Seeing as I live up here in Manchuria, all the hubbub about Manchu stirred up my wanderlust instinct and I was chomping at the bit to go poke around in 三家子 (sānjiāzi) or someplace. On the map, I noticed that there were some Manchu villages nearby, so I heeded the call.
I met with my friend Alice and caught the 08:15 bus to 乌拉街 (Wūlājiē ). It took about an hour and twenty minutes to get there. During the ride, we asked some other passengers and the 车长 (chēzhǎng , conductor) if anybody could speak Manchu there. Everybody said that they didn’t know anyone who could speak, but they thought there still might be some old people who could. The 车长 said that she thought they taught Manchu in the area primary school, so that’s where we headed when we got off the bus.
When we arrived at the school, there was a busful of government leaders finishing up their visit to the school—about 12 of them. As soon as they came out of the school gates, we headed in, not having any idea what to expect in this situation. But none of the Leaders said anything to us, and we just went right in, looking like we were supposed to be there.
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– Alice in front of the Long Tan District Primary School [Note: the times on the pictures are 12 hrs earlier than they should be. 15 refers to April 15th.]
As we approached the inner gate, I was shocked to notice that the traditional carved wooden sign on the right of the gate had Manchu script on it.
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– The sign on the left says: Jilin County Long Tan District Communist Youth League
– The sign on the right says: Jilin County Long Tan District Young Pioneers Organization
Just past the gate there is a traditional Chinese freestanding wall (not attached to anything) that also has Manchu script on it. The Chinese below it reads 尚德, 博学, 竞争, 创新 (shàngdé , bóxué , jìngzhēng , chuàngxīn ; upholding virtue, erudition, competition, pioneering).
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We asked where the headmaster’s office was and were quickly ushered in. They asked us if we were there with the visiting leaders, and I explained that I had nothing to do with them — it was just a coincidence that we were there at the same time. I explained that I was there just to see if Manchu was being taught there. The reason that the leaders were there, it turns out, was to install a new headmaster. The old headmaster, Headmaster Liu, was going to be working at the Manchu middle school, and it was the first day for Headmaster Wang, the new guy.
They said that Manchu was indeed being taught there, but that since it was late in the year, it was not being taught at the moment because math and Chinese had to take priority since they were tested subjects. It was taught at the beginning of the school year for a while in September, and was going to be taught again next school year.
I asked if the government was supportive, and they said yes. I pried a little further, saying I had lived here for more than five years, and I understand the government pretty well, and were they genuinely supportive, or did they just try to appear that way? After a few snickers, they said that the support was genuine and that the government really wants to save the Manchu language.
I asked to meet their Manchu teacher. The first three or four times I asked, they said that the teacher was busy teaching other subjects. I was persistent though, and finally Headmaster Wang said the teacher would be finished with class at 11:40. Having some time to kill, I asked if I could go around and take some pictures of the school and maybe could he give us a little tour? : )
Headmaster Wang explained that he was new, so he didn’t know too much about the history of the school, but sure, he would show us around. As we set out he explained that the school was originally a citadel that was important during the Qing Dynasty, and that the Emperor had spent some time there. Most of the citadel was destroyed by the Communists during the Autumn Offensive of 1947, but the layout was still there, and you could still see the city walls. There were three sets of them. The innermost set formed the boundaries of the school.
First stop: Wulajie Ancient Walled City Tourist Map
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That’s what it says! Notice the three citadel walls, which form the front and sides of the school. (Actually the side walls extend back to a fourth wall, which is outside the scale of the map.) In back of the school there is a big hill. On the map it shows a building on the top, but it is no longer there. The hill is called 白花公主点将台 (Báihuā Gōngzhǔ Diǎnjiàngtái, the platform on which Princess Whiteflower chose the generals). In front of the hill there is a little building which is also gone.
Standing in front of where the little building was, you can see the school’s new back wall with its moon gate in front of the hill, but the pavilion on the hill was replaced in 1975 by an obelisk commemorating the martyrs that died there during the Cultural Revolution.
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From on top of the hill, you can see the back wall, and on the horizon you can see the second, bigger wall with huge old trees growing on it.
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This is the primary school which once was a Manchurian palace, as seen from the back.
After our tour, we went back to Headmaster Wang’s office. He went to go get the Manchu teacher. When she arrived, I said “si sain” to her (which is the Manchu equivalent of hello), and she didn’t get it at first, but then she suddenly realized what I was doing, and laughed and returned my Manchu greeting. I asked her if she thought that there was a relationship between “si sain” and “你好(nǐhǎo)”; whether one was borrowed from the other. She said no; languages all have their way of saying hello, and “si sain” has no relationship to “你好“. I told her that I thought there might be some relationship because these two ways of saying hello are semantically equal: “si” = “你” = “you” and “sain” = “好” = “good”. I don’t know of any other languages that use this kind of greeting in exactly this way.
I asked how much Manchu she knew, and she said not so much. She took a course at Beihua University in Jilin City. She excused herself for a moment while she went out and got her textbook. When she came back I asked her if she could write some Manchu script for me and I flipped through the textbook. She had a good basic foundation, but said there is no one she can really practice with. We agreed to keep in touch and encourage each other’s study of Manchu.
We had a quick lunch with the headmaster before we left. On the way out, between the main gate and the outside gate, there are 14 murals depicting the history of the palace. Some of them show the palace’s original appearance.
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This is the original front entrance.
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This is the building that was on the hill.
We called a cab and had him take us to another village (雾凇岛, Wùsōng Dǎo, Rimefrost Island) where the headmaster said there might be old people who could still speak the language. On the way, we passed one of the outer walls.
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As I was taking the picture, an old guy walked up to me and asked where I was from (don’t get too many whiteys up this way…). I told him and said I was looking for Manchu speakers. He gave me a name of an old guy to look for in the village we were headed to.
When we got there, the cab driver stopped to ask a woman where we could find this guy. She said she would take us to where he should be and got in the car. She took us to a little building where some oldsters were playing ma jiang. The guy we were looking for wasn’t there, and none of them said they could speak Manchu, but one guy said they said they still performed Manchu ritual drum songs.
He got up and got an old black bag down, out of which he pulled a little notebook. In the notebook was written Manchu incantations to invoke spirits that help them with their crops. The songs were written using Chinese characters to represent the pronunciation, and there was some Manchu script on one page that he said he had copied down.
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I asked him if he could read some of it for me, and he said sure.
Here is what he sang (from the first page, not the one pictured above):