 On this large screen you have a, you have your first Manchu, namely Manchu, Gizun, Gizun is the tongue, so it's the language in Latin, it's a term that you can see here on the right, and that's your first lesson, the first part of the lesson. You read Manchu in columns going from left to right, you read Chinese in columns going from right to left. That means that if you have documents that are in two languages, they meet in the middle, so Manchu flowing from the left to left end of the scroll Chinese from the right hand, and then in the middle you often have a big seal or a picture or signatures, anything that makes the document an official document. So that was your first lesson. The Manchu language, which is written in columns and uses a script, which to some of you may look familiar, more or less. Well, I'm going to say something about this in a moment. On the right hand side, you have a Chinese term, which is often used in the Qing period in order to express that a text is in Manchu. It means the Qing language, Qinghua, sometimes Qingyu, and the term literally translated means the language of the Qing. Of course, that's very much the point that I'm going to make now. The Qing had more than one language, the Qing had at least in the end five official languages, but probably a hundred if you take all the minority languages into account as well. And so if you speak of the Qing language, it means the language of the Qing dynasty, and that is the point that where we'll be arriving in a second. So where do the Manchu's come from? Manchu's come from an area which is dominated by planes and these planes and mountains are delineated to the top by the sky. And this is where the Mongols, the Manchu's, and other Tungusic families, Tungusic members of the family, get their veneration for space and especially for the space above for the endless sky that must have seemed like the ultimate deity, ultimate god in pre-modern China, and therefore you have the so-called Tengri Kalt, which goes back also in Chinese history to beginnings which take you into the realm of shamanism. And shamanism of course you have in a variety of forms and you get this, for instance, in the classical shaman art that is depicted here at the early, at the beginning of the 19th, sorry, 20th century in the Qing court. And of course this is not the main Qing ritual, shamanic ritual, because we know that that was performed by a woman. So the main shaman in the Qing court is a woman, shaman's in ordinary Tungusic practice are men, and you find exactly the same in those parts of the Tungusic world, which have the same connection to the sky. And therefore you also have them in Lapland, for example, or in other parts of Siberia. It's, and of course in Mongolia, but this is something which became more or less a hallmark of Manchu civilization. The Qing religion is much more than just one thing and certainly the shamanic element is very much in the background. It's almost a private cult. Here you can see the pole which is the connection between the earth and the sky. In other words, this is the original Manchu element in the court ritual of the Chinese Empress, the imperial dynasty in Shenyang. And in Shenyang, of course you have the second capital of the Qing dynasty itself. And so you want to place it in historical terms, begins in the 1630s. 1644 is the date of the conquest of Beijing. That's when the Qing imposed themselves onto the Ming dynasty. And from that point onwards, you also have Beijing as the capital Beijing is the, the political capital you can say, Yang, up in the north is the dynastic capital and both would remain in parallel function until the end of the dynasty in 1911. So 1630s, 1631 to all the way until 1911, that is the stretch that you could identify as the Qing era. Now, if you look here on the right, you can see the Tangsir. Tangsir is an almost private affair. I say almost because it's dynastic. And in the families and the more in the wealthier families, in the larger families, it also becomes an ancestral duty. So in other words, there is a certain parallel to the Chinese ancestral rituals, but importantly, the connection with the sky worship is there because if you look at the tablets, these are clearly emulations of the pole that you see here. So there is a, you can say this is the family shamanic altar that every larger, every more important Qing family had to have. And this is the one that you can find in Shunyang in the imperial palace. Tangsir is just here the Chinese is the transcription of the mansion. So this is not the other way around. So it sounds very much like this is a hall, but that's not the case. So just a short glance at the way that Shunyang was conceived, you can see here that you have a variety of temples and sacred spaces, and then also political spaces, especially the, if you look at the headquarters on the right. Yeah, you can see that this is the area where Nurhaci established. So Nurhaci is the founder of the of the team, and he's also he's much more he's also the founder of the mantras and I'll say a few words about him in a second. He made sure that all the mantras speaking to music speaking church and speaking groups within his new state that they were directed towards him so here on the left and right you have the offices that belong to each of the banners and the banners. They're known as, they're known as Xi and Chinese so they're flags more or less. So you have a concept which goes back to the development of the of the Mongolian society during the times of Genghis Khan, when Mongolia, the Mongolian tribes, Mongolian nations, if you like, were being subdivided into banners and these banners had one particular function, namely to express loyalty to the ruler to the Khan, and the term Khan, Khan is something that you get from the Mongolian