MANCHU
Excerpts from Wikipedia.org
The Manchu people (Manchu: 
; Chinese: 滿族; Mongolian: Манж) are a Tungusic people who originated in Manchuria (today's Northeastern China). During their rise in the seventeenth century, along with the help of Ming rebels (such as general Wu Sangui), they conquered the Ming Dynasty and founded the Qing Dynasty, which ruled China until its abolition in 1911 after the Xinhai Revolution, which established a republican government in its place.
The Manchus are decended from Jurchens (女真), a Tungusic people who lived around the region now comprising the Russian province of Primorsky Krai and the Chinese provinces of Heilongjiang and Jilin.
The Manchu ethnicity have largely been assimilated with the Han Chinese. The Manchu language is almost extinct, now spoken only among a small number of elderly in remote rural areas of northeastern China and a few scholars; there are around ten thousand speakers of Sibe (Xibo), a Manchu dialect spoken in the Ili region of Xinjiang. In recent years, however, there has been a resurgence of interest in Manchu culture among both ethnic Manchus and Han. The number of Chinese today with some Manchu ancestry is quite large, and the adoption of favorable policies towards ethnic minorities (such as preferential university admission and government employment opportunities) has encouraged some people with mixed-Han and Manchu ancestry to re-identify themselves as Manchu.
Some recent scholarship in ethnic identity emphasizes that ethnic categories are often not static, objective category, but rather fluid, subjective ones. This may apply to the notion of a Manchu ethnicity which some recent scholarship suggests was strengthened in the early 19th century to distinguish members of the Qing military elites from the peoples they ruled.
Origins
Ancestors of the Manchu were the peoples of the Mongolian steppes. The first ancestors of the Manchu were the Sushen, a people who lived during the second and first millennia BC. They were followed by the Yilou people, who were active from AD 202 to 220 . The Wuji followed in the fifth century and the tribes of the Mohe in the sixth century. One of the tribes of the Mohe, the Heishui (Black Water) tribe, eventually became the ancestors of the Jurchens. The Manchus were related to the Jurchens, who had conquered a vast area in northeastern Asia in the twelfth century and established the Jin Dynasty (literally Golden Dynasty) under the Wanyan clan that ruled over northern half of China and rivaled the Song Dynasty in southern part of China until being conquered and destroyed by the Mongols under Genghis Khan. Genghis Khan’s descendants eventually established the Yuan Dynasty, ruling all of China and was followed by the Ming Dynasty in the historiography of Chinese history. Nurhaci's son Hong Taiji decided the Jurchens would call themselves Manju (Manchus) and prohibited the use of the name Jurchen.
The Manchu language is a member of the Tungusic language group, itself a member of the proposed Altaic language family.
The early significance of Manchu has not been established satisfactorily, although it seems that it may have been an old term for the Jianzhou Jurchens. One theory claims that the name came from the Bodhisattva Mañjuśrī (the Bodhisattva of Wisdom), of which Nurhaci claimed to be an incarnation. Another theory is that the Manchus, like a number of other Tungusic peoples, take their name from the common Tungusic word *mangu(n), 'a great river'. Before the seventeenth century, the ancestors of the Manchus were generally a pastoral people, hunting, fishing and engaging in limited agriculture and pig-farming.
Founding of the Qing Dynasty
In 1616 a Manchu leader, Nurhaci (1559-1626) broke away from the power of the decaying Ming Dynasty and established the Later Jin Dynasty (後金 Hòu Jīn) / Amaga Aisin Gurun (
), domestically called the State of Manchu (manju gurun) (
), and unified Manchu tribes, establishing (or at least expanding) the Manchu Banner system, a military structure which made their forces quite resilient in the face of superior Ming Dynasty numbers in the field. In 1636 Nurhaci's son Hong Taiji, reorganized the Manchus including Mongolians, Koreans and Hans who joined them, changed the nation's name to Qing, and formally changed the name of the nationality to Manchu.
Nurhaci later conquered the Mukden (modern-day Shenyang) area and built it into a new capital of Qing Empire in 1621. When Beijing was captured by Li Zicheng's peasant rebels in 1644, the Qing Dynasty collaborated with Ming Dynasty general Wu Sangui and invaded Li Zicheng's Shun Dynasty and moved the capital from Mukden (Walled city since the Warring States Period) to Beijing.
