banners remained a Mongol, and a Han Chinese soldier who joined the Han Chinese banners remained Han Chinese. The banner framework made all of them banner-people of the Qing, and the banner framework was the principal instrument by which the Qing state operated a multi-ethnic empire without forcing any single ethnic identity on its non-Manchu subjects.

The Later Jin dynasty and the wars against Ming

In 1616 Nurhaci proclaimed his state the Later Jin, with capital at Hetu Ala in what is now Liaoning province. The name was deliberate: the use of Jin claimed a continuity with the Jin dynasty of 1115 to 1234, the earlier Jurchen imperial project. The proclamation was the formal declaration of independence from Ming overlordship, although in practice the military contest with the Ming had already been underway for some years.

The military contest became open in 1618, when Nurhaci issued his Seven Grievances, a formal declaration enumerating the Ming’s offences against the Jianzhou Jurchens. The Seven Grievances is a foundational document of the Manchu state: in it Nurhaci publicly identified the Ming as the principal enemy of his people and laid out the political justification for the war he was about to wage. Within weeks of issuing it he had captured the major Ming frontier fort of Fushun and had begun the systematic conquest of the Liaodong region.

The years 1618 to 1626 were the period of Nurhaci’s principal wars against the Ming. The Later Jin forces captured Fushun in 1618, took the major Liaodong cities of Liaoyang and Shenyang in 1619, and consolidated their hold on the southern Manchurian plain. In 1626, however, Nurhaci suffered the most significant defeat of his career at the hands of the Ming general Yuan Chonghuan at the Battle of Ningyuan, a fortified town in the western Liaodong. The Battle of Ningyuan broke the momentum of Nurhaci’s expansion. Some accounts have it as the immediate cause of Nurhaci’s death, of wounds or disappointment, in September 1626.

The Later Jin state at the time of Nurhaci’s death was already a coherent regional power. It controlled the greater part of the Liaodong region, it had absorbed the principal rival Jurchen confederations, and it had begun the work of pushing south against the Ming. Its weaknesses were institutional rather than territorial: it had no working written language of its own, it had no codified body of laws, and it had not yet fully worked out the relationship between the Aisin Gioro chiefly line and the hereditary chiefly lines of the confederations it had absorbed. These institutional gaps were the work that Hong Taiji, Nurhaci’s eighth son and chosen successor, would take up.

Hong Taiji and the transformation into Manchu

Hong Taiji succeeded to the throne in 1626 at the age of thirty-five. He was a more deliberate state-builder than his father had been, and under his rule the Later Jin became the Qing, the Jurchen identity became the Manchu identity, and the multi-ethnic banner expansion took place. The cumulative effect of these changes was to make the Aisin Gioro state qualitatively different from what it had been under Nurhaci, and the new state would be the founding political form of the Qing dynasty.

The construction of a written language was a necessary precondition for any further state-building. In 1599 Hong Taiji commissioned the scholar Dahai, with the earlier working name Gagai, to devise a vertical script for the Jurchen language, on the model of the contemporary Mongolian script. The resulting Old Manchu script gave the Aisin Gioro state its first workable written form for the Jurchen language. The script was functional but imperfect: it had trouble representing the phonetic distinctions of the spoken Jurchen language and could not handle the Mongolian loan vocabulary that had become part of the Jurchen elite’s technical register. In 1632 Hong Taiji commissioned a revised script from Dahai, with the addition of diacritical dots that resolved the phonetic problems and a secondary, dotless script used for Chinese loan words. The two scripts together, the dotted New Manchu script and the dotless script for Chinese loans, formed the basis of the Manchu writing system that would be used in the Qing bureaucracy until the 19th century.

The renaming of the Jurchen as Manchu was a deliberate political act of 1635. Hong Taiji issued an edict declaring that the principal Jurchen population of his state should now be known as the Manchu, on the grounds that the old name had been associated with Ming vassalage and was no longer appropriate. The renaming was not a fiction: the population being renamed was the actual Jurchen population that had lived under the Aisin Gioro state since 1616. The renaming was, however, a reassignment of that population to a new political category, and the new category carried with it a new status: the Manchu were the founders and the ruling people of the new state, not a tributary people beneath the Ming. The renaming was the political act by which Hong Taiji severed the symbolic vassalage of his people to the Ming and asserted full sovereign status.

The renaming of the state itself followed in 1636. The state that had been the Later Jin since 1616 became, in Hong Taiji’s proclamation of that year, the Qing, a name meaning ‘pure’ in classical Manchu. The new state name was paired with a new dynastic title: Hong Taiji became the emperor of the Qing, not the khan of the Later Jin. The shift in self-presentation was substantial. The Qing state now claimed to be the legitimate Chinese-style imperial order of the region, and the Manchurian elite were now the imperial family of a Chinese-style dynasty. The new state would thereafter, and until 1912, use the traditional Chinese dynastic-cycle vocabulary and would present itself to Chinese subjects as a Chinese-style dynasty under new management.