experience and the mantras took this over, Nurhaci took this over, he became Khan over the, the new empire, the new state. It's this area where you find this word, the Tunguzic tribes, where you actually have to look for the ancestors of the, of the, the mantras, because it's the Ebeks, the Ebenks, and other smaller groups who are directly linked to the the Gürchen. The Gürchen begin a migration process, southwards, I mean this is the Jin Empire, the Jin state, but as an ethnic group, you would find them here between Sahal, Sahalian, so the black mountain, so this is the, this is not the Manchu speaking part, this white strip here, this is an extension of the Japanese islands and of course also the Russian, now under Russian control, Sahal would have been a hard border, so this is where you don't find Manchus, but Manchu speakers, Gürchen speakers, you find in all of this territory and northwards, so you can say the Tunguzic tribes and the Gürchens of the Jin, they would have been able to communicate. Here we find an early map of the, of the Tunguzic area, so we'll just go back one, so where you find here the Tunguzic tribes, this is the eastern end of what becomes the far east of the Russian Empire and it's the Russian tribes who had a particular interest in finding out more about the Tunguzic peoples and this, for this purpose, they send, they pay members from all over Europe to travel to the east, not just Europeans actually also Tartars, Tartars are a Turkic group who are more or less in the, in the service of the, of the tsar and they are usually involved in military campaigns, but the scientific campaigns, they are spearheaded by, by Europeans and that includes of course the Russians, the Russians. So, early 17th century we have an excursion into the land of the Tunguzics, Tunguzin lands, so this is the eastern, north eastern parts of, of Siberia, and roughly around the same time as the term Manchu is being coined in the south. This map makes it a little bit easier to distinguish between the different Tunguzic groups. So you have the northern Tunguzic will then extend across the Urals into Scandinavia. So in other words, this is the, this is the family of languages which still exist within the Russian Federation, but they have a clear minority status so you can imagine that these areas are very sparsely inhabited, and because of the, the fact that they are almost uninhabited, so they are often nomadic, so in many cases when the winters are very severe, much of this is actually not inhabited at all. And in later centuries, you would have had cities that were created by Russia in order to exploit the natural resources that existed in these places, that could be wood, that could be, that could be furs, and then later of course mineral resources, including oil. But it's this group that we're interested in. On the, along the, more, yes, whether it was today the Primorsky cry, the eastern most province of Russia, opposite Japan, but it's this group that is of interest to us and you, Southwest into Tunguzic, you can already see that this is not at all a territorial nation, which covers the whole of Manchuria. In fact, you have in the eastern part especially up to subpoins being has the here in the center of the province, that is more or less the boundary to the west of that, it's the Mongolian populations that dominate to the east, the region, and other migrant groups and that includes the Chinese. It also includes the Koreans. This is from a book that you can find at SOAS as well so this is a book on the tributary nations but also all the minority populations of the team, all the known populations in Asia and and beyond and beyond that means usually Europe, not all of Europe but those parts of Europe that sent traders and the Russians, the Oros, Guru Nialma, Nialma, Nialma is people, Guru is country, Oros is the name for Russia. And this is in case you're wondering where the term Urwalsil comes from in Chinese, it's a Manchu word, so it's the Manchu term for for Russia. So, Daiching Gurun, the Tumen Ba Iors Alban, so this is, this is a somewhat simplified form in Chinese, referred to as the illustrated book of tributary peoples to the great Qing country. So it's the great Qing, Daiching Gurun is of course a term that is being formed precisely then. So I'm going to give you a map version of this, and a very brief explanation of how we get to the Qing in the first place, namely that is connected to the person of to a single person who actually created the term Manchu. And if you, if you've ever heard of Norhachi or Norhachi, it can also be pronounced, and then you usually get the impression that this is a Manchu nationalist who tries to break free from the oppression of the Min, but there are a few caveats. And he is, first of all, Norhachi is first of all a an official who's in the service of the Ming dynasty. He's in, he's active in Shenyang, Shenjing, illustrated here on this map. And this is very important because he actually learns how the Ming dynasty operates. Why is this important? Because it shows that the Manchu's from the very beginning, the Qing dynasty from the very beginning, the Manchu's themselves as the people from the very beginning were heavily influenced in civilizational terms by China. So in other words, these are no longer the Tungusic peoples who come from the north here, and establish themselves as complete outsiders. This is a myth which is being built up in the late 19th century as a justification for essentially getting rid of the Chinese, sorry, of the Manchu's, of the team, I was going to say, as aliens, as Manchu's, as people who are not part of Chinese civilization. This is not true. From the very beginning, the Manchu's are part of the Chinese enterprise, civilizational enterprise, because they share very important