For political purposes, the early Manchurian emperors took wives descended from the Mongol Great Khans, so that their descendants (such as the Kangxi Emperor) would also be seen as legitimate heirs of the Mongolian Yuan dynasty. During the Qing Dynasty, the Manchu government made efforts to preserve Manchu culture and the language. These efforts were largely unsuccessful in that Manchus gradually adopted the customs and language of the surrounding Han Chinese and, by the nineteenth century, spoken Manchu was rarely used even in the Imperial court. Written Manchu, however, was still used for the keeping of records and communication between the emperor and the Banner officials until the collapse of the dynasty. The Qing dynasty also maintained a system of dual appointments in which all major imperial offices would have a Manchu and a Han Chinese member. Because of the small number of Manchus, this insured that a large fraction of them would be government officials.
Over the course of centuries the Manchus were gradually assimilated into the Han Chinese culture and eventually they became a de facto integral part of China with their culture, history and territory. Near the end of the Qing Dynasty, Manchus were portrayed as outside colonizers by Chinese nationalists such as Sun Yat-Sen, even though the Republican revolution he brought about was supported by many reform-minded Manchu officials and military officers. This portrayal quickly dissipated after the 1911 revolution as the new Republic of China now sought to include Manchus within its national identity.
Manchuria
Manchuria is a historical name given to a vast geographic region in northeast Asia. Depending on the definition of its extent, Manchuria either falls entirely within China, or is divided between China and Russia. The region is commonly referred to as Northeast China (東北), and historically referred as Guandong (關東, which literally means "the east of Shanhai Pass.")
This region is the traditional homeland of the Xianbei, Khitan, and Jurchen people, who built several dynasties in northern China. The region is also the home of the Manchus, after whom Manchuria is named. Beginning in the 17th century, the Manchus ruled China until the collapse of the Qing Dynasty in 1911.
The Queue Order
The Queue Order (剃髮令) was a series of laws violently imposed by the Manchu invaders of China in the seventeenth century. Traditionally, adult Han Chinese did not cut their hair. According to the Classic of Filial Piety, Confucius said "the body, hair and skin, are inherited from one's parents, do not dare damage them. This is the beginning of filial piety." (身體髪膚，受之父母，不敢毀傷，孝至始也。) Therefore both men and women wound their hair into a bundle or into various hairstyles. Manchu men, on the other hand, shaved their foreheads, leaving a long rattail called the queue.
When the Manchus broke through Shanhai Pass with the help of the general Wu Sangui in 1644 (year 17 of the Chongzhen era), they imposed the Queue Order in occupied territories, mandating that Han Chinese shave their heads like the Manchus. This resulted in widespread resistance by the Han Chinese, and the order was publicly revoked.
A year later, after the Manchus had reached South China, Dorgon reimposed the Queue Order, giving the Han Chinese 10 days to shave their hair into a queue, or face death. The slogan was "Lose your hair and keep your head, otherwise, keep your hair and lose your head". The Han Chinese people resisted the order and the Manchu conquerors struck back with deadly force, massacring all who refused to shave their hair. The Three Massacres at Jiading and the Ten-day Massacre at Yangzhou are two of the most infamous massacres, with death tolls of 50,000–200,000 and 100,000–800,000 respectively. The imposition of this order was not uniform; it took up to 10 years of almost genocidal martial enforcement for all of China to be brought into compliance.
The purpose of the Queue Order was to erase Han Chinese pride, identity and culture, and achieve psychological enslavement. The Manchus were quite successful, as during the early years of the Republic of China, many Han Chinese were unwilling to cut off their queues as they thought they would be beheaded if they did, and ironically many had their queues forcibly removed.
Anti-Manchuism
Anti-Manchuism is the sentiment in the history of China held against Manchus who were present in the region, especially against the Qing Dynasty ruling administration, which was often resented for being foreign rulers, despite a degree of cultural integration. This ethnic-based sentiment tended to be a subset of the greater anti-Qing sentiment.
Sun Yat Sen was the founder of Chinese Republic who overthrew the Qing Dynasty which ruled over all of China from 1644 to 1911 proclaimed as such when he launch his rebellion against the Qing Dynasty which was ruled by Manchus:
"In order to restore our national independence, we must first restore the Chinese nation. In order to restore the Chinese nation, we must drive the barbarian Manchus back to the Changbai Mountains. In order to get rid of the barbarians, we must first overthrow the present tyrannical, dictatorial, ugly, and corrupt Qing government. Fellow countrymen, a revolution is the only means to overthrow the Qing government!"
