But if you look closely at the Manchu on the pictures, some of it is very hard to read, and some of it seems to make no sense at all.  I’ll leave the error-analysis as an exercise for the reader, but suffice it to say that it varies quite a lot in quality; some words are clear and sensible, and some look like someone was just trying to imitate the way Manchu looks in general, without quite knowing what they are doing, like westerners often do with Chinese.

When I was in the little shop buying tasty sausages and local beer, a man came in and started asking me questions (—this is quite normal; since I’m not of Asian extraction, curious villagers often muster their courage and warmly ask me all sorts of questions, ranging from my nationality to my opinions about international politics).  I told him why I stopped here, and he offered to show me around.

I asked him if anyone could read the Manchu words on the signs.

Me: 满族字儿…在牌子上…你说谁也不认识嘛？ (The Manchu letters…on the signs…you say that nobody can read them?)

I phrased it that way because I had asked him previously, but that time I hadn’t had my recorder on.

Him: 当地谁也不认识。 (As far as the locals go, nobody can read them.)

Me: 那，写的是干哈的？(Then, why did they write them there?)

Him: 糊弄人儿的。反正要求，政府要求你满族这牌匾得带满文呢！(To trick people.  Anyway, it’s a requirement; the government requires that if you are Manchu, you have to put Manchu script on your signs.)

Me: 啊，是政府要求。 (Oh, it’s a government requirement.)

Him: 啊，是政府要求。 (Yeah, it’s a government requirement.)

Me: 啊，这儿也，这儿还有呢。 (Ah, here, here are some more.)

Him: 啊，都有呢。这个中的标准就不知道了。 (Yeah, they all have them.  Nobody knows what’s correct.)

A couple of students came to the office to demonstrate their Manchu skills.  Mrs Guan was given the third book I mentioned in the last post (which you can open up and look at to follow along, if you like), so she could say some words in Chinese and have the students say their Manchu equivalents. 

She picked a word from the first page of the book, ten thousand (#13 in the lower right hand corner: 一万, yīwàn), and the students quickly reply:

emu tumen (note that I’m not using the book’s crazy romanization)

No problem there.  Next she asks the word for one hundred million (#14: 一亿, yīyì).  The students stumble for a second, and get it wrong saying emu minggan.  One of the students quickly realizes their mistake, and says that’s the word for one thousand, and then they quickly correct it.

emu bunai

We can see clearly here that the student’s native language is Mandarin, because as soon as the student realizes the mistake, he shouts out a very short “buh!”, which is a typical way any Chinese child would pronounce 不 (bù) in that kind of a situation.

The next exchange between Shi Junguang (SJG), Mrs Guan (MG), and the students (SS), is interesting from a sociolinguistic point of view:

Quick translation:

SJG: (pointing to a page in the book) You can also ask them any of these.  They might have forgotten some of them; it’s been a long time,  Some of….

MG: (completely ignoring SJG, addressing someone else) Then take a picture of us!

SJG: (not sure how to deal with this)…after a while…one year…

MG: (getting louder) Of ME!  WITH THESE TWO KIDS!

SJG: …after one year…

Other person: We could video it.

SJG: These two have a lot of…

MG: HEY! HOW DO YOU SAY “ANSWER THE QUESTION”? “ANSWER THE QUESTION”?

SJG: …afterwards…

MG: HOW DO YOU SAY “HEAD”?  “Head”?

Student 1: “Head”?

MG: “Head”.

Student 1: hoto.

Student 2: hoto.

MG: “Head”?

Student 1: (softly, as if in disbelief) hoto.

SJG: They said it; hoto.  Say it louder.

SS: HOTO!

MG: How do you say “head”?

Student 1: hoto.

Student 2: hoto.

Aside from the asker’s center-of-attention-grabbing interruptions (who is supposed to be shown off here, anyway?), and the pure surreality of the “conversation” in general, note their pronunciation of hoto, which is very obviously influenced by Chinese.  It sounds exactly like pinyin huōtuo.  The Manchu sound should be more of a pure [o] or [ɔ], and not the Chinese [uo].

The next couple of words trip the students up:

Mrs Guan asks the words for nose (鼻子, bízi) and tongue (舌头, shétou), and after the students look around and scratch their heads, Shi Junguang says they forgot, and then gives the words.  Nose is oforo, which he pronounces as owulo (using normal Manchu romanization), and tongue is ilenggu, which according to Materials of Spoken Manchu, is usually spoken in Sanjiazi as yulong (using normal Manchu romanization), but he pronounces it the same as Chinese pinyin yulun, just like it is written in the book Mrs Guan is reading from.

