Manchu

Books

05.15.17

A World Trimmed with Fur

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, booming demand for natural resources transformed China and its frontiers. Historians of China have described this process in stark terms: pristine borderlands became breadbaskets. Yet Manchu and Mongolian archives reveal a different story. Well before homesteaders arrived, wild objects from the far north became part of elite fashion, and unprecedented consumption had exhausted the region’s most precious resources.

Manchu, Former Empire's Language, Hangs On at China's Edge

Descendants of the settlers struggle to keep a nearly vanished tongue alive

China’s Ethnic Manchus Rediscovering Their Roots

Aristocracy is no longer a dirty word in China, and those with ties to the nation's last imperial rulers are now embracing their past.

Reinventing the Manchus: An Imperial People in Post-Imperial China

With the 1911 overthrow of the Qing dynasty (1644-1911), many predicted that the dynasty’s ethnic founders, the Manchus, would soon be swallowed up by the Han majority – the final act in a long process of acculturation that began in 1644, which...

The NYRB China Archive

05.17.01

Un-Chinese Activities

Jonathan Mirsky

from New York Review of Books

In the first week of November 1728, China’s Emperor Yongzheng (who reigned between 1723 and 1735) ruled over something like 200 million people and the vast territory that Beijing today claims as the People’s Republic. He had plenty on his mind....

The NYRB China Archive

06.05.69

Still Mysterious

John K. Fairbank

from New York Review of Books

Within mainland China today the ratio of Westerners to Chinese is probably no greater than it was in Marco Polo’s time seven hundred years ago. Sino-foreign contact is so minimal that it almost meets the old Taoist stay-at-home ideal, “to live...