Manchu: A Textbook for Reading Documents

Manchu was the language of a group of people who in the sixteenth century lived to the northeast of China and later became known as Manchus. After establishing a new state in the southern part of Manchuria in the early seventeenth century, they conquered China and ruled as the Qing dynasty until 1911. Millions of Manchu records along with records in Chinese and Mongolian were created during nearly three hundred years in power. Nowaday, with an imperial Manchu court out of the picture, hardly anybody knows the language. With the accessibility of large number of Manchu documents, today scholars study Manchu to understand the documents.