Jurchen People - Ming Dynasty

Ming Dynasty

Chinese chroniclers of the Ming Dynasty distinguished three groups of Jurchens: the Wild Jurchens (Chinese:野人女真) of northernmost Manchuria, the Haixi Jurchens (Chinese:海西女真) of modern Heilongjiang (Chinese:黑龍江) and the Jianzhou Jurchens of modern Jilin province. They led a pastoral-agrarian lifestyle, hunting, fishing, and engaging in limited agriculture. In 1388, the Hongwu Emperor dispatched a mission to establish contact with the tribes of Odoli, Huligai and T'owen, beginning the sinicisation of the Jurchen people.

Yongle Emperor (1360 - 1424, r. 1402 - 1424) found allies among the various Jurchen tribes against the Mongols. He bestowed titles and surnames to various Jurchen chiefs and expected them to send periodic tribute. One of Yongle's consorts was a Tungusic Jurchen (Nu chen) princess, which resulted in some of the eunuchs serving him being of Jurchen origin. Chinese commanderies were established over tribal military units under their own hereditary tribal leaders. In the Yongle period alone 178 commanderies were set up in Manchuria, an index of the Chinese divide-and-rule tactics. Later on, horse markets were also established in the northern border towns of Liaodong for trade. The increasing sinification of the Jurchens ultimately gave them the organisation structures to extend their power beyond the steppe. Later, a Korean army led by Yi-Il and Yi Sun-sin would expel them from Korea.

The Jurchen tribe was the predecessor of the Manchu nationality. For a long period of time, it inhabited the areas north and south of the Songhua River(Chinese:松花江) and around the Heilong River. During the late Ming and early Qing eras, the Jurchen tribe in the northeast was divided into 3 parts called Haixi (海西, "west of the sea"), Jianzhou (建洲, "establishing a state") and Yeren (野人, "wild people").

The Yeren tribe lacked a fixed dwelling place. The Haixi and Jianzhou tribes were engaged in fishing, hunting, animal husbandry, and farming, and had relatively fixed abodes. A gap between the rich and the poor and the division of classes emerged. According to standardized nomenclature of socialist historiography, the three tribes were in the patriarchal-slavery stage of the late slavery clan system.

The Ming dynasty had set up a horse market at a Jurchen dwelling-place to carry out trade with the Haixi and Jianzhou tribes, whose main commodities were horse, fur, ginseng, and other special local products. Commodities from the Han regions included iron farming tools, farm cattle, seeds, rice, salt, textiles, etc.