Ilan Potokso- three families
The last 15 Manchu speakers in the world are old, living in a village in the outer suburbs of Qiqihar, making a living by growing corn and cows. In the early years, it was called Yilan Potoc Suo, and now it is called Sanjiazi.
There are no mountains and rivers outside the village, but the villagers' lives are isolated and lonely. Through the three TV channels that can only be received, the old people can watch Qing Dynasty dramas such as Emperor Kangxi and Yongzheng Dynasty. This makes their understanding of the past of the Qing Empire no different from that of the Han people who usually spend their evenings with TV sets: they are all early legends that the Fujin emperor can entertain, and have nothing to do with our own family. They don't think highly of Nurhachi Khan, the most sacred figure in Chinese history and "Old Wang Han". Some straightforward old men even shook their heads and curled their lips. They worship Mao Zedong very much.
Sanjiazitun has been a village alienated from the times since it was founded on 3 18. Earlier, its alienation was typical. Manchu families in Tunzhong are all in the Eight Banners Army. They learned to ride and shoot in the age of firearms and visited Qiqihar twice a year. Nowadays, alienation has the color of marginalization, and its whole non-agricultural economy is two small shops, two restaurants patronized by local men and a country bus.
Fifty years ago, China was already busy with "industrialization", and people in Sanjiazitun even knew little about farming techniques. Tao Qinglan's impression is: "Agriculture is not refined." She is 62 years old, and she speaks Chinese better among 15 Manchu people. Before that, the residents in Tunzhong were not used to agricultural life. If they want to plant yellow rice, they take some seeds and scatter them absently. They also planted some soybeans and buckwheat, and the harvest was not good. The only high yield is the yellow smoke that each of them needs every day, without too much manpower.
/kloc-When a large number of Han people from Shandong moved in in the 1970s, Manchu people in Tunzhong began to face a series of shallow difficulties, first of all, farming techniques, followed by culture. "Manchu people are careless, ignorant of the world and don't take the land seriously." Tao Qinglan commented: "In front of the house and behind the house, in the wasteland, the Han people seized the opportunity and occupied a little bit. Manchu people spend money, eat and drink, and can't save money. Han people are frugal, saving money in their mouths, and life will be better over time. "
Tunzhong people, especially Tao people, prefer fishing to farming. Fishing is a typical Manchu traditional mode of production. In history, Manchu herded pigs and horses for fighting, but from the perspective of livelihood, it was not a "semi-nomadic people", but a typical fishing and hunting people, and did not escape the economic form of the early people. The old people in the village also remember that "there used to be a lot of fish", and you can fork a lot of carp weighing more than 30 kilograms with a harpoon. The Dow family is especially good at this. At that time, fish was worthless and no one bought it, so we had to "stew fish all day"
The habit of fishing continues to this day. In the summer morning, we can also see some villagers catching fish on the branches outside the village and bringing them back in small plastic bags. When you ask, most of them are surnamed Tao. Now, however, there are only "young fish", and Ruhala's descendants look unhappy.
"Tuohu Ruhala" is the predecessor of the Manchu surname Tao. At the beginning of the construction of Sanjiazitun, there were three surnames: Ji, Meng and Tao. The predecessor of Ji's surname is "Hara I can't figure out", and the predecessor of Meng's surname is "Moeller Jilehara". In the history of Bentun, in addition to "serving as a soldier to eat vegetables" in the early Qing Dynasty, the three major families all had their own traditional livelihoods: Jimu cattle and horses, Meng weaving baskets, and Dow fishing.
Such a village rooted in Manchu tradition is rare now, but this does not mean that its degree of sinicization can be ignored.
You can't even see that it is a "reserved place" for Manchu culture and lifestyle. There's not much left. Of the 15 elderly people whose mother tongue is Manchu, only three are relatively proficient, and their Manchu level is not as good as their ancestors.
Sanjiazitun Primary School is the only Manchu primary school in China, and Qiqihar City and Fuyu County have invested more than one million yuan in it. A Manchu plaque and several calligraphy works written in Manchu are the only Manchu in the school. The school specially set up a classroom for the Manchu Traditional Exhibition, but we tried our best to collect utensils in the whole village, and only got a few pieces: a fishing fork, a fishing basket, a spinning wheel, a small pile of "Galaha"-kneecaps of pigs or sheep, and traditional toys of Manchu girls.
