Manchu

This paper concentrates on those maxims of Manchu language which deal with education and learning, and shows the attitude of Manchu people towards these aspects. Therefore, the article is an attempt to show how the Manchus perceived education and learning during the Qing dynasty, to translate their attitude to knowledge and to understand its role in their lives.
On the other hand the interpretation of maxims is fortified with insight into the cultural and social background of the times when Qing dynasty took power in China. Along with historical facts and cultural background on education, the paper suggests, where possible, parallels with relevant sayings (or proverbs) of Korean language.
Thus, the paper studies 18 Manchu language maxims on education and studies. Each maxim is translated into English and Korean languages and is provided with comments.

According to the documents regarding the Tibetan monasteries in Amdo from the 17th to 18th centuries, it is obvious that the influence of the Tibetan Buddhist monasteries in eastern Amdo, modern Gansu Province, had fallen gradually after the 17th century. In contrast, the monasteries in western Amdo, present-day Kokonor, rose soon after, and then took over the official titles of their peers in Gansu.
    This phenomenon reflected Qing’s frontier policy that essentially differed from that of Ming China. By examining various materials in Chinese, Manchu, Mongolian and Tibetan, with the study of the political geography in Amdo, this study shows that the decline and ascent of the Tibetan monasteries in eastern and western Amdo actually reflect the Mongolian and Muslim factors behind the frontier administration of the Qing court. Moreover, the frontier administration in the northwest that mainly dealt with the Mongolians in Kokonor had highly involved with the Buddhist cultures prompted by the Manchu emperors. The Mongolian prominent monks from western Amdo that presided imperial religious rituals in Beijing and translated Mongolian and Tibetan scriptures into Manchu can indicate that the Mongolian factors not only influenced the periphery but also the metropole in the Qing empire.
    Herein the author will describe the development of the Tibetan monasteries in Amdo under the transition between the Ming and Qing periods and the ruling of the Qing dynasty. Through delving into Chinese, Manchu, Mongolian and Tibetan archives, such as The Archives of the Grand Secretariat (內閣大庫檔) and The Manchu-Mongolian Routine Memorials of Lifanyuan in the Early Qing (清朝前期理藩院滿蒙文題本), the interactions between the Qing court and the Amdo monasteries will be elaborated. Furthermore, these historical archives provided a solid basis of comparative study on the Ming and Qing, as well as some interesting details about the interrelations between material culture and political function that are usually omitted in Chinese historiography.

This paper provides background information about the shamanism of the Tungus-speaking peoples in northeast China, particularly the Oroqen. It describes in detail the life, initiatory illnesses, training and healing practices of the last living Oroqen shaman who practiced this craft prior to the communist Chinese abolishment of such "superstitions" in the region just south of the Amur River in June or July 1952. Over three anguishing nights, hundreds of Oroqen participated in dusk to dawn rituals and begged the spirits to go away. Public, overt shamanistic healing rituals ended at that point.

一枚相傳由秦始皇所造，象徵天命傳承的傳國玉璽，在歷代政權遞嬗中扮演重要的角色，並引起激烈的爭奪。本文閱讀相關文獻，認為其他帝王的玉璽亦能象徵天命所歸，而其轉移也能象徵天命的傳承與政權的轉移，並非僅有傳國玉璽具備這樣的功能，因此可以於史書中見到「傳國六璽」之說，但隨著魏晉十六國時期的紛亂，各政權爭相強調自己的正當性，「一枚」「貨真價實」的傳國玉璽神話乃逐步被塑造與強調。爾後，更是出現了多個版本的傳國玉璽系譜，這些相互競爭的敘事，或許與各時代的正統論述有關。

The historic Ch’uan Kuo Imperial Seal (Ch’uan Kuo Yü Hsi), created by Ch'in Shih Huang, was considered a device by which to legitimize the emperor’s "Mandate of Heaven." It was passed down through various regimes and caused many armed conflicts in Chinese history. This essay attempts to prove that many other jade seals of Chinese emperors also had the same function in early times by vindicating the historical records of “six” Ch’uan Kuo Imperial Seals. However, when China was divided into several kingdoms in the Era of Norh-South Divisions, each regime struggled for its legitimacy. Then the myth of this Ch’uan Kuo Imperial Seal had been reinforced and become popular legends.

