The Manchu language fades into history

Interesting article in yesterday’s NYT on the Manchu language in China (hat tip: Kate Merkel-Hess). In the village of Sanjiazi, in Heilongjiang near the border with Inner Mongolia, 18 residents, all octogenarians, represent China’s last native speakers of Manchu.

With the passing of these villagers, Manchu will also die, experts say. All that will be left will be millions of documents and files — about 60 tons of Manchu-language documents are in the provincial archive in Harbin alone — along with inscriptions on monuments and important buildings in China, unintelligible to all but a handful of specialists.

“I think it is inevitable,” said Zhao Jinchun, an ethnic Manchu born in Sanjiazi who taught at the village primary school for more than two decades before becoming a government official in Qiqihar, a city about 30 miles to the south. “It is just a matter of time. The Manchu language will face the same fate as some other ethnic minority languages in China and be overwhelmed by the Chinese language and culture.”

Perhaps some in China will wonder, “So what? The Manchus became Chinese a long time ago.”

It’s a common myth and a necessary one because the

March 18th, 2007

You are not a REAL American, scenes from laowai street theater

Often when I go to the market to buy something, I find it useful to feign ignorance of the Chinese language. I find walking around as a deaf-mute relaxes people and causes them to say things (like the actual prices) in my presence that they probably wouldn’t say otherwise. Some of the things said can range from the naive to the nonsensical. When I first came to China, I used to rush to stand up for myself whenever the commentary took a turn for the personal, now I find it more amusing to let them prattle on for awhile.

Yesterday, we went to a little hutong to buy 剪纸 jianzhi for the Spring Festival. As usual, I hung back a little bit and let YJ and her Mom do the real shopping lest the seller know there was a laowai involved and add the usual ‘foreigner’ surcharge on each purchase. As I stood before the rows of delicately cut red paper, the seller’s helper came up to me and asked me what I liked. I responded by smiling and shrugging my shoulders. “tingbudong?” (don’t you understand?) he asked. Another customer, a woman of vaguely lao tai tai age wandered over

February 7th, 2007

A Roman holiday…in Gansu?

The question of certain groups of “Chinese” being distantly related to ancient wanderers from as far west as Europe is one of those subjects in the China history field that, like mildew in the bath or a chip in the car’s windshield, seems a matter of minor importance is both omnipresent and vaguely troubling. In 1998, the PBS series Nova did a piece on a group of mummies at a museum in Urumchi with distinctly ‘caucasian’ features. The long reddish-blond hair and European features of the preserved bodies convinced some scholars that an ancient settlement existed in the Takla Makan desert that was a kind of crossroads between Europe and Asia.

Today the Telegraph is reporting from Gansu, “Residents of a remote Chinese village [Liqian] are hoping that DNA tests will prove one of history’s most unlikely legends — that they are descended from Roman legionaries lost in antiquity.” Villagers are born with blonde locks and reddish wavy hair. Their skin is ruddy and their facial features…how to put this…look vaguely Roman. Richard Spencer writes:

The town’s link with Rome was first suggested by a professor of Chinese history at Oxford in the 1950s. Homer Dubs pulled

February 4th, 2007

From the "creative history" files: Genghis Khan was Chinese?

This past autumn, a project funded by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences set off a mini-firestorm when they suggested that the Goguryeo kingdom of Northern Korea (37-668) as well as the later Balhae kingdom (698-926) were actually Chinese kingdoms, founded by ethnic minority groups from China. One Korean newspaper even suggested that it was the beginning of a Chinese ‘land grab’ of Northern Korea in the event of a DPRK collapse. The whole point of the study was ludicrous, not the least the assumption that such entities as “China” or “Korea” existed in their modern forms during the first millennium C.E.

Now from the creative history files of the PRC, comes the claim that Genghis Khan, once famously slagged by Chairman Mao as just another barbarian warlord, was in fact Chinese. The last few holdouts of the Song dynasty who faced down the horses and boats of the Mongol horde must be really pleased by this recent rehabilitation of their arch-nemesis. If only they had known. The Song army could have welcomed them in as brothers and made some tea and passed out hong bao while their wives warmed up the tofu for their guests.

“We define

December 30th, 2006
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