Next she interrupts to ask “teacher” (老师, lǎoshī), and “study” (学习, xuéxí); and then “hello teacher” (老师好, lǎoshīhǎo) and “hello guest” (客人好, kèrénhǎo).

Teacher is sefu, which is taken from Chinese 师傅 (shīfu, master).  In the book Mrs Guan is reading from, it is given as sewo, but the student seems to say something like owo.  Study is tacimbi, (the students forgot it at first, but Shi Junguang corrects them) but in the book it is tacime.  This is very odd.  Verbs in the book are given in their -me form, which while similar to the English infinitive, is not the way that verbs are normally listed in Manchu dictionaries.  They are normally listed with a -mbi ending, which corresponds basically with simple present.  The -me form is used for verbs that are not the main verb in the sentence, so they cannot be used alone.

“Hello teacher” is sefu sain (sewo sain), and “hello guest” is antaha sain.  This construction, X sain, seems to be a translation of Chinese X 好, as in 你好, which was popularized in China in the 1980s.  The staff here at Echoes of Manchu has not yet been able to find any verifiable Qing dynasty examples of Manchu X sain as a greeting, but there may be some Chinese examples of X 好.  Sima is currently preparing a post on that topic.

Next, Mrs Guan asks the word for everybody (大家, dàjiā), and following a long pause, I ask the word for student.

For “everybody”, the students say saza, which is what is written in the book, but I can’t find anything resembling that in any dictionaries.  The closest thing I can find is in Materials of Spoken Manchu, which gives “crowd” in a phonetic spelling as sasəxəčjə (I’d have to take a wild guess at how to romanize that).  Also, Enenggi gives an adverb sasa, which means “together”.

“Student” is given as xaiwe (it’s given in Materials of Spoken Manchu that way also).  In traditional Manchu it’s xabi.  Perhaps it was changed on account of its sounding very much like a common Chinese putdown, shǎbī (silly twat), which I’m sure all of the students are familiar with.  In fact, I wonder if there might really be a relationship between those two words, because according to Gertraude Roth Li (p351, #5), self-deprecation was used in Manchu to show humility.

Next, Shi Junguang takes the bull by the horns and shows us the grand finale: letting the students translate some sentences!

SJG: 上节课我们学到哪了? (How far did we get in the last class?)

SS: fujinmu kicen musei ya de … … tacime inaha.

(Traditional Manchu: ???? kicen musei yabade tacime isinaha.)

???? [previous]
kicen [lesson]
musei [we]
yabade [to what place]
tacime [study]
isinaha. [arrived]

SJG: 学到第三课了. ((We) got to the third lesson.)

SS: ilan kicen gisureme inaha.

(Traditional Manchu: ilan kicen gisureme isinaha.)

ilan [three]
kicen [lesson]
gisureme [discuss]
isinaha. [arrived]

SJG: 我读一句儿. (I’ll read a sentence).

SS: bi emu gisun hvlame.

(Traditional Manchu: bi emu gisun hulambi.)

bi [I]
emu [one]
gisun [sentence]
hvlambi. [read aloud]

SJG: 大家跟我读一句儿. (Everybody read a sentence with me.)

SS: saza mimbe dageme emu gisun hvla.

(Traditional Manchu: ???? mimbe dahame emu gisun hvla.)

???? [everybody]
mimbe [with me]
dahame [follow]
emu [one]
gisun [sentence]
hvla [read aloud]

They obviously spend some time developing fluency, huh?

After dressing up and taking pictures, Shi Junguang, the Manchu teacher, brought out the books he uses to teach the children in their Manchu language classes.

They are not professionally published, but rather printed out using a color printer.  I’m not sure who wrote these books, but I suspect they were written by Zhao Jinchun, who was the former Manchu teacher at the elementary school, and who now is the vice commissioner of Fuyu county.

The first book is called Manju gisun tacibure bithe 1 debtelin (Manchu language textbook, volume 1), and covers syllables formed from single vowels, and consonants combined with single vowels, with instructions in Manchu and Chinese.  There is also a section with example words.  There are color pictures throughout.  The whole thing is written by hand.  Click on the picture to go to a web album of the whole book, page by page.

The second book is a simpler version of the same thing:   the same syllables, but no pictures.  It would be ideal for tracing.

