[9] This was eventually rebutted by the Qing during the Sino-Russian border conflicts in the 1680s, resulting in the Treaty of Nerchinsk in 1689 which gave the land to China.

[11] Han Chinese farmers were resettled from North China by the Qing to the area along the Liao River in order to restore the land to cultivation.

[14] The Qianlong Emperor allowed Han Chinese peasants suffering from drought to move into Manchuria despite him issuing edicts in favor of banning them from 1740 to 1776.

[15] Chinese tenant farmers rented or even claimed title to land from the "imperial estates" and Manchu Bannerlands in the area.

After that, the Qing court started to encourage immigration of Han Chinese into the region, which began the period of Chuang Guandong.

After conquering the Ming, the Qing identified their state as Zhongguo ("中國", the term for "China" in modern Chinese), and referred to it as "Dulimbai Gurun" in Manchu.

Although the settlers had come mainly from Zhili, Shandong and Shanxi and had brought with them many of the social patterns of those provinces, the immigrants derived from the poorer and less educated elements of society, with the result that at the beginning of the nineteenth century a "gentry" class of the type known in China proper - families of education, wealth and prestige who had exercised social leadership in a given locality for generations - had only recently come into being in Fengtian province and cannot be said to have existed in the Manchurian frontier at all.

One of the capacities in which Manchuria, especially Jilin and Heilongjiang, had served the Qing Empire was as a place of exile, not only for disgraced officials but also for convicted criminals.

Fengtian province had for some time been essentially Han Chinese and part of China, and the military governors of Jilin and Heilongjiang, though charged with the duty of upholding the supremacy of the banner element in society, had failed to preserve the status quo.

Only the cold and sparsely populated Amur basin, which had not attracted settlers from China, remained essentially outside the Chinese sphere.

[24] At the end of the 19th century and turn of the 20th century, to counteract increasing Russian influence, the Qing dynasty abolished the existing administrative system in Manchuria (created by the bannermen) and reclassified all immigrants to the region as Han (Chinese) instead of minren (民人, civilians, non-bannermen), while replacing provincial generals with provincial governors.