The masculinity advocated by Manchu always points to Batulu, a "warrior" borrowed from Mongolian, who is never afraid to use force. But now, in such a real life, a reckless man with a big fist has only incompetent power. Tao Qinglan said: "Whoever has money will cross."
Forgetting of collective memory
One of the most valuable "cultural relics" in Sanjiazitun is a picture of nave recorded by Taoism. Nave wrote a book with a temple, which was written in Manchu, "Far away in Ningguta of Sujili River in Changbai Mountain". This passage proves that the surnames Zhongji, Meng and Tao in Sanjiazitun were sailors under Sabusu, the deputy governor of Ningguta in the early Qing Dynasty. According to documents, they fought against the invading Russian army earlier and were stationed in Qiqihar.
The ancestors' migration experience was to Sanjiazitun, just as Odysseus' journey was to Greece, which formed many incredible legends. Meng Xianlian, the 76-year-old Communist Youth League branch secretary and village head, is somewhat literate, but still firmly believes in one of the legends. When we laughed and said we didn't believe him, his eyes opened wide, and his whole body sat and jumped on the kang to show his shock.
"The ancestors came here on pike," he said in a tone of stating what he had seen with his own eyes. "At that time, ships had not been invented."
In fact, this legend happens to be one of the few traces of Manchu culture in Sanjiazitun that have not been forgotten, only hidden in the minds of a few old people. Whether explicit or implicit, the cultural structure of Manchu is a thing of the past here. Soren pole and shadow wall disappeared fifty years ago. Eating dog meat is still taboo, but some people don't care.
When the villagers were keen on the new house, they cancelled the west window, which was the place where ancestors were worshipped in Manchu traditional houses. Traditional adobe houses are only inhabited by poor old people. Old people have long discovered that some new houses don't even need "Wikipedia", that is, the threshold.
15 Manchu people are over 60 years old, far away from the boiling new world of young people. But they can't keep their memories in isolation. Old age makes them face a new threat: forgetting. For several days in July, one old man after another sat in front of the Southern Weekend reporter, feeling extremely distressed: "You are too old to remember. If you had come a few years earlier, you might have been fine. "
However, forgetting began a long time ago. As early as when these old people were young, even before they were born, when the Qing Emperor ascended the throne and Manchu was the official language of a country with a population of 300 million, it began. The collective memory of Manchu has been lost for hundreds of years. Even the oldest Manchu woman in the village, such as Tao Yun, 9 1 year-old, has never lived a real Manchu life for even one day. Asked if she had ever heard shaman songs, her answer was: "Manchu has no songs."
The former Manchu girl never had a chance to listen to the wonderful "family-god tune", although she was born in Sanjiazitun, a "living fossil": "We are in that dark building, and we ask God to quietly take away that old time and bring in a new year." I have never heard of Hai Qing and Yan, how to show off the military and moral majesty of the Qing Dynasty: "Hai Qing and Yan, Hua Cun dogs are not noisy, and talking about military training and arrogance, the shogunate is more heroic."
Perhaps only Han people will not be surprised at all. This is a well-known historical experience: the Han nationality, such as Zhuangzi, is weak in tongue, unable to resist the tiger and wolf, but has the power of assimilation; Those invading nations always occupy the country for a short time, but they will lose themselves forever.
Old people in Sanjiazitun seldom feel sorry for the impending disappearance of Manchu. Most of them have lived a rough life and formed rough thoughts. "If Manchu is gone, it's gone!" Meng Xianlian holds the truth of peasant style. "Is there anything in this world that must be lost?"
He was "born in the year when the Japanese devils came in". He spoke Manchu when he was a child and began to feed pigs at the age of 12. During the Puppet Manchukuo period, I read books for one year and two months. "When Puyi became emperor, he called learning Japanese." 15 years old, the Japanese devils left. I heard that Soviet soldiers were coming, and then the * * * production party came. Two landlords were killed in the village during the land reform. They are brothers. My brother was shot and killed with a stick. At that time, Meng Xianlian had not figured out how to kill two people. "I'm not sad about it." Now I think, "I can't bear it." In fact, there are only dozens of families in the village, all of whom are relatives of the "Fan" dialect-in the village, those who speak Chinese are called "Shuo" and those who speak Manchu are called "Fan". There are fewer and fewer people turning over Manchu, and the more he forgets Manchu. Now his outlook on life has been reduced to "contentment".
