A gentle gust of wind awakens the body that has been sleeping for a thousand years; a gentle gust of wind blows away the mysterious veil of history. Standing on the shoulders of time, I talk to history.
From the first year of Qing Shunzhi (1644) when the Qing army entered the customs, the Manchu nobles began to rule the country for more than two hundred years, until the demise of the Qing court in the Xinhai Revolution. Manchus accompanied the Manchu nobles into the Central Plains during these years, and even after the fall of the Qing court, the Manchus were not in the minority. According to the survey, the Manchu population was 10.682 million until 2000, second only to the Han among the 55 ethnic minorities.
But a 2010 Manchu survey showed that there were no more schools in Beijing that taught Manchu, and fewer people knew Manchu. As a part of Chinese culture, the Manchu language is also coming to an end, and the Qing history materials recorded in Manchu are gradually sinking into the long river of history. Why did the Qing Dynasty fall less than a hundred years ago, and the Manchu language quickly disappeared? There are two main reasons for this.
At the end of the 16th century, Nurhaci unified the northeastern parts, and formed a Manchu pinyin with Mongolian letters, forming a new script called Lao Manchu. After Huang Taiji succeeded to the throne, he added a circle dot to the borrowed Mongolian alphabet to distinguish the pronunciation, calling it the circled Manchu or the new Manchu. Manchu was used as an official script for a long time after the clearance, and once became a widely used script throughout the country.
The loss of the Manchu language is a process, not a sudden abandonment. The first reason is internally, in order to forget the original, the emperor of the early Qing Dynasty made the children of the clan and the eight banner nobles must learn Manchu. Qianlong even set up an appraisal system, but even this did not stop the decline of the Manchu language. On the one hand, the children of the nobility gradually became lazy, and on the other hand, the first language they learned from an early age was Chinese. According to the data, most of the nobles' homes were Han slaves, and these slaves had no conditions to learn Manchu at all.
In this way, the first language that the little master learns at home is Chinese, and he will not start learning Manchu until he goes to school, but Manchu is not used much in life, so he will not learn it very deeply. Of course, those who have learned deeply are not without, like Hezhen, who is proficient in the four languages of Manchu, Chinese, Mongolian and Tibetan. However, more people learn Manchu only to cope with official documents, and they use More Chinese. And compared to Chinese, Manchu has too many flaws, such as a small vocabulary.
The second point is the external reasons, throughout the history of the Qing Dynasty, Han Chen can also occupy an important position in it. Fan Wencheng, Wu Sangui, Zhang Tingyu, Lin Zexu, Zeng Guofan, Li Hongzhang, Zhang Zhidong, Zuo Zongtang, these are only famous, not to mention the others. Whether these Hanchens can speak Manchu or not is related to their environment from childhood, obviously, they also learn Chinese from childhood, which has to be said to promote. The ruler of the promotion of a language does not count, it depends on the will of the people, and the Han nationality obviously has the advantage in numbers. At the beginning, in order to let the Han people cut their braids, several cities had been slaughtered, and they also came to force this set of impossible, and then the Han culture was obviously ahead.
As a result, the Qing Dynasty could only cater to Han culture in order to facilitate its rule. In the face of the dominant Chinese language, the inevitable decline of the Manchu language is still related to its own shortcomings. Of course, even this did not lead to today's point, after all, many people in the late Qing Dynasty, including the lower levels, were still using Manchu. The complete decline was after the Xinhai Revolution, because after the Qing Dynasty, the status of the Bannermen plummeted.
The first thing the Republic of China did was to cancel the Manchu and Mongolian academies in various places, and a trend of discrimination against flag people gradually arose in society, and even some places even caused human deaths. This is just like when the Qing army entered the Guantu City, the Flag People could only choose to hide their names, and even the members of the Ai Xin Jue Luo family could not avoid changing their surname to Jin. Teaching Manchu was only private, and did not mention his Manchu identity, and after another ten years, Manchu was discontinued. Of course, what needs to be done now is to work hard to save, which is of great significance for the study of Chinese history and culture.