features of Chinese civilization. And also, you can see that the northern populations of the Manchu's and the southern have developed here in the Tianzhou area, they've developed a part. They have developed, importantly, into two different anthropological types, one that is matriarchal in the north, one that is patriarchal in the south. So you have ancestral lines that focus on the male ancestor amongst the Tianzhou Manchu's, and in the north where you have the wild Manchu's. That was the term that was actually used at the time. It was the women who were in charge, and the women who were also venerated within society and also in a more religious sense. So there are changes that occur during this process of becoming part of China, which the Manchu's don't escape. So what does Nurhaci do? Nurhaci does important things. For example, he takes over the Manchu script. Sorry, the Mongolian script. In creating the very concept of what it means to be Manchu, he acknowledges that the most important country that he relies on is Mongolia. Mongolia is this great Mongolian enterprise that you can see here on the right. And that's one explanation why so many words within Manchu are of Mongolian origin. In some tribal words, in some tribal vocabularies, further here on the eastern side, sorry, of the Manchu's, the eastern side of the Mongolian civilizational outreach, up to half of the vocabulary is actually Mongolian. So Nurhaci in the quest to create a language for his new Manchu people, he borrows directly from the Mongols because he knows that all Mongols, all Manchu's know how to read Mongolian, very important. So where did the Mongolians get their script from? I'm going to show you some Manchu first. So remember that it flows like this. I'm going to enlarge it a little bit so you can look at the characters. And now imagine that you turn them 90 degrees on its side and then all of a sudden you don't have columns anymore but you have lines. And these lines you can read from right to left. So if you get this image of a script that runs from right to left and that is written with dots and with circles, you get very close to a language that is used at the western end of Asia, the Arabian Peninsula in Northern Africa, namely Arabic. So how are Arabic and Manchu script, Mongolian script related? Well, they are both derivatives of an earlier language. If you look at the Syriac script, you can see that you have this as the vehicle for transliterating Aramaic, which is of course the spoken language at the time of Jesus. So from this, you get a writing system, which is being used in various forms, also by peoples in the western parts of Asia. And one of the populations borrowed this are the Uighurs, not the Uighurs we know today, but the old Uighur kingdom and also the second Uighur kingdom. And they use this script in order to, for their own Turkic language which develops out of them. And it's only much later in the Islamification of Xinjiang, of Turkestan, that you get Arabic script, which replaces this writing system. But one ethnic group that borrows from the Uighurs at this early point are the Mongols. And the Mongols, very cleverly, they turn this on their side, and they use this Syriac writing system in order to reproduce their own language from a runic system that they have before. So if you're interested, I have, I can point you in the direction of a certain linguistic, historical linguistic articles in that direction. So this is the, this is the origin of the writing system and it's this writing system that Nurhaci takes over in the early 17th century, and he in later years. There's one difference, namely the addition of dots and circles, which enables, enables the speaker to reproduce the sounds more, more accurately than in Mongolian. So in Mongolian, there's a lot of guesswork, is it a ha, is it a ka, is it a ga, in Manchu, you know immediately, and you will be learning how this works with the, with the system that is, that I'm going to introduce you to. Anyone who heard of Tulishen, Tulishen is a Manchu official who travels for the Qing westwards, travels through the western parts of the Qing Empire, but he also travels into surrounding kingdoms, also Russia. He's, in other words, a traveling emissary of the, of the Qing, and he writes a very important work which gives us a very detailed impression of the populations that inhabit Central Asia and the west at this stage. So this is a, a, a book that we have here at SOWAS, for example, by Zhuang Jifar, translated into Chinese by Zhuang Jifar, but you get the original Manchu writing system too. So at some point, we will be able to read this together, and you will be able to make sense of the Manchu writings rather soon. This is another version that we have here at SOWAS. So in English, I think yes, or maybe Japanese, no? Yes, we will, yes, you can definitely, this is certainly also interesting because you get maps and these maps, of course, you have some for the northern parts of the Qing in Manchu. There's a map exercise, map creation exercise that is ongoing in Leiden, and SOWAS are directly involved with that. So this is something that you can ask me again for help. So just, just somewhat, I would like to advance to the practical part of language learning in the moment. But we need to be clear about one thing, namely that the Manchus do not impose their culture onto the, onto China. They integrated into a fabric of different ethnic traditions that already exists during the Ming period, that already exists during the Tang period, that probably already exists during the Qing and Tang. So in other words, these are enormous, it's an enormous territorial empire that has many living ethnic traditions in it. And because of this, because of the fact that these traditions exist side by side, there is an understanding