The Manchus and Their Language (Presidential Address)

Six hundred years ago, eastern Manchuria was inhabited by numerous small Tungusic tribes. Three centuries earlier these peoples had organized a powerful state, eventually conquering North China where they ruled for the better part of a century before being overcome by the Mongol armies of Cinggis Qayan in 1234; the Tungusic groups that created the confederation that we know as the Jin X dynasty (1115-1234) are known to history as the Jurchens (Nuzhen it L in Chinese). After the fall of the Jin, a majority of the Jurchens remained in China and southern Manchuria; in the course of time these Jurchens became completely sinicized. However, in the river valleys, forests and mountains of northeastern Manchuria, other Tungusic peoples, also commonly referred to as Jurchens, were found. These tribal peoples still preserved their languages and cultures; some of them engaged in agriculture and herding; others engaged in hunting and fishing for their livelihood. At the beginning of the Ming dynasty (1368-1644), these Jurchen tribes began to move southward, occupying regions only nominally under Ming control. By the sixteenth century, they were divided into three groups: the Jianzhou Jurchens, the Haixi Jurchens, and the Yeren Jurchens. The first two groups were rather more advanced culturally. The Yeren Jurchen lived along the tributaries of the great Amur River, eastward to the seacoast. It was from these tribal groupings that the Manchus, the founders of the Qing dynasty (1644-1911), were to come. The Qing empire, in addition to Manchuria, comprised all of China proper as well as Tibet, Xinjiang, and Mongolia. It seems remarkable that a number of small Tungusic tribes could have had the organizational skills and power to create one of the great empires in world history. By the beginning of the sixteenth century, the present province of Jilin, as well as parts of Liaoning and Heilongjiang were controlled by the Jianzh6u and Haixi Jurchens. It was from the Jianzhou Jurchens, who had settled in the region of the Long White Mountains (sanggiyan golmin alin) just north of the Korean border, that the founder of the Manchu confederation, Nurgaci (1559-1626) arose.1 By means of a series of campaigns at the end of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth century, Nurgaci united the Jianzh6u and Haixi Jurchen tribes and quickly began to menace the Ming dynasty in China. Before 1636, the Tungusic tribes that Nurgaci had united under his rule were collectively known as the Jusen which is the native Manchu form of the ethnonym Jurchen. In 1616 Nurgaci declared himself emperor of the Later Jin dynasty, thereby associating himself with the earlier Jurchen state. The Later Jin, first under Nurgaci and later under his successor, his eighth son Hung Taiji, adopted an increasingly

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