Every year during the Chinese New Year, he would light a wick incense for his "wife" by the west window and pray for thanks. However, he has forgotten who this "wife" is.
Who is the woman in this portrait in Sanjiazitun has been forgotten for many generations. Jin Qicong, a Manchu scholar, recorded the Manchu people's belief in "wife" in "Plum Garden Collection" and thought that the name "wife" itself was "ridiculous". "Wife" is a shaman, that is, a priest in shamanism, an ancient belief of Manchu, and has various magical powers such as channeling, which is generally played by women. Nowadays, Manchu people generally forget her identity in the process of localization, and often call her "female ancestor" in an ambiguous way.
Meng Xianlian's life is more difficult. His son was seriously ill last year and has not recovered for a long time. During the Spring Festival, he bowed to his wife, but he just said, "It's been a year, nothing. Thank you for your old lady's blessing. This year has been smooth and good! "
Since the Manchu dynasty.
Manchu scholars prefer to use a slightly lengthy word "Manchu * * * isomorphism" to refer to what is usually called Manchu, that is, Manchu.
The "real" Manchu people are actually very few. If we take the original core component of this nation, namely "Jianzhou Jurchen", as the standard, none of today's Manchu people meet the requirements. Oled, an American scholar, doesn't think Manchu is a nation based on descent: "From the day the name Manchu was established, it was a highly politicized national name."
There are so few Manchu people that after they defeated the Salhu War of the Ming army, the pro-Ming Mongolian Li Gedan Khan still greeted Nurhachi in such an ironic way: Genghis Khan, the owner of Batulu with a population of 400,000, asked the wise Manchu emperor, a waterfront country with a population of 30,000, whether he was safe.
Nothing has ever been regarded as a treasure by Manchu nobles like population. Nurhachi, a highly sinicized monarch who once served as commander-in-chief of the Ming Dynasty, has repeatedly stated his strategy to the generals: the primary purpose of the war is not to seize the city and seize the wealth, but to seize the population. His son Huang taiji achieved the goal of expanding the ethnic group in a more political way. 1635, Huang taiji abandoned Shen Zhu's surname and renamed it "Manchuria". Since then, the populations of ethnic groups such as Jianzhou Nuzhen, Haixi Nuzhen, Savage Nuzhen, Mongolia, Korea, Han nationality, Huerha, Suolun, etc. living in the northeast of China have been brought under the same surname, and Manchu has been formed since then.
As the most "pure" part of the lineage, the Jurchen people in Jianzhou are called "Buddha Manchuria", while others are called "Che Yi Manchuria".
The three surnames of Ji, Meng and Tao in Sanjiazitun are the birthplace of Manchu in Changbai Mountain, and so is Rao. Only Ji belongs to "Buddha Manchuria".
In the view of Manchu scholars, during the rapid expansion of Manchu, its sinicized and knowledgeable leaders also noticed a shadow in the future. Bao Ming wrote in the book "Manchu Cultural Model-A Study on Manchu Social Organization and Concept System": Huang Taiji wanted to seize the national political power, but he didn't want to enter the customs because he wanted to avoid the consequences of his people's sinicization after Liao, Jin and Yuan entered the customs. However, the family's selfish desires finally surpassed all this. 1in July, 639, in a letter to Emperor Chongzhen, Huang Taiji finally raised a question that every accident in China's history would always be snatched back: "Since ancient times, the world has not been owned by one surname, and destiny has circulated. How many emperors will meet? "
Five years later, Shunzhi boarded Long Ting. A realistic problem began to be placed in front of Manchu nobles. At this time, the population of Manchu was still only 300,000, so it was obvious that such a tiny force could not control China. In the dilemma of "expanding the clan will destroy the country, and not expanding the clan will destroy the country", the royal family has formulated a strategy of maximizing interests and doomed to failure: walking a tightrope between the two threats and relying on improvisational flexibility to maintain a dangerous balance.
