Manchuria

Manchuria is an exonym (derived from the endo demonym " Manchu") for a historical and geographic region in Northeast Asia encompassing the entirety of present-day Northeast China (Inner Manchuria) and parts of the Russian Far East (Outer Manchuria). Its meaning may vary depending on the context:
* Historical polities and geographical regions usually referred to as Manchuria:
** The Later Jin (1616–1636), the Manchu-led dynasty which renamed itself from "Jin" to "Qing", and the ethnicity from "Jurchen" to "Manchu" in 1636
** the subsequent duration of the Qing dynasty prior to its conquest of China proper (1644)
** the northeastern region of Qing dynasty China, the homeland of Manchus, known as "Guandong" or "Guanwai" during the Qing dynasty
** The region of Northeast Asia that served as the historical homeland of the Jurchens and later their descendants Manchus
***Qing control of Dauria (the region north of the Amur River, but in its watershed) was contested in 1643 when Russians entered; the ensuing Sino-Russian border conflicts ended when Russia agreed to withdraw in the 1689 Treaty of Nerchinsk
***controlled in whole by Qing Dynasty China until the Amur Annexation of Outer Manchuria by Russia in 1858-1860
***controlled as a whole by the Russian Empire after the Russian invasion of Manchuria in 1900 until the Russo-Japanese War and the Treaty of Portsmouth in 1905, which required Russian withdrawal.
***controlled by Qing China again, and reorganised in 1907 under the Viceroy of the Three Northeast Provinces (東三省; the area had previously not been considered "provinces")
***controlled by the Republic of China (1912–1949) after the 1911 revolution
***controlled by the Fengtian clique lead by Zhang Zuolin from 1917–1928 (during the Warlord Era), until the military Northern Expedition and the Northeast Flag Replacement brought it under control the Republic of China (1912–1949) again (specifically, the Nationalist government of the Second Republic of China, 1925-1948, then allied with the Chinese Communist Party)
***controlled by Imperial Japan as the puppet state of Manchukuo, often translated as "Manchuria", (1932–1945). Formed after the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, it included the entire Northeast China, the northern fringes of present-day Hebei Province, and the eastern part of Inner Mongolia.
***briefly entirely controlled by the USSR after the Soviet invasion of Manchuria in 1945, but then divided with China
** Modern Northeast China (also known as "Inner Manchuria"), specifically the three provinces of Heilongjiang, Jilin, and Liaoning, but broadly also including the eastern Inner Mongolian prefectures of Hulunbuir, Hinggan, Tongliao, and Chifeng, and sometimes Xilin Gol
**Areas of the modern Russian Federation also known as "Outer Northeast China" or "Outer Manchuria". The two areas involved are Priamurye between the Amur River and the Stanovoy Range to the north, and Primorye which runs down the coast from the Amur mouth to the Korean border, including the island of Sakhalin

First used in the 19th century by the Japanese, the term is deprecated among people of the People's Republic of China (PRC) due to its association with pro Japanese imperialism, the historical puppet state of Manchukuo of the Empire of Japan, and its origination of alleged contemporary " Manchurian nationalism". Official state documents use the term Northeast Region (东北; Dōngběi) to describe the region. Northeast China is predominantly occupied by Han Chinese due to internal Chinese migrations and Sinicization of the Manchus especially during the Qing dynasty. It is considered the homeland of several minority groups besides the Manchus, including the Yemaek the Xianbei, the Shiwei, and the Khitans. The area is also home to many Mongols and Hui.

Manchuria is often referred to as the "Chinese rust belt", due to the shrinking cities that used to be the center of China's heavy industry and natural resource mining, but today face increasing economic decline.