S.V. Dmitriev and S.L. Kuzmin. 2014. The Qing Empire as China: an Anatomy of Historical Myth. – Oriens (Moscow) (1): 5-17.
It is often considered that China is a unique state in the world which has been several times won by foreigners, but never became a part of any other state, thus retaining continuity of its history and statehood based on consecutive row of ruling dynasties. This view is based on ancient sinocentric model which does not satisfy testing by comparative historical approach. Our analysis revealed that the Qing Empire cannot be equaled to China. Although the latter term has been broadly used, it had different meaning at different times. Actually, China was only a part of the Qing Empire. Manchu declarations that their state is China (i.e. Middle State, most important in the world), are similar to those by German, Ottoman, Russian and other monarchs on their states' continuity from the Roman Empire. These declarations have only historical value and cannot be used for modern international law. The Qing and other "conquest dynasties of China" were actually different empires created by non-Chinese peoples. The Han nation-state: Republic of China and People's Republic of China (PRC) had acquired almost whole territory of the Qing Empire as a result of occupation of weaker neighbors, instead of continuity of one state. Modern concept of PRC as a multinational state of "one Chinese nation", that included "minority nationalities" at least from the Middle Ages, is a historical myth.

This article examines how dynasties applied the Five Elements theory in their respective legitimation discourses throughout the history of imperial China. Drawing on both documentary and visual sources, I reveal that the Liao, Jin, and Yuan rulers constructed different dynastic lineages that challenged the “orthodox” dynastic succession pattern formulated by Han Chinese dynasties. In particular, I will show that the Yuan tacitly invoked Metal as its dynastic element and white as its imperial color. I argue that the Yuan choice of dynastic element essentially claimed succession to the Jurchen Jin, another non-Han conquest dynasty, rather than to the Song as scholars have previously assumed. However, these constructions were later negated by the Ming dynasty, which restored a purely Han Chinese dynastic lineage that excluded the Liao, Jin, and Yuan. These ideological conflicts, which were ultimately grounded in ethnic tensions between Han and non-Han peoples, eventually led to the disappearance of the Five Element theory in the Qing political rhetoric. This article sheds new light on understanding how a dynasty engaged its cultural heritage and ethnic background in its political ideology and how it perceived its own place in the Chinese dynastic lineage.

The present study takes as a starting point the question of whether Proto-Turkic had an onset *h- or *p- and aims at reconstructing its consonantism. The answer to the initial question is searched for in the fourteen Turkic lexical loans of adjacent languages such as Mongolic, Kitan, Yeniseian, and Samoyedic. At first sight, the data provided by these loanwords seem ambiguous. However, once it is demonstrated that both the daughter languages of Proto-Turkic, namely Proto-Bulgar Turkic and Proto‑Common Turkic, had the historically unattested initials *d2- and *ń-, these data can be taken to point to the existence of *p- in these languages as well as in Proto-Turkic. The discussion is extended with the question of rhotacism and lambdacism. As regards the rhotacism, Proto-Turkic is assumed to have two rhotic consonants, phonologically denoted as */r1 r2/. The lambdacism, on the other hand, turns out to be a tougher problem. Based on several lexical borrowings into and from Turkic, a further consonant */t2/ is posited for Proto-Turkic. This consonant, originally of affricate and probably later of fricative pronunciation, yielded /š/ in Common Turkic and /l/ in Bulgar Turkic. Thus, the Proto-Turkic consonantism is reconstructed as having a series of consonants */t2 d2 r2/ that underwent serious changes in historical Turkic. Finally, */k2/ is added to this series to explain the correspondence of k- and vocalic onset between some Turco-Mongolic cognates. In addition, significant sound changes in the prehistory of Turkic are dated through external evidence.

Key words: Proto-Turkic, onset consonant, lexical borrowing, consonantism

The Mongolic-speaking Kalmyks currently inhabiting the steppes of the Volga region have Central Asian ancestry and are organized into the tribal groups. The genetic relationships among these tribes and their origin have remained obscure. We analyzed 17 short tandem repeat and 44 binary polymorphisms of Y-chromosome in 426 individuals mainly from three major tribes of the Kalmyks (the Torguuds, Dörwöds and Khoshuuds). Among these tribes, the Dörwöds and Torguuds, as well as the Kalmyks collectively as an ethnic group, showed relatively close genetic affinities to each other and to the Mongols and Altaian Kazakhs, whereas the Khoshuuds were clearly separated from all of them, gathering with the Manchu, Tibetans or Evenks (depending on the algorithm used to calculate genetic distances). The genetic results also indicate that paternal gene flow from East Europeans to the Kalmyks is very little, despite their cohabitation in the North Caspian Steppe during the last 380 years. The occurrence of unique cluster of N1c-Tat haplotypes in the Khoshuuds, which dates to about 340 years and is likely to have East European ancestry, is considered as a result of interethnic contacts occurred soon after the appearance of the Kalmyk tribes in the Volga-Ural region.