that the most important, the numerically most important traditions need to be able to govern the country together. And because of this, you have a rather complex system of coexistence that is being worked out legally and in terms of power sharing between the Manchus, the Mongols, the Tibetans and the Chinese. These are the four big groups who in the beginning dominate. There's a fifth group that will be added in due course. I'm going to show that to you in a moment, but here you can see the first in Mongolian, then in Manchus here on the right hand side in Tibetan script, and in Chinese. And this is from the, of course, it's a religious building. It's from the Yonghe Gong, the Namai temple, which is built by the Yongjong Emperor in Beijing. Why do the Tibetan Buddhism play such an important role? Tibetan Buddhism is the glue that keeps the non-Chinese parts of the Qing Empire together. So you have this northern belt, if I go back, you have a northern belt which you can draw, draw the border here from Korea all the way through Manchuria, Mongolia, and then also historically through Xinjiang and then Tibet. Why historically? Because by the 15th century, so by the mid-late Ming era, Xinjiang had predominantly converted to Islam, but there are still pockets in today which are Buddhists, but before they did so, they converted to Buddhism as it was being practiced in Tibet. So Tibetan Buddhism has a very strong unifying, culturally unifying impact on the neighbouring civilizations, especially on Mongolia. The Mongols during the Ming era, they become almost completely normalized. And in order to cement this bond between the different populations on the outside, on the fringes of the Qing, the early Qing rulers, namely the Manchu state rulers before the conquest, before 1644, they decide that the Lamaist, the Lama tradition, the Lama rights would be elevated to state, to imperial state ritual once the conquest was complete. So this is why Tibet plays such an important role. Here you can see dragons, and these dragons are on different colours, these colours adorn the banners, literally the flags of the eight groups that Nurhaci created. Oh, here, Lamaism as the political glue of the Qing, yes, of course it's religious as well, but it's the Yongjiang Emperor, it was very much wedded to the idea that all the populations be held together by certain religious practices. And the most important one for the, for the, at least for the aristocratic side, for the non Chinese scholar official side that would become Lamaism. That's the Chinese term for Lamaism, it's the Tibetan, that's Buddhism in the Tibetan tradition. And yes, this is from a different picture from the Yonghe Gong, and you can here already see very clearly the differences between the Mongolian and the Manchu. Now at the end of the Qing era, so is Manchu still important then? Yes, because people at the court are still being trained in Manchu, so they write the documents in Manchu. So if you go to the number one archives in China, in Beijing, you will find that from this era you have documents that only exist in Mongolian or in Manchu, and not in Chinese languages, why? Because they wanted to keep the circulation of knowledge to a minimum. They wanted to keep the Xianfeng and the Tujir emperors in the very turbulent period of time for China, who is really in control of the Empress Dowager. But Tsuxi is from the Yehe tribe, which was the only tribe that did not go with Nurhaci in the early 17th century, but sided with the Ming, therefore they were punished, the capital of Yehe was completely destroyed, and people from the Yehe had a reputation of being of dubious loyalty to the Qing. But here we have her, and Tsuxi is referred to here as Wangheu, so this is of course the Wanghou, so this is a title which in English is translated as Empress Dowager, but the term is very much a Taihou, that would be the Empress Dowager. But the Manchu term actually suggests that this is an empire, sorry it's Empress. She is in control. Does she know Manchu? She knows actually quite a bit. And how do we know? Well, we get a lot of negative news about her. She was a very clever diplomat. She knew how to not just manipulate, but actually she was a power politician. She understood politics both within the court and with the outside world. So here you have in Tsuxi's own handwriting, Manchu script, so if you enlarge this, this is again you see the spine that I talked about earlier on. In fact, if anything, she leaves minimal distances between the words, so it looks almost as if it was sewn out of the embroidered. Nope, this is it. So this is the, these are very much, this pays testimony to the fact that even at the very last years of the Qing, people like Prince Gong, very important character for the reformation of the Qing Empire, but even the last Emperor, the boy Emperor Puyi, that they knew how to write and use Manchu. Why? Why? Why? Because here we have a very interesting little notebook, which is Puyi's trialing journal book. It's in English in, because he was learning English with Reginald Johnson, a very important person when it comes to East Western contacts, Chinese and Manchu. So, and his Manchu is not bad. So this shows that he had practice, and this practice is something that you will also get when you learn Manchu conscientiously. So now the concluding slides, they will show you what happened to the Manchu's from the end of the 19th century onwards. And this was a stroke of bad luck because they were being singled out by, you can call them proto-nationalists, if you like, such as the Taiping in their quest to eradicate the Qing as the ruling Empire on Earth. They particularly directed their hatred against the Manchu's, who they saw as not just aliens, but actually evil spirits. They saw them as satanic creatures