This can explain why the policies of the Qing government are always contradictory. In the Qing Dynasty, people who surrendered, were captured and defected, no matter which nationality, were incorporated into the Eight Banners Lu Niu by Manchu nobles. Later, each flag was divided into Manchu-Mongolian-Hangu Mountain, which made the Eight Banners twenty-four isolated mountains and set up the internal affairs office, which led to the expansion of Manchu like a snowball and reached 6 million by the middle of Qing Dynasty. On the other hand, marriage between Manchu and Han is forbidden. For the northeast, the government suddenly set up a wicker border crossing to prohibit Han Chinese from moving in (reporter's note: the trenches built in Liaoning and Inner Mongolia are planted with willows along the way, which is called "wicker border crossing"), and then suddenly lifted the ban and enriched the border crossing. The Qing royal family not only forced the Han people to dress up as Manchu by force, but also inherited the civil service system of the Han landlords. He not only claimed to be the heir of Confucian orthodoxy, but also repeatedly pushed the literary prison, completely destroying the tradition of literati who dared to speak and remonstrate.
In this way, the vitality of Han culture and Manchu culture has disappeared, and what remains is the most suitable part for lasting power rule. By the end of the Qing dynasty, under the strong artillery of the west, the once brave Manchu military attache had almost become synonymous with fear of you damn fool. For example, Meng Sen's "Lecture Notes on the History of Qing Dynasty" said: "There are no aristocrats in Manchu Dynasty." Although the famous ministers of the Han nationality struggled to win their support, they were inevitably ridiculed by later generations as full of servility.
Even in the most powerful era of the Qing Dynasty, the two major dangers of "clan" and "country" were approaching. During the reign of Gan family, many Manchu people in Beijing could not speak Manchu. Forty years after Qianlong, Guo, a Manchu official, could not understand the Manchu language of the emperor. What shocked the emperor even more was that he was from Shengjing. General Lin Ning of Shengjing is not good at Manchu either. Writing a report said that there were no locusts in the local area, and all the memorials were in Chinese. Gan Long denounced it, but it could not change the fact that the Qing Dynasty was declining. On the other hand, peasants gathered in the name of religion, such as An Baili sects, have revolted from time to time, and "the debate between Chinese and foreigners" has always been the moral basis of any opposition.
By 1840, how to protect Manchu culture from being swallowed up by Han culture is no longer a problem worthy of attention-the future of China is unknown. Manchu soon disappeared from official documents, because Empress Dowager Cixi, who came to power later, did not understand Manchu herself.
During this period, more and more soldiers of Sanjiazitun Eight Banners were transferred from combat posts. According to the genealogy of Tang family in Tunzhong, there were 1858 soldiers who stopped the British and French allied forces in Jingu area with monk Qin, and 1894 soldiers who defended Fengtian during the Sino-Japanese Sino-Japanese War of 1894. However, blood is only a shame, and no one can defend this sandcastle-like empire anymore.
19 1 1 year, the number of recruits in Wuchang completely ended the unsolved problem of Manchu nobles in the past 268 years.
However, the Qing Dynasty has quietly changed China culture, and it is likely to be permanent. There are so many Manchu pronunciations in Northeast Dialect and Beijing Dialect that Mandarin based on them is called "Manchu" by some linguists. For example, modern words in Mandarin, such as "sloppy" and "sloppy", are often borrowed from Manchu. This language is so clumsy in thinking, but it is so flexible and deeply rooted in people's hearts that Manchu writers who write this kind of "Man Han" are more likely to succeed than Han writers in the south. Similarly, Cao Xueqin, as the standard-bearer of the Ministry of Internal Affairs who was born in the Han army, was regarded as a member of his own clan by both Han and Manchu, and for 300 years, he was regarded as boasting.
During the Wuchang Uprising, the new army searched the whole city for people who spoke Beijing dialect, and at least 1500 people were killed for speaking Beijing dialect.
