The Tale of the Nisan Shaman (also spelled "Nishan"; Manchu: ᠨᡳᡧᠠᠨ ᠰᠠᠮᠠᠨ ᡳ ᠪᡳᡨᡥᡝ, Möllendorff: nišan saman-i bithe) is a Manchu folk tale about a female shaman who resurrects the son of a rich landowner.
[2][3] The tale was transmitted orally, and manuscripts were rare; Soviet ethnographer Alexander Grebenshchikov managed to purchase two during his early research trips to Northeast China in 1908 and 1909, the first near Qiqihar, and the second at Aigun.
The Qiqihar manuscript shows some unusual features in its orthography; in particular, the verbal tense markers therein are written separately from their base verbs, whereas the standard practise in written Manchu is to write them attached to the base verb.
[6] In 1969, an English translation was made by George Meszoly, a Harvard University undergraduate; however, it was never published.
The first published English translation, Nowak & Durrant 1977, relied on the annotations in Volkova's and Seong's works but did not refer to Ling's study.