Blog
The Manchu Studies Blog is an informal place to share short write-ups related to Manchu Studies: conference reports, brief introduction to materials, translation, think-pieces, travelogues, or anything else too short or informal for the Saksaha journal but is nevertheless interesting and worth sharing.
To submit a piece of writing for the blog, please reach out to the web editor at [email protected].
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Manchu Folklore: Tales Told by a Bewitched Being
Hanung Kim, Harvard University The genre of folklore is a constituent part of Manchu literature, but has attracted less scholarly attention than other types of literature, perhaps because the strong…
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Thoughts on the Rise and Fall of the Manchu Language
Mårten Söderblom Saarela, Princeton University As a friend recently pointed out to me, Manchu translations of Chinese from the Qing period often seem to adhere to a method in which…
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A Hard-won Work
A Hard-won Work: A. O. Ivanovskii’s Manchzhurskaia khrestomatiia Gregory Afinogenov, Harvard University Aleksei Osipovich Ivanovskii’s academic career was not exactly an unqualified success. In1885, at the age of 22, he…
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The Journey of a Manchu Map
Mario Cams, KU Leuven The Département des cartes et plans of the French National Archives preserves a Latin version of the map that is included in the Lakcaha jecen de…
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A Tatar among the Tartars
David Brophy, Postdoctoral Fellow, Australian Centre on China in the World Between 1915 and 1917, the Tatar journalist Nushirvan Yavshef undertook a trip to Xinjiang, or Chinese Turkistan (Chīnī Türkistān)…
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“Learning Manchu” through Comedy
Lei Lin, AM Candidate Harvard University Xiangsheng 相聲, commonly referred to as “crosstalk”, is a traditional Chinese comedic performance in the form of a solo monologue (dankou 單口), a dialogue…
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Gun Control, Qing Style
David Porter PhD Candidate Harvard University In February of 2012, Hing Chao, the Hong Kong founder of the Orochen Foundation — an “NGO dedicated to the cultural survival of numerically…
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The Cost of a Manchu Dictionary in the Guangxu Period
Mårten Söderblom Saarela, Princeton University Lacking good information on print runs, prices, and distribution channels, it is difficult today to estimate how widely Manchu dictionaries circulated in the Qing (1644–1911)…
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Living and Dying at Peking’s Russian Ecclesiastical Mission
Gregory Afinogenov Ph.D. Candidate Harvard University In the Archive of Orientalists at the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts in St. Petersburg, there are two volumes of manuscript exercise books composed by…
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Turco-Manjurica Revisited: a Closer Look at Haenisch 1951
Eric T. Schluessel Ph.D. Candidate Harvard University Historical scholarship on Qing Xinjiang (East or Chinese Turkestan) has experienced something of a florescence in the Anglophone world since the publication of…