The third book is more interesting.  It has a Chinese name, 小学满语教材 (xiǎoxué mǎnyǔ jiàocái, Primary School Manchu Textbook), and a Manchu name, Ajige tacikv manju gisun i tacibure bithe ujui debtelin (Primary School Manchu Textbook, volume 1).

It is filled with lessons covering basic conversation and vocabulary.  But the romanization is bastardized Chinese hanyu pinyin, which of course doesn’t match Manchu pronunciation.  If one were to use this as one’s only guide to Manchu pronunciation, one would lose a lot of clarity, just like one would if one used Chinese hanyu pinyin to represent English sounds.  Luckily Shi Junguang’s Manchu pronunciation is pretty good, having learned Manchu from his grandmother, one of the last surviving native speakers.

A couple days ago I went to the National Palace Museum library and met a Manchu scholar, 莊吉發, who has been quite prolific in producing published Manchu materials.  He gave me the address of a publishing company that he uses, and the next day I went to go find it. 

It was a lovely tiny little bookshop overflowing with delightfully academic books.  The owner is a delightfully energetic man who is over 70 but looks barely 50.  We chatted for well over an hour about all kinds of geeky Chinese subjects.  I ended up buying quite a selection of books: Manchu children’s Stories, Dialogue (in Manchu and Chinese) from Dream of the Red Chamber, Dialogue (in Manchu and Chinese) from Journey to the West, Manchu Stories, and two books about Manchu shamanism!

What a treasure!

There’s an old stereotype about Asians and cameras.  When I was a boy growing up in the Midwest, I remember hearing my father say “I’ve never seen a Chinaman without a camera.”  Of course by “Chinaman” he meant anyone with “yellow” skin.  This kind of talk sounds almost racist these days, but that’s just how people talked back then, regardless of their views on race.  Looking back on my father’s life at that time, I couldn’t say he was racist in any way.  During that time I rarely knew or even saw any Asians, but my father worked with people from all over the world every day.

Stereotypes don’t come out of nowhere though.  After I got married (to a Chinese girl), my wife and I were living in Manhattan’s Chinatown, and once decided to take a Chinese bus tour to Washington DC.  As soon as we got there, the bus stopped in front of the Capitol building and everyone (all Chinese except me) proceded one by one to have their pictures taken in front of it.  Then we got back on the bus, drove to the next attraction, and then the same thing again!  And again!  My wife and I finally decided we would escape and catch up with them later.

Back to Sanjiazi: when the Manchu teacher Shi Junguang (see previous posts, listed above)  and I got back to the school office, some of the others were looking at the school’s collection of traditional Manchu costumes.  Then someone pointed at me and I was doomed.

Of course, these costumes are not real Manchu clothes, but rather just things that you throw over your street clothes.

The fun begins!

Fun can’t be had alone!

美满 (měimǎn, [this means happy, but could also mean U.S.-Manchu])

The more, the merrier!

Mrs. Wu is on the left, and Mrs. Guan’s charming daughter is on the right.  She was already in the spirit and only put the headdress on; the other stuff she had already been wearing.

We put our bags down in the office and then headed over to a little building near the school gate.  It’s the school museum — if you go in the school gate, it’s just to the right.  On the way over, I asked Shi Junguang, one of the school’s two Manchu teachers, how he started learning Manchu when he was little.

Me: 你怎么开始学习满语的？你小的时候。
SJG: 小的时候， 就是， 爷爷奶奶他们，就是老人们说满语了我也听不懂。但是，当时吧，他们就是教我们一些简单的词汇。唉。咋说呀？ 见到什么东西啦，介绍我们怎么叫。这是简单东西。或者诶，上学之候呢，到五六年级我们教的是赵金纯教育事变语。到中学阶段就是主要学习了。所以就断了这个阶段，完了倒是，高中毕业了之后，完了下来学的。当时，具有这个理想就是长大以后这个三家语言，就是赵老师当时介绍给我们说，全国来说保留非常好了。就是希望这些学生能传承一下。我就是有这种志向，所以始终这方面做这个。

Me: How did you start studying Manchu, when you were little?
SJG: When I was little, when my grandparents spoke Manchu, I couldn’t understand them. But at that time they taught us a simple vocabulary. When we saw an object, they would tell us what to call it. Or after I started going to school, in 5th or 6th grade we studied Zhao Jinchun’s educational methods. When we went to middle school it was the most important time for study, so at that time we stopped. After graduating from high school we started again. At that time, the goal was that after we grow up, the language of Sanjiazi, well, our teacher, Mr Zhao, told us then that here it was preserved best in the whole country. He hopes that we can hand it down. This is my aspiration, too, so this is what I’ve been engaged in all along.

