I’ve recently read"The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World" and want to hear what all of you think the answer is, because I feel like the book was missing something in its thesis and I am not very sure what that is.
I’ve recently read"The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World" and want to hear what all of you think the answer is, because I feel like the book was missing something in its thesis and I am not very sure what that is.
I literally have a multiple scans of Song dynasty print books I use for my projects and I’m not even a history major or anything. The Song dynasty was THE dynasty that started mass production of books. What is considered the standard print font is called Song form. The amount of surviving prints from that era is immense considering the time period. Everything from construction manuals to poetry anthologies. Considering the Jurchens ruled over former Song territory in the North, it would be incredibly chauvinistic to assume that they had no interest or ability in producing books of their own, or that they did not produce any literature in their own language. We have Steles in the Stele Forest of their equivalent of the Thousand Character Classic, and we have records of programs to mass translate classical texts into Jurchen during the Jin dynasty, so clearly they cared about their language and its preservation. The contrast between the complete lack of any paper documents in language we know was mass producing paper books is incredibly stark.
Also the reddit thread you linked is incredibly sus(No hate to you I just can’t stand
) since it uses terms like “had an ancestor born in Manchuria”. Manchuria as a word is a Japanese invention and a misappropriation of a political term as a geographic term for a region that has many ethnicities. The Manchus themselves never used such a term geographically. Anyone who uses this term is a historically illiterate reactionary who probably has very chauvinistic views towards Manchus.
Sounds like some fash shit. This literally sounds like Khazar theory for Manchus. I don’t know why westerner “scholars” have such a hate boner for Manchus.
Lol, Lmao even.
This is what I’m talking about. The Jurchens are the Manchus.The change was a change in name only. There’s not really a stark linguistic change other than the transition in writing systems. Clearly there existed a Jurchen/Manchu language corpus of literature that was lost due to the Mongol conquest and the subsequent loss of the Jurchen script. If they had survived we would not be refering to a work written in 1743 as “one of the few original Manchu-language literary works” for a language that had writing since 1119 and was presumably mass producing paper books.
well a good question to ask would then be why Song books are preserved but Jin and Liao ones are not, no? why would so much Song production survive but no Jin if they had the same technology and both got conquered by the Mongols?
its just a geographical term to english speakers, could probably specify “territory of the Later Jin” or Fengtian, Jilin, Heilongjiang but i don’t think either of those are amenable to a very straightforward answer, without having to further explain what those mean. i didn’t link that to you to talk about semantics, the salient points about Manchu identity being tied to the banners and those banners being associated outwardly and internally with han-speakers are pretty compelling.
but i also disagree with the “a change in name only”, being organized into the banners, being given a new name, standardizing the language, and then becoming this de jure separate ruling caste over eventually all of China is a pretty huge deal culturally.
I didn’t expect you to defend “Manchuria” of all things. Go fuck yourself. As someone from the Northeast with Manchu relatives, people like you disgust me. You walk in here assuming things about Northern ethnicities that you’re too much of a coward to say, you cite
Bullshit with zero sources full of fascist dogwhistles and you outright use a term the Japanese fabricated to justify Genocide against my people. People like you are the exact same type to believe Israel’s bullshit pseudo-religious justifications for bombing the Palestinians. Fuck off back to r*ddit.
seriously, sorry. i didn’t know it was that charged in the local context, i just wanted to side-step that issue to talk about what else was written but clearly that was a mistake. if you don’t mind, what’s more acceptable language?