What Kind of Writing System Is Manchu?
What Kind of Writing System Is Manchu?
MING YE
9/30/20269 min read
What Kind of Writing System Is Manchu?
From Old Manchu and New Manchu to More Than Four Centuries of Written History
By MING YE
Manchu was one of the most important official written languages of the Qing dynasty and remains an indispensable key to the study of Qing history.
Compared with the long history of Chinese writing, Manchu is a relatively young script. From its creation around the end of the sixteenth century to the present day, its history spans only a little more than four centuries.
Yet within this relatively short period, Manchu produced an enormous documentary legacy, including archives, rare books, inscriptions, imperial edicts, palace memorials, genealogies, dictionaries, translations, and other historical records.
What kind of writing system is Manchu? Where did it come from? And how did it develop from its creation and reform to widespread use and eventual decline?
To answer these questions, we must begin with the Jurchens before the creation of the Manchu script.
What Did the Jurchens Use Before the Manchu Script?
The ancestors of the Manchus were closely connected with the historical Jurchens.
The Jurchens did, however, possess writing systems before the emergence of Manchu.
Following the establishment of the Jin dynasty in the twelfth century, the Jurchens created and used the Jurchen script.
During the reign of the Jin founder Wanyan Aguda, the Jurchen Large Script was created under the influence of existing written traditions, particularly the Khitan and Chinese scripts.
In 1138, during the reign of Emperor Xizong of Jin, another form of Jurchen writing was promulgated. It later became known as the Jurchen Small Script.
Jurchen writing became one of the important official scripts of the Jin dynasty.
Following the fall of the Jin and subsequent changes in the political and linguistic environment, however, the use of Jurchen writing gradually declined.
Many Jurchens who settled in China proper increasingly adopted the Chinese language and script, while some Jurchen communities in Northeast Asia continued using Jurchen writing for a longer period.
By the Ming period, the Jurchen script gradually disappeared from practical use.
A writing system that had once recorded a dynasty and a language eventually became an ancient script that later generations could scarcely read.
The Disappearance of Jurchen Writing Did Not Immediately Produce Manchu
An important distinction must be made here:
The Manchu script was not simply an evolutionary continuation of the Jurchen script.
After Jurchen writing disappeared, the Jurchen communities of Northeast Asia experienced a long period without a widely used writing system of their own.
During the Yuan and Ming periods, some Jurchens made use of Mongolian writing.
By the time of Nurhaci, the Jianzhou Jurchens spoke their own language but relied on Mongolian writing for certain written purposes.
As Nurhaci gradually unified the Jurchen groups, political, military, and economic activities expanded rapidly, while contacts with Ming China and the Mongol groups became increasingly frequent.
A rapidly developing political community required a writing system better suited to recording its own language.
It was within this historical context that the Manchu script emerged.
1599: Nurhaci Decides to Create a New Script
In 1599, Nurhaci initiated the creation of a writing system capable of recording the language of his people.
Traditional historical accounts associate two figures in particular with this project:
Erdeni and Gagai.
Both were familiar with Mongolian writing.
According to traditional accounts, they initially expressed doubts about the feasibility of creating a new script.
Nurhaci's basic reasoning, however, was straightforward:
Why should his people speak their own language but have to learn another language and its writing system in order to write?
Why not use the already familiar Mongolian alphabetic tradition and adapt it to the sounds of their own language?
Historical sources preserve a well-known account in which Nurhaci demonstrated how individual written elements could be combined to represent words in the spoken language.
The essential principle was clear:
Mongolian letters could be adapted to serve the language of the Jurchens.
Erdeni, Gagai, and others therefore modified the Mongolian script according to the phonological characteristics of the language.
The resulting early writing system later became known as:
Old Manchu, or undotted Manchu.
What Is “Old Manchu”?
Old Manchu was not a separate language.
It was an early form of the Manchu writing system.
Because the early script relied heavily on existing Mongolian letter forms, while the sound systems of Manchu and Mongolian were not identical, a practical problem soon became apparent.
Some different Manchu sounds could not be clearly distinguished in writing.
As a result, the same written form could sometimes correspond to different pronunciations, and different pronunciations could represent entirely different words.