Hong Taiji’s administrative reforms went beyond the banner and the script. In 1631 he set up the Six Ministries, in Chinese the liubu, of the Chinese imperial model, with separate portfolios for personnel, revenue, rites, war, justice, and public works. In 1636 he established a censorial apparatus modelled on the Chinese censorate. In the same year he set up a formal imperial academy to teach the Manchu written language to officials and to translate Chinese texts into Manchu. The administrative reforms gave the Aisin Gioro state a Chinese-style skeleton, and the skeleton would become the basis for the Qing dynasty’s later administrative structure. The Jurchen-Manchu state, by the end of Hong Taiji’s reign, was administratively Chinese-style in its high-level structure and Jurchen-Manchu in its banner-level structure, and this dual structure would persist for the rest of the dynasty.

Hong Taiji’s two Korean campaigns of 1627 and 1636 to 1637 were a major part of his consolidation work. The Joseon court had been allied with the Ming against the Aisin Gioro state, and Hong Taiji’s campaigns forced the Joseon to abandon its Ming alliance and to recognise the Qing state as the legitimate regional order. The campaigns were not conquests — Hong Taiji did not occupy Korea — but they were decisive: by 1637 the Joseon court was sending tributary missions to the Qing, and the Ming was politically isolated on its eastern frontier. The Qing-Korean relationship established in 1637 lasted until the Japanese annexation of Korea in 1910, and it became one of the most stable of the Qing dynasty’s foreign relationships.

The third major Hong Taiji-era innovation was the integration of new ethnic populations into the banner system. Hong Taiji in 1634 to 1635 incorporated the principal Mongol populations that had submitted to or been conquered by the Aisin Gioro state, primarily the Chahar Mongols and the Khorchin, into a new set of Mongol Banners parallel to the original Manchu Banners. In 1639 to 1642 he created a parallel set of Han Chinese Banners for the Han Chinese populations, primarily Liaodong soldiers and their families, that had been brought under the Aisin Gioro state. By the end of Hong Taiji’s reign in 1643 there were eight Manchu Banners, eight Mongol Banners, and eight Han Chinese Banners, twenty-four banners in total, organised under the Aisin Gioro imperial house.

The conquest of Beijing and the Qing dynasty

Hong Taiji died in 1643, before the conquest of Beijing was to be undertaken. The succession was settled by the enthronement of Fulin, the young son of Hong Taiji, with Hong Taiji’s nephew Dorgon as regent. The regency arrangement was to last until Dorgon’s death in 1650, when Fulin assumed the throne in his own right under the reign name Shunzhi. The conquest of Beijing was carried out in 1644, in the immediate aftermath of the fall of the Ming capital to the rebel forces of Li Zicheng. The Qing army entered Beijing in June 1644, declared the new Qing emperor under the regency, and within a few years had completed the conquest of the rest of northern China. The Qing conquest of Beijing is conventionally taken as the founding moment of the Qing dynasty in the strict sense, although the Aisin Gioro state had existed as the Later Jin and then the Qing from 1616.

The Qing conquest of 1644 is one of the rare successful conquests of China from the north. It was made possible by the political collapse of the Ming under the weight of long fiscal crisis, peasant rebellion, and military disintegration, and by the institutional coherence of the Qing state. The Qing state was the second of two Jurchen-Manchu imperial projects on the Chinese frontier, the first having been the Jin dynasty of 1115 to 1234. The two projects bracketed almost exactly the period of Mongol rule of China: the Jin had preceded the Mongol conquest and the Qing followed it, and the two non-Han dynasties together account for almost four centuries of rule over northern China and, in the Qing case, over China as a whole.

The Qing conquest of Beijing was followed by the formal installation of Qing authority over the northern Chinese plain. The new Qing emperor conducted the standard Chinese imperial rituals: the enthronement ceremony at the Forbidden City, the formal reception of officials at the Ming imperial palace, and the imperial sacrifices at the Altar of Land and Grain, in Chinese the Shejitan, on the western outskirts of the new capital. The Qing court promulgated a calendar (the Shunzhi calendar), ordered the compilation of an official Qing dynasty history of the preceding Ming, and issued a series of ritual reforms that incorporated Manchu imperial practices alongside the older Chinese imperial framework. The Qing imperial order in Beijing, by 1645, was recognisably a Chinese-style imperial order, with a Chinese-style calendar, a Chinese-style official hierarchy, and Chinese-style state rituals, all overlaid on the Manchu banner-level structure that had been built up over the previous four decades.

The institutional legacy

The institutional legacy of the Jurchen-Manchu transformation is one of the most consequential legacies in pre-modern world history. The Eight Banners system, originally a Nurhaci-era instrument of consolidation, became the basis for the Qing military structure for the next 268 years. The Manchu writing system, originally devised by Dahai in 1599 and 1632, became one of the working languages of the Qing imperial documents alongside Chinese and Mongolian, and produced a substantial Manchu-language scholarship that is still being edited and translated today. The Manchu identity, originally a Hong Taiji-era political construction of 1635, persisted as the founding political identity of the Qing ruling house for the rest of the dynasty and continues, in vestigial form, in the contemporary self-identification of the small Manchu population of present-day China.