In the late eighteenth century, a Qing-centered, pluralistic legal order emerged in the Tibetan regions of the Qing empire. In the Gansu borderlands known to Tibetans as “Amdo,” the Qing state established subprefectures to administer indigenous populations and prepare them for integration into the empire. In the 1790s, the Qianlong emperor asserted the dynasty’s sovereignty in central Tibet and embarked on a program to reform the Tibetan government. This dissertation examines the nineteenth-century legacy of these policies from the twin perspectives of the indigenous people of the region and the officials dispatched to manage them. On the basis of Manchu and Tibetan-language sources, Part One argues that the exercise of Qing sovereignty in central Tibet was connected to the Qianlong court’s desire to monopolize indigenous arts of divination, especially as they related to the identification of prominent reincarnations. The Qing court exported a Ming-era bureaucratic technology—a lott...

First issue of new academic journal. Studia Turkica Mongolica Tibetica Manchurica Sibirica Russica et cetera.

Tartaria Magna is a peer reviewed e-journal in Russian. Editors accept papers and reviews in English and provide Russian translation. We may consider publication of the papers and reviews that have been published in other journals within the period of 3 years. More info: www.tartaria-magna.ru

Hölzl, Andreas. 2020. Tungusic languages / Langues toungouses. In Anne Aarssen, René Genis & Eline van der Veken (eds.), Linguistic Bibliography of the year 2019. Leiden: Brill. https://brill.com/view/title/57528

Available online at: https://bibliographies.brillonline.com/browse/linguistic-bibliography

Continually updated with a new volume published every fall

Andreas Hölzl. preprint. The complexification of Tungusic interrogative systems. To appear in: Dankmar W. Enke, Larry M. Hyman, Johanna Nichols, Guido Seiler & Thilo Weber (eds.), Language change for the worse. Berlin: Language Science Press. https://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/292

Bu çalışmanın konusu, Kül Tegin ve Bilge Kağan Yazıtları'nda geçen ve Türgeş kağanının ordusu için kullanılan otča bwrča ifadesidir. Bu benzetme, Wilhelm Radloff'un çalışmasından başlayarak günümüze kadar yalnızca yazıtlarla ilgili yayınların değil, müstakil çalışmaların da konusu olmuş, defalarca irdelenmiş ve farklı açıklamalarda bulunulmuştur. Bu makalenin amacı, önceki okuma, etimoloji ve açıklamaları bir araya getirerek bunlar içinde hangisinin en ikna edici olduğunu belirlemektir. Sonuç olarak, otča borča okuması ile "ateş ve toz bulutu gibi" anlamlandırmasının en muhtemel yorum olduğuna karar verilmiştir.
The subject of this study is the phrase otča bwrča used to describe the army of Türgäš Qagan in the Kül Tegin and Bilgä Qagan inscriptions. From Wilhem Radloff's study to the present day, this simile has been the subject not only of publications on the inscriptions but also of independent studies. It has been scrutinized several times, and different explanations have been put forward. The purpose of this article is to bring together the previous readings, etymologies, and explanations, and to determine which of them is the most convincing. In conclusion, it is found that the most likely interpretation of the phrase is to read it as otča borča, meaning 'like fire and a cloud of dust'.

This essay examines the process of writing and memorializing the past in the post-Mao era in Xinjiang. In particular, this essay concerns the Sibe community and their recollections of the turbulent decades between 1930 and 1949 and their participation in the Eastern Turkestan Republic. Writing in Chinese, Manchu, and Uyghur, Sibe authors have recorded a narrative of the revolutionary period that is significantly different from the “official” narrative of the PRC. They have appropriated the vocabulary of revolution, translated it into Manchu, and used it to talk about their own revolutionary activities in 1944, asserting both their own agency and their ambivalence about their role as an official “minority nationality” in “New China.” Moreover, Sibe participation in the ETR reveals the degree to which their martial legacy as Qing bannerpeople continued to complicate self-understandings and political activities well into the 1940s.

Türkçe ve Moğolca en az iki bin yıldan beri etkileşim hâlindedir. Bu uzun süreli temasın en açık göstergesi, iki dil ailesinin ortak ve benzer söz varlıklarıdır. Bu karşılıklı alıntılamalar, Türkçenin ve Moğolcanın tarih öncesi ses bilgisini yeniden tasarlamamıza yardımcı olduğu gibi, bazı Türkçe ve Moğolca sözcükleri doğru şekilde yorumlayabilmemizi de sağlamaktadır. Bu sunumun amacı, Moğolcanın Eski Türkçe söz varlığıyla ilgili bazı bilgi boşluklarını doldurduğu durumları sunmaktır. Çalışmada Moğolca karşılıklarına dayanarak bazı Eski Türkçe tekörnek ve nadir tanıklanmış sözcükler yeniden yorumlanmıştır.