This created difficulties even with ordinary vocabulary.
The problem became still more serious when recording personal names, place names, and political or military terminology.
Nevertheless, Old Manchu was historically transformative.
For the first time, the emerging Later Jin state possessed a writing system that could systematically record its own language and document its political, military, and social activities.
The Old Manchu Archives and the Earliest Stages of Manchu Writing
One of the most important bodies of material for studying Old Manchu is the Old Manchu Archives and the related corpus of early Manchu documents.
These records preserve extensive information about political, military, and social affairs during the periods of Nurhaci and Hong Taiji.
At the same time, they preserve the linguistic and orthographic characteristics of Manchu during its formative period.
The importance of the Old Manchu Archives therefore lies not only in what the documents say.
The writing itself is evidence.
Through these early records, researchers can examine how Manchu words were originally spelled, which letters could be confused, how personal and geographical names were recorded, how writing conventions gradually changed, and why the script eventually required reform.
In this sense, the Old Manchu Archives are not merely historical documents.
They are also a kind of linguistic fossil preserving an early stage in the development of Manchu writing.
Why Did Old Manchu Need to Be Reformed?
One of the principal limitations of Old Manchu was its insufficient ability to distinguish certain sounds.
The fundamental purpose of a writing system is to represent language with reasonable precision.
If several different sounds are written in exactly the same way, readers must depend heavily on context to determine the intended word.
For the rapidly developing Later Jin state, this became increasingly inconvenient.
As government administration, military orders, population management, diplomatic communication, and historical recordkeeping became more complex, greater orthographic precision was required.
The reform of Old Manchu therefore became a practical necessity.
The figure most closely associated with this reform was Dahai.
Dahai's Reform and the Dotted-and-Circled Manchu Script
Historical sources contain different accounts concerning the precise chronology of the reform of Old Manchu.
The date most commonly associated with the major reform is 1632, the sixth year of the Tiancong reign.
During the reign of Hong Taiji, Dahai and others carried out important modifications to the existing writing system.
The most recognizable innovation was the introduction of:
dots and circles.
These apparently small marks solved many of the ambiguities that had existed in Old Manchu by making previously difficult-to-distinguish sounds and letters more clearly identifiable.
The reformed system therefore became considerably more precise.
It is generally known as:
New Manchu, or
dotted-and-circled Manchu.
The traditional Manchu script most familiar to readers today developed essentially from this reformed system.
New Manchu Did Not Replace Old Manchu Overnight
A writing reform does not transform the habits of every writer immediately.
Manchu was no exception.
Surviving early archives show that after New Manchu began to spread, there was a considerable transitional period during which:
Old Manchu and New Manchu were used side by side.
Some scribes adopted the new dotted-and-circled system, while other documents continued to preserve older spellings.
The transition from Old to New Manchu was therefore gradual.
Only toward the later Chongde period did New Manchu become firmly established throughout official documentary practice.
From the beginning of the reform to its broad implementation, the process took roughly a decade.
This demonstrates that Manchu was not a writing system that was simply “invented” in a single moment.
It went through a complete process of:
creation → practical use → identification of problems → reform → standardization → widespread adoption.
What Type of Writing System Is Manchu?
From the perspective of writing-system typology, Manchu is an alphabetic script.
It is written vertically:
letters run from top to bottom, while vertical lines are arranged from left to right.
A Manchu letter can take different graphic forms depending on its position within a word.
These are generally described as:
isolated, initial, medial, and final forms.
This feature can initially confuse new learners.
Why does a single letter seem to have several different shapes?
In fact, they are not different letters. They are positional forms of the same letter.
Manchu uses combinations of letters to represent syllables and words. Its writing principles are therefore fundamentally different from those of Chinese characters.
Understanding this distinction is one of the most important first steps in learning to read Manchu.
Manchu Reached Its Height After the Establishment of the Qing Dynasty
Following the Qing conquest of China proper, the geographical and institutional use of Manchu expanded greatly.
In addition to Northeast China, the central government, and the imperial court, Manchu was used in many strategically important cities and military centers where Banner forces were stationed.
