Jurchen people
Generally lacking a central authority, and having little communication with each other, many Jurchen groups fell under the influence of neighbouring dynasties, their chiefs paying tribute and holding nominal posts as effectively hereditary commanders of border guards.
The latter dynasty, originally calling itself the Later Jin, was founded by a Jianzhou commander, Nurhaci (r. 1616–26), who unified most Jurchen tribes, incorporated their entire population into hereditary military regiments known as the Eight Banners, and patronized the creation of an alphabet for their language based on the Mongolian script.
[9] Aisin-Gioro Ulhicun, however, argues that this was a later folk etymology and the original reason was uncertainty among dialects regarding the name's final -n (Nussin, Naisin).
[10] The form Niuche was introduced to the West by Martino Martini in his 1654 work De bello tartarico historia, and it soon appeared, e.g., on the 1660 world map by Nicolas Sanson.
Jurchen (Jyrkin) is an anglicization of Jurčen,[2][11] an attempted reconstruction of this unattested original form of the native name,[12] which has been transcribed into Middle Chinese as Trjuwk-li-tsyin (竹里真)[b] and into Khitan small script as Julisen(sulaisin).
)[17] Janhunen argues that these records already reflect the Classical Mongolian plural form of the name, recorded in the Secret History as J̌ürčät (Jyrkät),[12] and further reconstructed as *Jörcid,[15] The modern Mongolian form is Зүрчид (Zürčid, Suurseita)) whose medial -r- does not appear in the later Jurchen Jucen[15] or Jušen (Jussin)(Jurchen:)[18][c] or Manchu Jushen(Jussin).
According to tradition passed down via oral transmission, Wugunai was the 6th generation descendant of Hanpu, the founder of the Wanyan clan, who therefore must have lived around the year 900.
He succeeded in settling a dispute between two families without resorting to violence, and as a reward, was betrothed to a worthy unmarried maiden also 60 years old.
Herbert Franke described the narrative provided in the History of Jin as an "ancestral legend" with a historical basis in that the Wanyan clan had absorbed immigrants from Goryeo and Balhae during the 10th century.
[32] Hongtaiji, the Qing dynasty emperor of the Aisin Gioro clan, claimed that their progenitor, Bukūri Yongšon[33] (布庫里雍順), was conceived from a virgin birth.
According to the legend, three heavenly maidens, namely Enggulen (恩古倫), Jenggulen (正古倫) and Fekulen (佛庫倫), were bathing at a lake called Bulhūri Omo near the Changbai Mountains.
[53][54][55] As the geopolitical situation shifted, Goryeo unleashed a series of military campaigns in the early 12th century to regain control of its borderlands.
[58][59] Yun Kwan believed that the loss was due to their inferior cavalry and proposed to the king that an elite force known as the Byeolmuban (別武班; "Special Warfare Army") be created.
According to Breuker, Goryeo never really had control of the region occupied by the Nine Fortresses in the first place and maintaining hegemony would have meant a prolonged conflict with militarily superior Jurchen troops that would prove very costly.
This was because it had traditionally been part of their system of tributary relations, its rhetoric, advanced culture, as well as the idea that it was "bastard offspring of Koryŏ".
[citation needed] The Koreans dealt with the Jurchen military through appeals to material benefits and launching punitive expeditions.
Soon after, Mentemu, chieftain of Odoli clan of the Jianzhou Jurchens, defected from paying tribute to Korea, becoming a tributary to China instead.
[citation needed] In 1409, the Ming government created the Nurgan Command Post (奴兒干都司) at Telin (present-day Tyr, Russia,[87] about 100 km upstream from Nikolayevsk-on-Amur in the Russian Far East) in the vicinity of Heilongjiang.
There is probably quite a lot of propaganda in the inscriptions, but they give a detailed record of the Ming court's efforts to assert suzerainty over the Jurchen.
In 1635, his son and successor, Hong Taiji, renamed his people the Manchus as a clear break from their past as Chinese vassals.
Henceforth persons should call our gurun its original name, Manju, and not use the previous demeaning name.Jurchen culture shared many similarities with the hunter-gatherer lifestyle of Siberian-Manchurian tundra and coastal peoples.
They farmed grain and millet as their primary cereal crops, grew flax and raised oxen, pigs, sheep, and horses.
[113] During the Qing dynasty, the Manchus, who descended from the Jurchens, similarly made Han Chinese men shave the front of their head and wear the rest of their hair in a queue, or soncoho (ᠰᠣᠨᠴᠣᡥᠣ) (辮子; biànzi), the traditional Manchu hairstyle.
They gathered ginseng root, pine nuts, hunted for came pels in the uplands and forests, raised horses in their stables, and farmed millet and wheat in their fallow fields.
They engaged in dances, wrestling and drinking strong liquor as noted during midwinter by the Korean Sin Chung-il when it was very cold.
These Jurchens who lived in the northeast's harsh cold climate sometimes half sunk their houses in the ground which they constructed of brick or timber and surrounded their fortified villages with stone foundations on which they built wattle and mud walls to defend against attack.
Nurhaci, who was hosting Sin Chung-il, was uniting all of them into his own army, having them adopt the Jurchen hairstyle of a long queue and a shaved forecrown and wearing leather tunics.
Haplogroup C3b2b1*-M401(xF5483)[125][126][127] has been identified as a possible marker of the Aisin Gioro and is found in ten different ethnic minorities in northern China, but completely absent from Han Chinese.
[125] A genetic test was conducted on 7 men who claimed Aisin Gioro descent with 3 of them showing documented genealogical information of all their ancestors up to Nurhaci.
[130] In the Alternative History timeline of Harry Turtledove's novel Agent of Byzantium, the Jurchens migrate westwards, reach Europe and become a serious threat to the Byzantine Empire.