This is another cycle in the long history of hatred. Some famous revolutionaries hate Manchu people. The Manchu people ushered in difficult years. The Eight Banners are professional military organizations. Manchu people have always had a few pairs of armor-a few soldiers-and a few rations at home. After the abdication of the Qing emperor, they had no food and clothing. In Sanjiazitun, a widow named Ji and a widow named He in Qiqihar petitioned in Beijing. She didn't bring any money back when she came home. Then warlords rose, and it was "several emperors and kings".
The mission will not continue.
When the Manchu people in Beijing turned around in the long history and began to show their amazing talents in drama, painting and calligraphy by virtue of the artistic genes accumulated in the excellent life of generations in Gyeonggi, the Manchu people in Sanjiazitun began to learn farming clumsily.
As the last site of Manchu culture, Sanjiazitun is very dramatic because it was built in 1689. Ruhala, a Manchu sailor at that time, never had any records except his own genealogy. Hong Ali and his partners chose and built Sanjiazitun. It happened to be this year that a glorious revolution took place in Britain, the Bill of Rights was passed, Peter I took charge of the country, Russia began the westernization reform, and world history turned to a magnificent new era. Hong Ali's small team, drifting against the current of history, as the trustee of a nation that is about to lose its characteristics, has come to an isolated place.
Everything that is well documented in the Sanjiazitun started from Hong Ali. He was ordered by Sabusu, deputy commander-in-chief of Ningguta, to go to the desolate Nenjiang River at 1683 to stop the Russian troops coming 4000 kilometers away. Six years later, on 1689, the Qing army won the battle of Yaksa City, and China and Russia signed the Treaty of Nebuchadnezzar Chu in Manchu, Russian and Latin. However, when there was no Chinese version, he and his two companions, as soldiers of the Navy Battalion, were allowed to choose a residence with beautiful water and grass as a camp within a hundred miles of Bukui (later Qiqihar).
They made full use of the rules and chose the location of Sanjiazitun today, 95 miles away from Bukuizu. This distance is far enough in the era of inconvenient transportation. So in the next 300 years, Sanjiazitun will always be a remote place, enough to preserve a sample of Manchu culture like a refrigerator.
Now, Shi began to feel that the strange mission of his ancestors had spread to him. Manchu primary school in Sanjiazitun offers simple Manchu courses for children, which are not included in the examination subjects. There are two Manchu teachers in the school, both of whom are substitute teachers without formal establishment, and Shi is one of them. He is the only middle-aged man in the village who is interested in Manchu. Over the past few years, he has recorded 10 tapes for the elderly in the village, from "Mountain Red" to "Sticking the roe deer to catch fish", which correspond to Manchu and Chinese one by one.
He wants all children to learn Manchu, or at least "talk in Manchu". As for the long-term goal, he violates the law of language survival and hopes that "Manchu can continue", although Manchu scholars who have visited Tunzhong for a long time told him that this is impossible.
Jin Qicong, a late Manchu scholar, discovered Sanjiazitun, a "Manchu living fossil", in AD 1980. For more than twenty years, Manchu scholars from all over the world have visited Tunzhong in succession. As a little-known knowledge, there are not many researchers who are knowledgeable. Such visits are neither frequent nor attract public attention, but the academic conclusion has long been confirmed: besides, there is no Manchu language alive in the world.
Tao Yunqing, 15, one of the Manchu old people, is Shi's uncle. He not only supports history, but also thinks he is whimsical. "Manchu can't start from our society. The elders in old China turned it over and still wanted to pick it up. I can't get it back. How many of these old people are still alive? My translation level is at most half that of my grandfather. " Tao Yunqing said, "It's ok to teach children Manchu now. But it will last for three or four years. If I forget all about the transfer, I will have a few odds and ends-rice bowls and chopsticks! "
The general reaction of parents in Tunzhong is "Why not?" "Isn't it good for us Manchu people to learn Manchu dialects?" However, some people disagree. "What's the use of studying when all that stuff is thrown away?" It also affects test scores. "
Anyway, Manchu class was as usual this morning. Shi first taught children to read syncopation, close to English continuous reading, and then taught four words: two, ten, one yard, and others. Every time Shi read it, he shouted: Zhuo! Good luck! Hua! Melon!