It’s important to note that he’s not a native speaker.  The only native speakers left are above 80 years old, and there are only less than ten, I believe.  We’ll meet some of them in later posts.

In his answer he says that he stopped studying Manchu while he was attending middle school and high school (grades 7-12) because “it was the most important time for study”.  This shows a peculiar element of the average Chinese citizen’s perspective on education: math and Chinese language are considered “real” things to study, and Manchu (or anything else) is not.  (Click for bigger pictures.  Mouse-over for titles.)

He asks me in Manchu if I can speak Manchu:

My “huh?” before he repeats the question sums up my range of potential answers.

However, after listening to it at home many times and consulting no fewer than four books, I think what he said was: si manju gisun gisurehe mutembinio?

si = you
manju gisun = Manchu language
gisureme = speak (converb)
mutembinio = can (with question ending)

Notice the SOV (subject, object, verb) sentence structure, similar to Japanese and Korean.  A converb is a verb that is not the main verb in a sentence.  These are used much the same way secondary English verbs are used in subordinate clauses, or with coordinators, like “and”.  The word mutembi is the simple present form, and the -nio is a question suffix that can be put on the end of a verb as one way to make a question.

I’m a little puzzled why there is no be beween gisun and gisureme.  Usually, direct objects in Manchu are marked by be.  I don’t know if it just got swallowed up, or if there is a grammatical reason for its omission.

A quick peek in the next room shows that there is a nice computer room, with decent computers.  I asked Mr Shi if he had internet access, and he said no, and that the nearest internet bar was always filled up with people playing games, so he could never get a seat.  What an ironic tragedy.  He’s the one person who is charged with passing on the Manchu language, and he can’t even communicate with the Manchu enthusiasts scattered across the globe who are rooting for him.

Looking around the two or three museum rooms, we see some antiques:

“Galaha” (3rd picture) is a game played using sheep’s knuckles.  Players roll the sheep’s knuckles, then they throw a small ball (or another sheep’s knuckle) into the air and, while the ball is in the air, try to arrange all of the sheep’s knuckles to be in the same position, and then catch the ball.  Then they throw the ball again and see if they can pick them up and then catch the ball with the same hand.  Of course there are many variations of this game.  According to this, it is mentioned, along with the “nine interlinks” (4th picture) in 红楼梦 (hónglóumèng, Dream of the Red Chamber).  Galaha is regarded as a Manchu thing, and the name for the game in Chinese (嘎拉哈, gālāhà) is simply a transliteration of the Manchu.  I don’t know if the nine interlinks puzzle is of Manchu origin specifically or not, but from looking around the net a bit, it appears to be of Chinese origin at least.  If anyone knows more about these, please let us know in the comments.

In the main room there are also three montages on the wall depicting Sanjiazi’s development.

A translation of the Chinese captions follows (notice how random they are):

Montage 1

• Former Manchu residences
• The old schoolhouse
• 1996 school song and dance competition
• Young Pioneers initiation ceremony
• Recess
• 1997 performance celebrating Hong Kong’s return
• Dance performance
• Participating in village-level sports day
• 1998 Children’s Day performance

Montage 2

• The new school’s appearance
• Expert passing on Manchu language knowledge
• Manchu class
• Attentively studying Manchu
• Recess
• Recess
• A glance at the Manchu village
• Smooth, flat village road
• New Manchu residences

Montage 3

• Party and government leaders’ enthusiastic support
• City and county leaders watch a Manchu class
• Foreign experts come to do research
• Cash cows: “black & white flowers”
• A corner of the park
• Happy ethnic dance
• Modernized dairy production facility
• Zhongyin irrigation canal supplies an abundant source of water for Sanjiazi rice paddy production

There are also two enlarged Manchu documents posted on the wall.

As intriguing as they are, I’m not going to translate them just now.  I’ll save that for a rainy day, if another intrepid soul doesn’t beat me to it.  The titles are jakvn gvsa (Eight Banners), and ilan boo tacikv i suduri (History of Sanjiazi School).  It’s amazing how deep one can go into things.  Look at the how in the two documents, the words are split between lines — they sometimes get cut off at the bottom and then continue at the top of the next line!  I’ve never seen that happen before in Manchu script.  And in the second document, there is a horizontal space dividing two “horizontal columns” (since the writing is vertical).

