Pamela Kyle Crossley

Manzhou Yuanliu Kao and the Formalization of the Manchu Heritage

During the Qianlong period (1736–95) in China, knowledge of Manchu origins, much of which had been of a folk or informal character, was given documentary institutionalization—that is, incorporation into the Qing (1636–1912) imperial cultural mosaic by the act of writing something official about it. Much but by no means all of Manchu civilization was derived from Jurchen culture (tenth–seventeenth centuries), which was primarily a folk culture in which oral tradition, shamanic ritual, and clan custom were the mainstays of orderly social life. Inseparable from those folk traditions were elements of tribal rule that affected political life in many ways in the Later Jin (1616–35) and early Qing periods. To the extent that Manchu society retained the archaic forms through the Qing era, the folk heritage was brought into conflict with the political institutions and classical traditions of conquered China, especially the emperorship. The history of the Qing court and its relation to the Manchus may be viewed as the aggregate of the processes by which the dynasty attempted to resolve this conflict through formalization of the old culture. In its political aspects this meant the progressive bureaucratization, regulation, and depersonalization of the state in displacement of the personal, diffused authority that had once been vested by tradition in the clans and confederations. In its cultural and ideological facets, it meant the documentation of descent, myth, clan history, and shamanic practice; what had once been various and mystically obscure was now made visible, manageable, and standard.

An Introduction to the Qing Foundation Myth

For symbolic legitimacy and cultural coherence the Qing dynasty (1644-1912) depended in part upon a myth of the supernatural foundation of their imperial clan, the Aisin Gioro. In retrospect further significance can be attached to the myth. The story itself reflects certain aspects of the origins of the Aisin Gioro clan that the official docments do not treat with much precision, and reveal the mythological intentions of the story as reduced in extant Qing documents. The preservation and presentation of the myth over the course of the dynasty is in turn a reminder of the importance of clan origin as an enduring, fundamental cultural theme. Finally, the story was the inspiration for a Manchu epic that quickened the fascination of Enlightenment intellectuals, notably Voltaire, for China and things Chinese. The hero of the Qing foundation myth was Bukuri Yongson. He was magically conceived when his mother Fekulen held a fruit that had fallen from the mouth of a sacred crow. The child Bukuri was barely grown when he pacified the warring factions of the sanxing people, and was elected beyile by them. He then lived at Wodoli, a town on the heaths of Womuhe, east of Changbaishan, and he called his tribe manju. The Yuan dynasty established a militial myriarchy here, and in the early Ming it became the Jianzhou Garrison. After several generations the clan of Bukuri Yongson became unfit to govern the people. When the tribes rebelled Fanca, a scion of the clan, escaped. Generations later the Garrison commander Möngke Temür was born into the lineage.1