The Aisin Gioro state-building of the late 16th and early 17th centuries is also one of the clearest cases of ethnic construction in the pre-modern world. The Manchu identity was assembled, deliberately, by Hong Taiji in 1635 to 1636 out of an older Jurchen population that had been politically subdivided, had no working written language of its own, and had no shared supra-tribal political identity. The construction was carried through by means of the Eight Banners, the new writing system, the renaming of the state as the Qing, and the inclusive multi-ethnic banner expansion of the 1630s and 1640s. The construction worked, and it produced one of the most durable multi-ethnic empires of the early modern world.

The Manchu identity persisted because it was anchored in a substantial set of institutions. The Eight Banners gave the Manchus a definite place in the Qing state, distinct from the Mongol banner-people and the Han Chinese banner-people. The Manchu written language gave them a definite working language and an administrative corpus. The garrison system of the Qing period, by which Manchu banner-people were stationed at strategic garrisons in the major cities of China proper while their families remained at the original Manchurian bases, gave the Manchus a continuing territorial and demographic focus. The Qing imperial house, the Aisin Gioro, gave the Manchus a continuous princely genealogy and a set of princely households that maintained Manchu identity across the centuries. The Qing imperial house was deposed in 1912 with the establishment of the Republic of China, and the Manchu identity has been a minority identity in the Chinese state ever since, but the identity has persisted.

The Qing-Manchu relationship evolved over the 18th and 19th centuries. The Manchu bannermen of the early Qing were a substantial proportion of the Manchu population, and the banner system remained the principal administrative interface between the Manchus and the Qing state. By the mid-18th century the banner populations were growing faster than the banner land assignments, and the banner economy was becoming increasingly impoverished. By the 19th century the banner military was no longer the elite force it had been in the 17th, and the 19th-century crises — the Opium Wars, the Taiping Rebellion, the Boxer Uprising — drew heavily on banner military formations that by that point were substantially below the operational standard of the original Eight Banners. The 1911 revolution abolished the Qing imperial order, but the banner households and the Manchu identity persisted in the Northeast, and persisted into the 20th century.

The Manchu population today numbers around 10 million in the People’s Republic of China, with a further substantial diaspora in Taiwan and elsewhere. The eight banners as a state institution are long gone, but the Manchu language persists as a heritage marker, the Manchu household genealogies are still kept by descent groups in the Northeast, and the Manchu cuisine (notably the Manchu hotpot of Liaoning) is one of the recognised regional cuisines of China. The Manchu identity continues as one of the 56 official nationalities of the People’s Republic of China, and the Manchu language and writing system are studied by scholars in China and abroad, and are taught in some Northeast Chinese universities as a heritage language. The contemporary Manchu identity is a continuation of the Hong Taiji-era construction of 1635, modified by three centuries of subsequent history but still recognisable as that construction. The continuation is the most striking thing about the Manchu identity. The Hong Taiji act of 1635 to 1636 was a deliberate political construction in the moment of a substantial new imperial state. Three centuries later the political conditions that had sustained the Manchu identity had entirely changed: the Qing imperial order was abolished, the banner households were dispersed, and the Manchu language had been largely replaced by Chinese in daily life. Yet the Manchu identity persisted as a recognisable and self-conscious category through all those changes. The persistence is the mark of how substantial the original political construction had been. The Manchus in the early twenty-first century are a small minority population, but they are a recognisable minority population, and the recognition itself is the legacy of the Hong Taiji-era act. Few pre-modern ethnic constructions have persisted so recognisably into the modern era, and the Manchu case accordingly remains one of the central case-studies in comparative ethnic history. The constitutional structures of the Qing empire have, in addition, been the model on which the modern administrative state of Northeast China was built, and the Manchu imperial house’s genealogical records from the seventeenth to the twentieth century have become an important source for the social and demographic history of late imperial China as a whole. The Veritable Records of the Qing emperors, the drafts of which are preserved in the First Historical Archives in Beijing, are the single most substantial body of Manchu-language administrative documentation surviving from any pre-modern state, and they continue to be the foundation of all serious Qing historical scholarship.

Conclusion

The transformation from Jurchen into Manchu is one of the founding acts of the Qing state and one of the most consequential episodes of ethnic construction in world history. The work took forty-four years, from Nurhaci’s consolidation campaign of 1583 through Hong Taiji’s renaming of 1635 and the conquest of Beijing in 1644. The institutions produced in those four decades, the Eight Banners, the Manchu script, the Manchu identity, the multi-ethnic banner expansion, the Qing imperial house, endured for another 268 years until the fall of the Qing in 1912. The political model of the Qing state, a multi-ethnic empire under a Jurchen-Manchu imperial house ruling a vast Chinese state, was the political form of the most populous state in the world for the better part of three centuries. The Manchu identity has, in sum, much to teach historians of identity construction everywhere: how a deliberate ethnic construction, anchored in substantial state institutions, can persist as a working identity for centuries beyond the original generation that built it.

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