It appeared in:
imperial edicts,
palace memorials,
government documents,
military archives,
official seals,
stone inscriptions,
palace plaques,
genealogies,
educational materials,
dictionaries,
literary translations,
and many other fields.
The Qing dynasty consequently left behind an enormous documentary heritage written in Manchu.
The language itself also continued to develop.
Through prolonged contact with Chinese, numerous Chinese words entered Manchu through transliteration and other forms of borrowing, expanding its vocabulary in response to new political, social, and cultural needs.
Manchu Was Not Used Exclusively by the Manchus
The historical influence of Manchu writing was not limited entirely to the Manchu people.
Several neighboring peoples in Northeast Asia, particularly those closely connected with the Qing political and military system, also used Manchu to varying degrees.
These included groups such as the:
Sibe, Daur, and Evenki.
The Sibe case is particularly important.
The later Sibe writing system has a very close historical relationship with Manchu.
Viewed within the broader linguistic history of Northeast Asia, Manchu was therefore more than simply “the writing system of the Manchus.”
It also served at different times as an important medium of documentation, education, and cultural communication among different communities.
Why Did Manchu Gradually Decline?
The most important transformation in the history of Manchu occurred among its own speakers.
Following the Qing conquest, Manchu communities increasingly lived in a social environment dominated by Chinese.
As political, economic, social, and cultural interaction between Manchus and Han Chinese deepened, growing numbers of Manchus came to use Chinese as their principal language of everyday life.
An important distinction consequently emerged:
Manchu identity could continue even when Manchu was no longer a person's first language.
By the Kangxi and Yongzheng periods, the Qing court was already expressing concern about declining proficiency in Manchu among Banner populations and repeatedly emphasized the preservation of the “national language and mounted archery.”
Such efforts themselves demonstrate that the everyday linguistic environment was changing.
After the Qianlong period, although Manchu continued to occupy an important place in state institutions and official documents, its everyday social use gradually contracted.
The trend became still more pronounced during the late Qing.
From a Language of State to an Endangered Historical Language
By the later nineteenth century, Chinese had become increasingly dominant in administrative practice.
Many of the practical functions once performed by Manchu continued to diminish.
Following the end of the Qing dynasty in 1911, Manchu lost the official institutional framework that had sustained its privileged political position.
Its use as an everyday spoken language subsequently contracted still further.
A language that had once been used for imperial edicts, government archives, military orders, diplomatic documents, education, literature, and scientific translation gradually became a specialized language mastered fluently by relatively few people.
This is one of the most striking aspects of Manchu history.
Created around the end of the sixteenth century, it developed rapidly during the seventeenth century, generated an enormous documentary tradition under the Qing, and then gradually retreated from everyday use in the modern period.
The entire process unfolded within little more than four centuries.
Has Manchu Really “Disappeared”?
As an everyday spoken language, Manchu is now highly endangered.
From the perspective of written historical heritage, however, Manchu has by no means disappeared.
An enormous body of Manchu material still survives:
palace memorials preserved in archives,
Manchu-Chinese plaques in historical buildings,
imperial seals,
stone inscriptions,
Manchu genealogies,
rare books,
multilingual Qing dictionaries,
and large quantities of archival material that have yet to be fully studied.
The real question, therefore, is not:
Does Manchu still exist?
It is:
How many people today can still read these texts directly?
Conclusion: A Script Only Four Centuries Old That Preserved the Memory of an Empire
The history of the Manchu script is not particularly long.
From its creation around 1599, it spans only a little more than four centuries.
Yet within those centuries, it experienced a remarkably complete historical life:
from undotted Old Manchu,
to the dotted-and-circled New Manchu associated with Dahai's reforms;
from the writing system of an emerging Jurchen political community,
to one of the major official written languages of the Qing dynasty;
from military and administrative records,
to literature, history, religion, science, medicine, and multilingual translation;
and finally, as its linguistic and social environment changed, to a gradual retreat from everyday use.
The true significance of Manchu, therefore, lies not simply in the fact that it is a writing system associated with the Manchu people.
It recorded an era.
Studying Manchu today is not merely an attempt to recover an old script.
More importantly, it allows historical records that have remained silent in archives and rare books for centuries to become readable once again.
— MING YE