In 1644, the Manchu rulers relocated their court from Mukden to Beijing, the capital of the Ming dynasty. The enthronement ceremony for Emperor Shunzhi (1638–1661; r. 1644–1661) took place at the Imperial Palace inherited from the Ming. The emperor, born outside the Great Wall, began to rule the vast territory within and without the Shanhai Pass from the “seat of the dragon” (longyi龙椅) in the Forbidden City.

What happened to Manchuria after the “dragon” left? The region became almost devoid of people after the departure of the court. Immediately after 1644, most of the elite and many...

The banner system in the Three Eastern Provinces during the late Qing was both old and new. It was old because the original banner system, which officially began in 1601, had developed over hundreds of years. It was new because the military, political, and social roles of the banners began to change when new problems arose. The banner communities in Manchuria, despite their minor differences across Fengtian, Jilin, and Heilongjiang, were distinguished from banner garrisons stationed in China Proper with respect to military function, political importance, administrative strategies, population management, and relations with Han civilians.

The evolution of the generals’...

The 1911 Revolution finally forced the Manchu court to negotiate with the anti-Manchu revolutionaries, who had launched a series of failed revolts before the end of the Qing. On January 1, 1912, Sun Yatsen formally announced the establishment of the Republic of China at his presidential inauguration in Nanjing. In Beijing, the emperor abdicated on February 2. During the Qing-ROC transition, dramatic changes and calamitous consequences reshaped banner people’s lives and community.

The banner people and families of most garrisons stationed in towns and cities in China Proper faced vehement anti-Manchu rhetoric, sentiments, and actions. Violence against banner people reached...

Manchuria, with its vast and fertile land, rich natural resources, and strategically important location, was significant for both the Japanese colonial empire and the ROC. Aiming to protect Japan’s “interest line” beyond its territorial borders, Japanese leaders valued Manchuria as their nation’s “lifeline” (seimei sen); thus the Japanese government devoted tremendous manpower and generous amounts of state resources to protect Japanese interests in the area.¹ Chinese nationalists in the 1930s and 1940s, unlike the anti-Manchu revolutionaries of the 1910s, asserted that China would not be a complete nation without recovering Dongbei 北 (the Northeast) from Japanese occupation.² The Western...

On October 19, 1934, a LondonTimescorrespondent in Mukden reported that the Manchoukuo emperor, Puyi, who had abdicated the Qing throne at the age of six in 1912, visited Dongling 东陵 (Eastern Mausoleum), one of the three imperial mausoleums of his ancestors in Manchuria. For this occasion, Puyi changed from his field marshal uniform, in which he was regularly depicted in official photographs released by the Manchoukuo government, into a traditional Manchu costume, rarely seen in official photographs in Manchoukuo.⁴ In his Manchu costume, Puyi offered “fruits, wine, jade, a bullock, and a ram to the spirit of the...

A Manchurian orphan in Manchoukuo’s capital, Xinjing 新京 (Changchun 長春), who had been cruelly abused by her Manchurian stepparents, was saved and adopted by a Japanese couple. She was given a Japanese name, Emiko, and a decent education. She learned social etiquette, handcrafts, thread and needle work, and other skills and knowledge required of Japanese women. She thus became a “graceful and pure Japanese woman.” The family was praised in a newspaper as “a bright example of Manchurian-Japanese love, which crosses ethnic boundaries” (SJSB, October 7, 1938), presenting a rosy picture of Manchoukuo’s national principle of “Harmony of the Five...

Although the Manchus had to face another wave of suspicion in the ROC during the 1930s and 1940s, the ROC leaders perceived the Manchus as a Hanized subnational group and viewed the Three Eastern Provinces as lost borderlands. This perception, expressed in state rhetoric and diplomacy (as examined previously), was also well supported by Chinese scholarly publications on the ethnology and borderlands of China. Scholars in the ROC played an essential role in redefining the ethnic composition and territorial structure of China in general, and in re-identifying the Manchus and repositioning Manchuria in particular.

A careful examination of the changes...

As a minor—and sometimes illegal—political party in the ROC, the CCP could not conduct nationwide ethnological surveys or research projects. The CCP did, however, make efforts to win sympathy and support from minority peoples during its bitter struggles with the GMD.³ The CCP developed general policies for the border regions in its development strategies as early as its Second National Congress in 1922. Under the influence and directorship of the Comintern, the CCP defined its task in the frontier regions as “respecting the autonomy of borderlanders” and establishing “self-governing states (zizhibang自治邦) in Mongolia, Tibet, and the Hui...

In late March 1948, news agencies in China, Japan, and the United States reported the execution in the ROC of Aisin Gioro Xianyu 愛新觉罗显扜 (1906?–1948)—also known as Jin Bihui 金璧辉 and Kawashima Yoshiko 川島芳子—for treason. In the Japanese reports, she was known as Kawashima Yoshiko, “Manchoukuo’s Joan of Arc,” or “A Beauty in Male Attire” (dansō no reijin男装の麗人). Americans referred to her as the “Mata Hari of East Asia.” The Chinese knew her as the mysterious Jin Bihui (“Radiant Jade”).² Xianyu still appears frequently under these names in postwar memoirs in Japanese, Chinese, and English, where...

The Qing Empire came to an end in 1912, and Manchoukuo disappeared with Japan’s imperial empire in 1945. Yet collective and individual memories of the two empires persist in the Manzu’s narrations of their pasts. “The remembering and the telling are themselvesevents,not only description of events” (Portelli 1981b, 175). Manzu accounts of the two empires reveal a triadic process of the ethnicization of the Manzu community: the Manzu’s reconception of Manchuria, redefinition of their historical roles, and decolonization in post-Qing China. With a role to play in revising the history of a community for the present redefinition of...