Boundaries

Manchuria is now most often associated with the three Chinese provinces of Heilongjiang, Jilin, and Liaoning. The former Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo further included the prefectures of Chengde (now in Hebei), and Hulunbuir, Hinggan, Tongliao, and Chifeng (now in Inner Mongolia). The region of the Qing dynasty referenced as Manchuria originally further included Primorskiy Kray, the Jewish Autonomous Oblast, the southern parts of Amur Oblast and Khabarovskiy Kray, and a corner of Zabaykalʼskiy Kray. These districts were acknowledged as Qing territory by the 1689 Treaty of Nerchinsk but ceded to the Russian Empire due to the Amur Annexation in the unequal 1858 Treaty of Aigun and 1860 Convention of Beijing. (The People's Republic of China indirectly questioned the legitimacy of these treaties in the 1960s but has more recently signed agreements such as the 2001 Sino-Russian Treaty of Friendship, which affirm the current status quo; a minor exchange nonetheless occurred in 2004 at the confluence of the Amur and Ussuri rivers.) Various senses of Greater Manchuria sometimes further include Sakhalin Island, which despite its lack of mention in treaties was shown as Qing territory on period Chinese, Japanese, Russian, and French maps of the area.

File:EB1911 Manchuria.png , Map of the three provinces of Northeast China (1911)
File:Manchukuo Railmap en.png , Map of Manchukuo and its rail network, c.1945
File:Amurrivermap.png , Drainage basin of the Amur River, also showing the island of Sakhalin in the east

Etymology and names

"Manchuria"variations of which arrived in European languages through Dutchis a Latinate calque of the Japanese place name ''Manshū'' "Region of the Manchus"), which dates from the 19th century. The name ''Manju'' was invented and given to the Jurchen people by Hong Taiji in 1635 as a new name for their ethnic group; however, the name "Manchuria" was never used by the Manchus or the Qing dynasty itself to refer to their homeland.

According to the Japanese scholar Junko Miyawaki-Okada, the Japanese geographer Takahashi Kageyasu was the first to use the term ''Manshū'' as a place name in 1809 in the ''Nippon Henkai Ryakuzu'', and it was from that work that Westerners adopted the name.
.
. According to Mark C. Elliott, the term ''Manshū'' first appeared as a place name in Katsuragawa Hoshū's 1794 work ''Hokusa Bunryaku'' in two maps, "Ashia zenzu" and "Chikyū hankyū sōzu", which were also created by Katsuragawa. ''Manshū'' then began to appear as a place name in more maps created by Japanese like Kondi Jūzō, Takahashi Kageyasu, Baba Sadayoshi and Yamada Ren, and these maps were brought to Europe by the Dutch Philipp von Siebold. According to Nakami Tatsuo, Philip Franz von Siebold was the one who brought the usage of the term ''Manchuria'' to Europeans after borrowing it from the Japanese, who were the first to use it in a geographic manner in the 18th century.ed. Wolff & Steinberg 2007
, p. 514.

According to Bill Sewell, it was Europeans who first started using the name Manchuria to refer to the location and it is "not a genuine geographic term". The historian Gavan McCormack agreed with Robert H. G. Lee's statement that "The term Manchuria or Man-chou is a modern creation used mainly by westerners and Japanese", with McCormack writing that the term Manchuria is imperialistic in nature and has no "precise meaning" since the Japanese deliberately promoted the use of "Manchuria" as a geographic name to promote its separation from China at the time they were setting up their puppet state of Manchukuo.

The Japanese had their own motive for deliberately spreading the usage of the term Manchuria. The historian Norman Smith wrote that "The term 'Manchuria' is controversial". Professor Mariko Asano Tamanoi said that she "should use the term in quotation marks" when referring to Manchuria.

In 18th-century Europe, the region later known as "Manchuria", was most commonly referred to as " hineseTartary". However, the term Manchuria (''Mantchourie'', in French) started appearing by the end of the century; French missionaries used it as early as 1800. The French-based geographers Conrad Malte-Brun and Edme Mentelle promoted the use of the term Manchuria (''Mantchourie'', in French), along with "Mongolia", "Kalmykia", etc., as more precise terms than Tartary, in their world geography work published in 1804.

In present-day Chinese, an inhabitant of the Northeast is a "Northeasterner" (). "The Northeast" is a term that expresses the entire region, encompassing its history and various cultures. It's usually restricted to the "Three East Provinces" or "Three Northeast Provinces", however, to the exclusion of northeastern Inner Mongolia. In China, the term Manchuria () is rarely used today, and the term is often negatively associated with the Japanese imperial legacy and the puppet state of Manchukuo.

