The last of the Manchus
Et tu, Manchu?
One hundred years on, only a few native speakers remain
Asia
Oct 8th 2011 edition
SANJIAZI
A CENTURY ago it was the “national language” of a vast empire. Today Manchu mixes with cigarette smoke blown through the wrinkled lips of 86-year-old Zhao Lanfeng in Sanjiazi, a village in China's north-east. The words she croaks in her thatch-roofed, mud-brick farmhouse are precious. Ms Zhao (pictured) calls herself one of only two fluent native speakers of Manchu left in the village, one of the last redoubts of a language that is verging on extinction.
Even in 1911, when the hated Manchu rulers of China's last imperial Qing dynasty were overthrown, the language was national only in name. Manchus formed only about 2% of the country's population at the time. Most people spoke Chinese, the language of the majority Han people who were conquered in 1644 by the Manchus, a collection of ethnic groups from the country's borderlands in what was once known as Manchuria. Even the last Manchu emperor, Puyi (who was six when he abdicated), was far from fluent, despite the court's dogged efforts to keep the language alive.
Hundreds if not thousands of Manchu civilians, many of whom lived in separate communities walled off from their Han neighbours, were massacred during the revolution by vengeful Han troops. Many more changed their names, clothing and other giveaway features of their ancestry to escape persecution. But in some remote rural areas Manchu ways held out longer. In Sanjiazi, descendants of the Manchu troops who settled the village during the Qing period outnumbered Han residents. Ms Zhao grew up speaking Manchu.
Hers was the last generation to do so. In 1979 there were 50 fluent speakers left. The two remaining (the other is also 86) sometimes chat to each other in Manchu. But Ms Zhao says the last time this happened was about four months ago. A few others in Sanjiazi speak a bit of Manchu. But in all of China, there are only a handful of people like Ms Zhao.
Few Chinese have any interest in learning the dying language of their one-time oppressors. Wu Yuanfeng, a government archivist, says 2m out of 10m Qing documents in the country's collection are written in Manchu. Yet he estimates there are only about 30 scholars in China who are truly expert in the language. Knowledge of the language is kept up mainly by people like him who belong to the Xibo people from China's far north-west. The Xibo language is very close to Manchu, but Mr Wu says only about 20,000 speak it and their numbers are rapidly diminishing too.
About six years ago Sanjiazi set up the country's first Manchu school. But Ms Zhao does not think this will make much difference. The Manchu teachers, she says, do not understand her Manchu. A big sign outside the village proclaims it as a “living fossil” of the language. Soon it might be a dead one.
This article appeared in the Asia section of the print edition under the headline "Et tu, Manchu?"
来源：https://www.economist.com/asia/2011/10/08/et-tu-manchu
读者回信：
Few Manchu
SIR – I read your article on the fate of the near-extinct speakers of Manchu in China, marking the 100th anniversary of the fall of the Qing dynasty (“Et tu, Manchu?”, October 8th https://www.economist.com/asia/2011/10/08/et-tu-manchu). Although Manchu as a spoken language is indeed in danger of disappearing in China, it is enjoying a rebirth among scholars. Manchu has long been a staple in the training of Japanese historians of the Qing period, and since the 1960s has been taught regularly at Harvard.
Over the past ten years more than 30 of my students have learned the language and many have gone on to do path-breaking research, relying on the one-fifth of the Qing archives that is written in Manchu and which is routinely ignored by most historians.
Rewriting the story of China's last imperial era, which has been told almost entirely from either nationalist or Marxist perspectives, is an ongoing process in which Manchu plays an essential part. Like that other imperial language, Latin, Manchu may be gone, but it is not being forgotten.
Mark Elliott
Professor of Chinese history
Harvard University
Cambridge, Massachusetts