The Manchu people of China: from the Qing court to the north-east today

Who the Manchu are today

The Manchu (满族, Mǎnzú) are one of the 56 ethnic groups officially recognised in China. The seventh national census counted 10,423,303 Manchu on 1 November 2020. Ethnic minorities as a whole numbered 125.47 million, or 8.89% of the population.

Their homeland is the north-east, the region once called Manchuria. At the 2010 census, the latest with a published provincial breakdown in our sources, Liaoning held 5.34 million Manchu, just over half of the total, and Hebei 2.12 million; Jilin, Heilongjiang, Inner Mongolia and Beijing each had several hundred thousand. There are Manchu autonomous counties in Liaoning (among them Xinbin, Xiuyan, Kuandian, Benxi, Huanren and Qingyuan), Hebei (Qinglong, Fengning, Weichang and Kuancheng) and Jilin (Yitong).

In daily life most Manchu today speak Mandarin and live much like their Han neighbours in the north-east, though interest in Manchu language and culture has grown again since the 1980s.[1][2][3][4]

From the Jurchens to the Qing dynasty

The Manchu are generally described as descendants of the Jurchens, who founded the Jin dynasty (1115–1234), though historians debate how direct the link is. In the early 17th century the Jurchen leader Nurhaci organised his followers into the Eight Banners and founded the Later Jin state in 1616.

His son Hong Taiji replaced the name Jurchen with Manchu in 1635 and renamed the state Qing (清) in 1636. The Qing took Beijing in 1644 and ruled China until 1912, the last of China’s imperial dynasties. Under the Qing the empire’s territory grew to about three times its size under the Ming, and its population rose from roughly 150 million to 450 million.

The banners shaped Manchu identity for centuries: people registered in them were known as banner people (旗人, qírén), a word that survives in the name of the qipao.[3][5]

The Manchu language and script

Manchu is a Tungusic language, descended mainly from Jurchen, with many loanwords from Mongolian and Chinese. It is written in vertical columns in the Manchu script, which was adapted from the Mongolian script. A large body of Manchu documents survives in archives; historians use them because they sometimes record details missing from the Chinese versions.

As a spoken language, Manchu is now critically endangered. The 1990 census counted more than 9.8 million Manchu but fewer than 100 native speakers, all elderly. In 2007 the last native speakers were thought to be 18 people in their eighties in Sanjiazi village, Fuyu County, Qiqihar, Heilongjiang, with a few more in Dawujia village near Heihe.

Revival work began in the 1980s. Heilongjiang University in Harbin runs a Manchu research centre and teaches Manchu as a degree subject, and several thousand learners, not all of them Manchu, have studied it. The Xibe (锡伯族), officially a separate ethnic group, write a language very close to Manchu and are often seen as the keepers of the written tradition.[3][6][2]

The qipao: the ‘banner gown’

The word qipao (旗袍, qípáo) literally means ‘banner gown’, after the banner people of the Qing. It first referred to a loose, trapezoid-cut robe worn by Manchu men and women; men’s robes were cut for riding, with slits and horse-hoof cuffs. Over the robe went the magua (马褂), a short jacket reaching to the navel.

The slim dress the world now calls a qipao or cheongsam took shape after the Qing fell, from the late 1910s and 1920s, when it became the everyday wear of urban women in cities such as Beijing and Shanghai; in 1929 the Republican government named it a national dress. Scholars still debate its roots: some trace it directly to banner dress, others to older one-piece Chinese robes, and others see it as a Republican-era blend with Western fashion.[7][2]