Manchuria has been referred to as Guandong (), which literally means "east of the pass", and similarly Guanwai (), a reference to Shanhai Pass in Qinhuangdao in today's Hebei, at the eastern end of the Great Wall of China. This usage is seen in the expression '' Chuǎng Guāndōng'' (literally "Rushing into Guandong") referring to the mass migration of Han Chinese to Manchuria in the 19th and 20th centuries. The name Guandong later came to be used more narrowly for the area of the Kwantung Leased Territory on the Liaodong Peninsula. It is not to be confused with the southern province of Guangdong.

During the Qing dynasty, the region was known as the "three eastern provinces" (; Manchu, ''Dergi Ilan Golo'')Clausen 1995
, p. 7. since 1683 when Jilin and Heilongjiang were separated even though it was not until 1907 that they were turned into actual provinces. The administrators of the three areas were the General of Heilongjiang (Sahaliyan Ula i Jiyanggiyūn), General of Jilin (Girin i Jiyanggiyūn), and General of Shengjing (Mukden i Jiyanggiyūn). The area of Manchuria was then converted into three provinces by the late Qing government in 1907. Since then, the phrase "Three Northeast Provinces" was officially used by the Qing government in China to refer to this region, and the post of Viceroy of the Three Northeast Provinces (dergi ilan goloi uheri kadalara amban) was established to take charge of these provinces. After the 1911 revolution, which resulted in the collapse of the Manchu-established Qing dynasty, the name of the region where the Manchus originated was known as "the Northeast" in official documents in the newly founded Republic of China, in addition to the "Three Northeast Provinces".

During the Ming dynasty the area where the Jurchens lived was referred to as Nurgan. Nurgan was the area of modern Jilin in Manchuria.

Geography and climate

Manchuria consists mainly of the northern side of the funnel-shaped North China Craton, a large area of tilled and overlaid Precambrian rocks spanning . The North China Craton was an independent continent before the Triassic period and is known to have been the northernmost piece of land in the world during the Carboniferous. The Khingan Mountains in the west are a Jurassic mountain range formed by the collision of the North China Craton with the Siberian Craton, which marked the final stage of the formation of the supercontinent Pangaea.

No part of Manchuria was glaciated during the Quaternary, but the surface geology of most of the lower-lying and more fertile parts of Manchuria consists of very deep layers of loess, which have been formed by the wind-borne movement of dust and till particles formed in glaciated parts of the Himalayas, Kunlun Shan and Tien Shan, as well as the Gobi and Taklamakan Deserts. Soils are mostly fertile mollisols and fluvents except in the more mountainous parts where they have poorly developed orthents, as well as in the extreme north where permafrost occurs and orthels dominate.

The climate of Manchuria has extreme seasonal contrasts, ranging from humid, almost tropical heat in summer to windy, dry, Arctic cold in winter. This pattern occurs because the position of Manchuria on the boundary between the great Eurasian continental landmass and the huge Pacific Ocean causes complete monsoonal wind reversal.

In summer, when the land heats faster than the ocean, low-pressure forms over Asia and warm, moist south to southeasterly winds bring heavy, thundery rain, yielding annual rainfall ranging from , or less in the west, to over in the Changbai Mountains. Temperatures in summer are very warm to hot, with July average maxima ranging from in the south to in the extreme north.

In winter, however, the vast Siberian High causes very cold, north-to-northwesterly winds that bring temperatures as low as in the extreme south and in the north where the zone of discontinuous permafrost reaches northern Heilongjiang. However, because the winds from Siberia are exceedingly dry, snow falls only on a few days every winter, and it is never heavy. This explains why corresponding latitudes of North America were fully glaciated during glacial periods of the Quaternary while Manchuria, though even colder, always remained too dry to form glaciers – a state of affairs enhanced by stronger westerly winds from the surface of the ice sheet in Europe.

History

Early history

Manchuria was the homeland of several ethnic groups, including Manchu, Mongols, Koreans, Nanai, Nivkhs, Ulchs, Hui and possibly Turkic peoples and ethnic Han Chinese in southern Manchuria. Various ethnic groups and their respective kingdoms, including the Sushen, Donghu, Xianbei, Wuhuan