The Disappearance of the Manchu People in the Face of Historical Turbulence

It is interesting to witness a piece of history right in the neighborhood that you live in. In this residential suburb of Chiba city that I live in, there is a little wooden Japanese-style house sitting in the corner of a small backstreet, surrounded by similar houses populated by normal people. Yet, in this little wooden house, decades ago, lived Aisin Gioro Pujie (愛新覺羅溥傑), the younger brother of Aisin Gioro Puyi (愛新覺羅溥儀), the last emperor of the Manchu Qing Dynasty that ruled China until 1911. After the fall of the Qing Dynasty, he came to Japan as a member of the royal family of Manchukuo.

It was a time of great historical upheaval in Northeast Asia. Manchukuo, a puppet regime established by Japan with Puyi as the nominal head of the state, faced greater uncertainty as partisans loyal to China sabotaged its functioning. As Japan waged war against China proper and faced off against the Soviet Union to the north, the regime was no more than a staging ground for the Japanese military and exploitation of the region's vast natural resources. It is not surprising that Manchukuo, and with it the last vestiges of the Qing royal family, collapsed in the final days of World War II, brought down by a weakened Japanese military unable to fend off the onslaughts of a Soviet invasion.

In the midst of this historical upheaval, Pujie attempted to live a normal life in this little corner of Chiba, surrounded by his Japanese wife and their two daughters. While attending Japanese military school as a member of the Manchukuo royal family, he also found time dabbling in poetry and calligraphy, creating a collection that is displayed all over the walls and tables of the little wooden house. The tranquility of his words, punctuated by the views of the still well-maintained garden in the back of the house, contrasts greatly with the political and economic difficulties that his people faced in that era.

Indeed, it is amazing to see the rapid decline in the fortunes of the Manchu people in the 20th century. At the turn of the century, they were still ruling over a vast empire containing not only what is today China, but also all of Mongolia and pieces of Southeast Asia that now belong to countries like Myanmar and Laos. Yet, as Chinese revolutionaries rise up and call for the expulsion of "foreigners" and restoring Han Chinese rule, the various Manchu community spread all over the vast empire quickly became targets of attacks by the local majority populations.

Granted, as a nomadic people at heart, the Manchu population was never really large. In the administration of the vast empire, it had to, from the very beginning of the Qing Dynasty, rely on locals that vastly outnumbered the Manchu garrison that often only provided a stamp of authority through a military presence and the highest political posts connected with the imperial court. The general inability for Manchus to make a cultural stamp in the various parts of the empire, through demographic, economic, or other means, meant they remained marginal in the daily lives of the vast majority of the empire's subjects.

Perhaps the most unfortunate is that the Manchu homeland, corresponding to what is now northeastern China and Russian Far East, quickly lost its Manchu character in the last years of the Qing Dynasty. In a bid to stave off Russian and Japanese designs on the region, the Qing Dynasty had to rely on large numbers of Han Chinese immigrants into the region to provide a greater demographic basis for imperial rule. By the time Manchukuo was established, nominally as a home country for the Manchus, the land has become largely populated by the Han Chinese, with Mandarin as the lingua franca.

The Chinese revolutionaries calling for the expulsion of foreigners only expedited the decline of Manchu identity. Fearing for their very lives, many Manchus took up Chinese names, spoke Chinese, wore Chinese clothes, and hid their Manchu identity from others, including their own children, for fear of being attacked by the Han Chinese. With minimal physical differences from the Han Chinese, many Manchus simply became Han Chinese, in population statistics and in their minds. Even as Manchus officially continuing to number more than 10 million today, the Manchu language has all but become extinct.

Pujie, in his own way, contributed to the death of the Manchu fortune. His posterity has long since settled in Japan, marrying Japanese and taking up Japanese language and names. His own poetry and calligraphy were largely in Chinese, with little that suggests his lifestyle has any obviously Manchu elements. In photos, on display in the little wooden house, showing his last days spent in Beijing in the 1970s, he is dressed in a Mao suit, no different from millions of other local residents of the city at the time. As a part Manchu blooded person myself, it is a bit hallowing to see the Manchu people disappearing in such a prominent way.