Why Do Palace Plaques in the Forbidden City Often Contain Both Chinese and Manchu?

Language, Court Culture, and Imperial Order in a Single Plaque

By MING YE

Visitors to the Forbidden City in Beijing often notice an interesting feature on its palace gates and buildings.

Some plaques contain only Chinese characters, while others display Chinese together with vertically written Manchu.

During the Qing dynasty, the names of palaces, gates, halls, and other imperial buildings were frequently written in both languages. The visual combination of Chinese and Manchu became one of the most distinctive features of Qing imperial architecture.

Why did the Qing court use both languages on the same plaque?

The simplest answer is that the Qing dynasty was established by the Manchus, and Manchu held an important position within the political and administrative institutions of the dynasty.

But this explanation alone does not fully account for what these plaques represented.

The bilingual plaques of the Forbidden City were not merely decorative, nor were they simply Chinese architectural names translated into Manchu and placed beside the original.

They reflected a much larger question: how the Qing state represented language, political identity, and imperial rule within the physical space of the court.

The Forbidden City itself was originally constructed under the Ming dynasty.

When it was built, the names of its palaces and gates were naturally written primarily in Chinese. After the Qing conquest of Beijing in 1644, the new dynasty did not construct an entirely new imperial palace. Instead, it inherited and continued to use the former Ming Forbidden City.

The architecture remained, but the political authority occupying that architecture had changed.

This created a practical and symbolic question:

How should the new dynasty express its own political and linguistic identity within an inherited imperial space?

Palace plaques provided one of the most visible answers.

During the early Shunzhi period, the names of many palaces, gates, and towers were reconsidered or standardized, and some plaques appeared in Manchu, Mongolian, and Chinese.

The early Qing court, in other words, did not begin immediately with the familiar Manchu-Chinese bilingual format seen on many surviving plaques today. In some cases, Manchu, Mongolian, and Chinese appeared together.

This was hardly accidental.

The political world of the early Qing was not simply bilingual.

Before entering China proper, the Manchu ruling house had already developed close political and military relationships with Mongol groups. Mongolian occupied an important place in the political environment of the Later Jin and early Qing, while the Manchu script itself had developed from the traditional Mongolian writing system.

The appearance of Manchu, Mongolian, and Chinese on early Qing imperial architecture therefore reflected the multilingual political environment of the emerging empire.

During the Shunzhi period, however, the linguistic form of palace plaques gradually changed.

Research on plaques in the Forbidden City indicates that by around 1657, Mongolian was removed from many palace plaques, while Manchu and Chinese were retained.

The familiar Manchu-Chinese bilingual plaque consequently became one of the characteristic visual forms of Qing imperial architecture.

But why preserve both languages?

To answer this question, it is important to understand that Manchu was not simply a minority language within the Qing state.

It was a major language of the ruling house and an important written language of the imperial administration.

The Qing dynasty produced an enormous body of Manchu archives, palace memorials, imperial records, edicts, dictionaries, translations, and other documents. Major works of the Qing state were produced in multiple languages, including Manchu, Mongolian, and Chinese.

When Manchu appeared on the most important buildings of the imperial palace, therefore, it did not merely announce that “Manchus lived here.”

It represented part of the linguistic and institutional order of the Qing state.

Chinese, at the same time, was indispensable.

After establishing its rule over China, the Qing inherited an enormous Chinese-language administrative and intellectual tradition. Chinese was central to government, local administration, classical education, literary culture, and the everyday life of the overwhelming majority of the population.

The simultaneous appearance of Manchu and Chinese on palace plaques therefore created a particularly characteristic visual language of the Qing dynasty:

one palace, named in two written languages.

At the most practical level, both scripts identified the building.

But in the larger historical context, their coexistence placed the political and linguistic structure of the Qing state directly onto the surface of imperial architecture.

The Manchu-Chinese plaque can therefore be understood as a kind of visible language policy.

One did not need to open a Manchu archival document or read an official Qing compilation to encounter the two languages. Anyone entering the imperial palace could look upward and see them occupying the same political space.

This is why the Manchu inscriptions of the Forbidden City should not be understood merely as ethnic decoration.

They were part of the institutional and court culture of the Qing dynasty.

The Manchu written on these plaques also did not remain completely unchanged throughout more than two centuries of Qing rule.

In the early Qing period, some names of palaces, government institutions, and official titles were represented in Manchu through phonetic transcription from Chinese.

In other words, rather than creating a Manchu expression with an equivalent meaning, the Chinese pronunciation was sometimes represented using Manchu letters.

This practice changed significantly during the Qianlong period.

The Qianlong Emperor placed considerable emphasis on the standardization of the “national language,” meaning Manchu. He was concerned that excessive dependence on Chinese loanwords and phonetic transcriptions could weaken the distinctiveness of Manchu vocabulary. The court therefore undertook extensive efforts to regulate and standardize Manchu terminology.