We woke up, went to the lobby, and were met by two women from the Fuyu County government. One was 吴旭英 (Wú Xùyɪ̄ng), the Fuyu County Secretary of Ethnic and Religious Affairs, and the other was 安晓丽 (An Xiǎolì). I didn’t catch her title; maybe she was one of Secretary Wu’s subordinates. We had breakfast in the hotel, and then set off.

There were now six of us, so we hired a minivan taxi to take us 30 minutes south to Sanjiazi. We got in. Secretary Wu was in the front, I was behind her and next to Mrs Guan, and everyone else was in the back. Suddenly it became apparent that someone got up on the wrong side of the bed that morning, and somehow picked me as a scapegoat, probably just because I happened to be sitting next to her.  She told me to refrain from joining in the conversation.  I didn’t take the directive seriously, and continued my participation in the chatter.  Then she blew up.  Knowing that escape is often the best ukemi, at the next traffic light I did just that, which would have ended the trip for me.

Mrs An stayed behind with me and pointed out that if I left, I would have come all that way for nothing and that would be regrettable. She suggested that she and I go to Sanjiazi in a separate minivan taxi. I gave in on the condition that I pay the fare.

We went straight to the elementary school. 

Here are the two sides of the front gate (click on them for bigger versions). On the brass plates it says Sanjiazi Manchu School — on the left in Manchu (ilan boo i tokso manju gisun tacikv), and on the right in Chinese (三家子满族学校, sānjiāzi mǎnzú xuéxiào).

What’s carved into the stone is even more surreal than what happened in the minivan. On the right side is Chairman Mao’s famous quotation 好好学习, 天天向上 (hǎohāo xuéxí, tiāntiān xiàngshàng, study hard and improve daily), famously mistranslated as “Good good study, day day up”. On the left it appears that this quotation from the Great Helmsman of Communist China has been translated into the royal language of the Qing Dynasty (who Mao, as a soldier in the 1911 Revolution, personally had a hand in overthrowing). To trump that I’d have to find a copy of Mao’s little red book in Manchu. Who knows?

Going inside the gate, we can see the school, which is very tidy.

In the hall outside the classrooms, we can see some students’ work, which is in sharp contrast to the Manchu writing (if you can call it that) we saw in Wulajie.  (Again click on each one for a bigger version.)

There are a few spelling errors here and there of course, which you would expect from elementary school students, but this is real Manchu!  And each student has their own distinct handwriting style!  

Here we can see indisputable evidence that an effort is being made to preserve this dying language by passing it on to the youth of this village.  The major players in this effort are the students themselves, their teacher, 石君广 (Shí Jūnguǎng), who we’ll meet in the next post, and the former Manchu teacher, 赵金纯 (Zhào Jīnchūn), who now is the vice mayor of Fuyu.

It turned out that Mrs Guan’s daughter also was keen on learning English, so much of the train ride was taken up with me giving her English lessons.  She was very nice and pleasant, so I even ended up offering that she could come to my school anytime and study for free.

When we got to Haerbin, we got in line for the next leg of the trip, which was through Qiqihaer to Fuyu.  But the sign said “Fuyu (Wenzhou)”, meaning that Wenzhou is the final destination of that train.  Being the only person in our group who had looked at a map, I thought it was awfully strange that the train should go northeast to Qiqihaer, then north to Fuyu, and then south all the way down to Wenzhou.  But our tickets said 扶余 (Fúyú), and that’s what it said on the sign.  I kept asking people about it (Chinese people in my experience are horrible at geography), and finally got someone that said that Fùyù is in Qiqihaer prefecture (Heilongjiang province), and that our tickets had us going to Fúyú, which is in Jilin province, not Heilongjiang province.  It’s a good thing we hadn’t gotten on that train.

As a foreigner (foreigners struggle a lot with the tones in the Chinese language) I thought this was hilarious (though I didn’t say anything to that effect).  Here a Chinese native speaker screwed up the tones and bought the wrong tickets!

After getting tickets to the right place, we had to wait several hours for that train, which didn’t get in until midnight.  On the train, I had the good fortune of sitting next to Mrs Wu, who was talking about history a lot.  At one point she mentioned that when she was little she learned a rhyme about how to tell the difference between Manchu and Mongol script:

一根棍儿，长满刺儿，加上圈和点儿，就是满族字儿。
yì gēn gùnr, zhǎngmