Manchu a window into forgotten past

A ceremony to worship heaven held by Chinese emperors during the Qing dynasty is reenacted at the Temple of Heaven on Feb 3 last year, attracting about 40,000 visitors. Zhuo Ensen / for China Daily

Courting change

According to Tong Yue, a Qing history expert from Shenyang, in northeastern Liaoning province, where the Manchu originated, the decline of the language started the moment this ethnic people sought to rule over the entire land of China, in the early 17th century.

"The Manchu people, similar to the Mongols 400 years before, came from the northeast to sweep the country by sheer military might, at a time when Han rulers - from the Chinese majority group - had become corrupt and weak," he said. "Dutiful students of history, the Manchu had from the very beginning tried to avoid the fatal mistake committed by the Mongols.

"Instead of imposing on their subjects everything Manchu, the Qing rulers, awed by the much more sophisticated form of civilization they encountered in Central China, borrowed enthusiastically from this newfound cultural wealth, including the language."

Research into Qing government documents gives a clear indicator of how Mandarin had been consistently gaining ground at the court level, Tong said.

"Before Shunzhi, the third Qing emperor, almost all court files were written in Manchu," said Yan Chongnian, the historian. "But things changed markedly under Kangxi, Shunzhi's son, when half of the files were recorded in Mandarin.

"The ratio further increased to seven to three in the following years. And what happened in the larger society echoed this trend."

A love-hate relationship developed between Mandarin and Manchu aristocrats, exemplified by one person - Emperor Qianlong (1711-1799), the dynasty's sixth emperor, who ruled for 60 years.

Alarmed by the waning influence of his native tongue, the emperor issued orders to promote Manchu, including making it compulsory among his children. This did not, however, prevent the literary-minded emperor from penning a reputed 6,000 or more poems, all written in Mandarin in strict accordance to the rhyming and cadence of traditional styles.

Artistic aspiration aside, Tong said the Manchu rulers embraced Mandarin out of the necessity to rule.

"They realized that if they were to stay, they must have meaningful dialogue with the elite class, the literati," he said. "Manchu youths looking for a career at court were required to sit tests and translate writings from Manchu to Mandarin. The emphasis was clearly on Mandarin."

However, it would be unfair to dismiss the role of the Manchu language as merely peripheral, according to Yan.

"You may not believe it, but it was through the language that China's ancient literary and philosophy classics were first introduced to the Western world, in the early 18th century," he said. "The works, mostly on Confucianism and traditional Chinese ethics, were first translated from Mandarin to Manchu by leading Manchu scholars, before they were retranslated from Manchu to English by missionaries in China."

Despite this seemingly tortuous route, Yan said the method best served the purpose.

"It's much easier for foreigners to learn Manchu than Mandarin, as Manchu is alphabet-based," he said. "Moreover, the classics were written in around 500 BC, with its language long becoming obsolete. Without paraphrasing it was virtually impossible for the missionaries to fully understand the allusive, metaphor-infused writing.

"This crucial paraphrasing was done by Manchu scholars trained in China's ancient literary traditions."

Fu Chunbing, an amateur historian in Beijing and a Manchu culture enthusiast, said when two languages meet the infiltration is mutual.

"It's true Mandarin had the upper hand, and gradually nudged the Manchu language into the far corner of people's mind, even by the end of the 19th century," he said. "But by that time, the Manchu language had made numerous tiny inroads into Mandarin, changing it once and for all. This is especially true for the Beijing area, with the largest concentration of Manchu people before the fall of the Qing Dynasty in 1919."

According to Fu, the "old Beijing dialect" - spoken by a dwindling number of elderly indigenous Beijingers - features a large amount of Manchu words.

"It's still unmistakably Mandarin, but many terms would be indecipherable for a modern ear," he said. "People put the stamp of 'old Beijing' on these words, unaware their roots are in the Manchu language."