Names of palaces, government institutions, official titles, and administrative terms were affected by this linguistic policy.

Some Manchu names that had previously been phonetic renderings of Chinese were replaced by expressions created from Manchu vocabulary to convey the meaning of the Chinese name.

The Hall of Supreme Harmony, or Taihe Dian (太和殿), provides a useful example.

Its Manchu name came to be written as:

amba hūwaliyambure deyen

Rather than simply reproducing the Chinese pronunciation of “Taihe Dian” in Manchu letters, the expression uses Manchu vocabulary to represent the meaning of the name.

This means that the Manchu inscriptions on palace plaques can tell us more than the names of buildings. They can also serve as historical evidence for changes in Manchu vocabulary and Qing language policy.

A single plaque may preserve traces of linguistic reform.

From phonetic transcription in the early Qing to more systematic semantic translation and language standardization during the Qianlong period, the inscriptions themselves changed over time.

For this reason, when we see Chinese and Manchu together on a Qing plaque, we should not assume that the two sides always correspond word for word.

Some names were transliterations. Others were semantic translations. Still others were revised and standardized during different periods.

Studying these differences can help reconstruct the history of translation between Manchu and Chinese and the development of Manchu terminology during the Qing dynasty.

There is another interesting question in the Forbidden City:

Why do some buildings still have Manchu-Chinese bilingual plaques today, while others display only Chinese?

The answer cannot be found entirely within the Qing dynasty.

The Forbidden City we see today is not a perfectly frozen version of the imperial palace as it existed at the end of Qing rule. Its plaques and inscriptions also experienced political changes after the dynasty collapsed.

Following the establishment of the Republic of China, Manchu inscriptions were removed from some plaques in the Outer Court. Because the former Qing imperial household continued to occupy the Inner Court for a period after the abdication of the emperor, differences emerged between the treatment of plaques in the Inner and Outer Courts.

Around 1915, plaques on major Outer Court buildings, including the Hall of Supreme Harmony, also underwent significant changes.

Consequently, when visitors today notice that one building has Manchu while another does not, they should not automatically assume that the Qing court originally chose to use Manchu in one location but not the other.

Some differences reflect the original function and history of particular Qing buildings. Others are the result of plaques being removed, altered, replaced, or preserved after the fall of the dynasty.

This makes the plaques of the Forbidden City particularly valuable historical objects.

They document not only the Qing dynasty itself, but also the ways in which later governments and institutions reinterpreted the political space inherited from the Qing.

There is another dimension to this story.

Manchu and Chinese were not the only languages visible in Qing imperial architecture.

In particular historical and architectural settings, Mongolian also appeared. More broadly, Qing imperial monuments, inscriptions, temples, and commemorative structures could employ Manchu, Chinese, Mongolian, Tibetan, and other languages.

Rare plaques containing Manchu, Mongolian, and Chinese can still be found in parts of the Forbidden City, preserving traces of the multilingual practices of the early Qing court.

It would therefore be equally misleading to imagine the Qing imperial court simply as a bilingual world divided between Manchu and Chinese.

The Qing Empire governed a much more complex multilingual political space.

Manchu, Chinese, Mongolian, Tibetan, and other languages performed different functions in different regions, institutions, and political relationships.

The Manchu-Chinese plaques of the Forbidden City are simply the most visible surviving expression of this much larger linguistic system.

Their importance lies precisely in the fact that language here did not exist only in books and archives.

It became part of architecture.

Emperors passed beneath these inscriptions. Officials entering the court saw them. People living and working within the palace inhabited a physical environment in which these written languages were constantly present.

Writing therefore participated in the construction of imperial space itself.

This is also why palace plaques have particular value for the study of Manchu.

An archival document may tell us how the Qing government handled a political or administrative matter. A dictionary may tell us how a particular Manchu word was defined.

A palace plaque tells us something different:

it shows us how Manchu physically occupied one of the most important political spaces of the Qing Empire.

These inscriptions were not later additions intended to display ethnic culture, nor were they modern decorations designed to make a tourist site appear more “Qing.”

They were part of the linguistic and political world of their own time.

From the Chinese plaques inherited from the Ming period, to the appearance of Manchu, Mongolian, and Chinese in the early Qing, and then to the predominance of Manchu-Chinese bilingual plaques; from early phonetic transcriptions to Qianlong-era efforts to standardize Manchu terminology; and finally to the removal or alteration of some Manchu inscriptions after the fall of the dynasty—the changing language of palace plaques reflects changing historical circumstances.

So when we stand in the Forbidden City today and look at a plaque containing both Chinese and Manchu, we are seeing more than two ways of writing the name of the same building.

We are seeing the linguistic order of the Qing state written directly into imperial architecture.

A seemingly ordinary palace plaque is therefore both an architectural object and a historical document.

And for those who can read the Manchu inscription, it may tell a story far richer than the few Chinese characters beside it.

— MING YE