In Sanjiazitun, what happened more obviously than sinicization was the globalization of11960' s standards. The villagers became more and more dependent on electricity and diesel, and they all became staunch supporters of herbicides. In this village, a Manchu teacher receives no more attention than an invisible man. As a middle-aged man who can't go to college because of his poor family, he can't even solve the problem of how to become a public teacher.
History can only pin its hopes and embrace on the national character. The happiness he can tell is that when writing Manchu, his wrist feels the smoothness of the curve. "Like writing good calligraphy, there is a sense of beauty." This kind of confession is obviously difficult to find a bosom friend in rough rural life. He is serious and earnest, giving the impression that he is looking for comfort in dying words and warmth in loneliness.
Toll road
There is a forgotten world behind the Manchu Dynasty. There are more than 60 words about ice and snow in Manchu, and almost every form of ice and snow has its own name. There are more words about water, reaching more than 130, ranging from "autumn water decreasing" and "running water ringing" to "water lines caused by fish swimming", and even there are separate words corresponding to them. Manchu ancestors divided wild boar into 1 1 species by their clumsy and delicate way of observing the world, in which the square-toothed wild boar was named once a year and the fangs were named once every three years. Due to the various morphological changes of antlers, all kinds of deer are classified into 29 different nouns.
"Manchu is a simple language," said Fan Jiang, an expert on Manchu studies. "It has obvious intuitive characteristics, but it lacks abstraction and generalization of thinking."
In the last year of16th century, Erdene and Ganggai created Manchu at the order of Nurhachi, and borrowed Mongolian initials to create a complete Manchu, namely "Lao Manchu". It is inconvenient to use Manchu without punctuation, so it ordered Dahai to transform it and create Manchu with punctuation, which is called "New Manchu". The sea has since been revered as a saint by Manchu people. Unfortunately, the life span of this writing is only over 300 years.
For Manchu, Shi, a rural Manchu teacher, thinks he is "very studious". Manchu, like Russian, is pure pinyin, so it is not difficult for an illiterate who can only speak English to read and write. Meng, 79, confirmed this.
Meng is the only person in San Zi Jing who likes to read the full text except history. He is well-informed among the older generation in Tunzhong, and thinks Manchu is "the pride of the nation". In the past, he could speak Manchu, but he could not read. Starting from two years ago, he began to learn the four volumes of Qing Enlightenment sent to him by a Korean Manchu professor. But he felt lonely. He wants his son to learn, and his son shirks that when he is old, reading will give him a headache. He wanted his grandson to learn it again, but the result was "even more useless." Grandson dropped his book and ran away.
Nowadays, Manchu, as a retiring language, still exists in hundreds of thousands of Manchu files, recording many details in history of qing dynasty. For Manchu scholars, this language at least gives them a symbol system to understand Manchu people, just like the philosopher Cahill said, "Words bring meaning construction". Through Manchu, scholars can understand how Manchu people know the world.
Zhao Aping, director of the Manchu Research Center of Heilongjiang University, gave a time limit of "about ten years" when Manchu society died.
There are only three elderly people in Sanjiazitun who really use Manchu as their first choice language in daily life, and all of them are over eighty. When they died, it was the day when Manchu withdrew from the historical stage. From then on, Manchu will only be an academic language mastered by a few scholars and will not be used for daily communication.
In Sanjiazitun, life continues like an ordinary Han village in Northeast China. From 4: 30 to 7: 00 in the morning, it was extremely noisy, cows bleated gloomily, geese crossed the road like a group of generals, and hens were always insatiable and made a fuss in a panic. At half past six, the sun was shining and the village was quiet. Dark green corn is swaying low, swaying low in the wind, as boring as a dream, endless. So there was no one in the village all day. Until half past nine in the evening, the whole village slept on the kang. This is what a forgotten place has: now.
Now, on a sunny July afternoon, the young people in the village are fishing on the tributary of Nenjiang River. After Manchu, people sometimes pull nets and sometimes close nets, and are busy walking a stone's throw, but only some small fish like bamboo poles are firmly nailed to their fishing nets. Carp, catfish, snakehead and Gayazi, where are they? Now, where are all the big fish in the legend of our ancestors? Where's Parker?
Dog fish, the huge "Gouren Nimago", the ancestor's boat, as Meng Xianlian said: "No more."