that needed to be extirpated in every sense of the word. So not just driven out of China, but really destroyed. So this was, there was only one way of dealing with them, namely complete destruction or systematic destruction. And this happened by attacking the garrison communities that you found spread all over the Taiping territory. Whenever that a warrior family lost, a Manchu warrior family lost a battle, they would be expected to put an end to their own lives. So this is very much a, it's quite a gruesome example of military honor that the family members, once the fighting soldiers had been killed, they had to be killed starting with the youngest ones. And the person who did that was the oldest one, namely the grandmother, the grandmother's job was to kill the entire family. And this was to preserve the honor, but also to make sure that the Manchu's would not be singled out for the type of pogroms that went on. For example, during the Tiananmen, sorry, during during the Taiping uprising in the mid 18th century, but then also in the aftermath of the rebellion that led to the victory of the nationalists. There were pogroms in certain cities, not all of them and in some cities that were negotiated settlements, but the Manchu's had to keep their heads down. And what we know from the Republican era, and so this is Sun Yat-sen on the left, this is Jiang Kai-shek, Sun Yixian, Jiang Yixi, they made it clear that the first and foremost loyalty would not be to the clan or to the banner, or to the Manchu nation, but to the Chinese state. And whoever made a point out of having traditions that went beyond that, that included also the Muslims and other groups, lived dangerous. So that's why from this time onwards, families such as the Shumuro, you have the Shu here, the Shu, this character is the Manchu's Shumuro, and this gives you an idea how they tried to integrate into Republican China, namely by seeming as Chinese as possible. You may have heard of Lao Shuo, he lived in London for some time, not just that, he worked at Sowers for some time, and he complained about being underpaid because he was Chinese. He complained about racism at the workplace. And this was one of the reasons why he ran out of money. Another reason was perhaps also because he lived in a relatively well-to-do part, lower end, not in Dale, so lower end of a very well-to-do area, or maybe he spent a little bit too much money there, so we don't know. But in any case, he is a member of the plain red banner, so one of the eight banners, but he never made a point of it. How do we know whether somebody belongs to a Manchu family or not today? Looking at the surname, the family name often helps because there are certain names that are being translated into Chinese. Lao Shuo is of course a famous writer of the Republican era, of the May 4 era, so here you have a map of the Republic published in Taiwan not so long ago. You can see that this Shantou also includes out of Mongolia because for the Republic of China, out of Mongolia is still part of it. So this is the, in essence, the inheritance of the team empire. And not part of it is the Primozki cry here, this part, down to Vladivostok, which is seeded with the help of Zaharov in 1856-78. So this is very much a, of course, an area where the goes to show that the fate of empires is always limited by wars, by diplomacy. But anyway, in this empire, in this, sorry, in this state, which in theory includes all the territory of the team, the Manchus were still spread out, completely spread out as they happened. And for many years, it was almost taken for granted that their traditions would die away, that the language would die away. Now, like with asterisks, there's this small little village in, on this map, I can't find it, it's on the westernmost edge of Xinjiang, you get a form agarism, which was left completely on its own. And that is the Shibwa, which is recognized as a separate nationality today, but actually the language that they speak is Manchu. And they have a larger content of Mongolian words, also some Russian words as well. But innovations that came in when the Eastern Turkestani Xinjiang state was more or less supported by the Soviet Union in the war years, there was also some influence that came from Russia. But in any case, in this period, we can see that right up to the year 2000, in the early 2010s, we can see that the use of Manchu dwindled in those areas where it used to be strongest, maybe in Manchuria, but remained relatively strong in Shibwa, the Shibwa Territories. So what is happening now in China with the study of Manchu, it is very much, it is actually not limited by any of the policies that we find under Xi Jinping today. You will find that most people who study Manchu are the descendants of Manchu families, Manchu banners themselves, and they always kept up the memory, positive memory of having been part of the Manchu. So you find many young people learning Manchu who want to revive this tradition, but of course here, this is actually a cover from before Trump came to power, so this is before the fallout between China and the United States. What it means to say is that the rulers of the People's Republic in China, they had a lot in common with the rulers of the Qianlong era when China 1793, so when China was at its strongest. And it's this parallel that they wanted to make that Xi Jinping during that time was the inheritor of a very strong empire. But we also know that the Qing Empire that stage was a multi-ethnic, multi-lingual empire, so this is perhaps where he's going a little bit off the record of the Qing rulers. But learning Manchu today in China is a relatively popular thing to do amongst the Manchus and there are a few centers where mostly of course in the northeast and in Beijing, where this has been taken seriously.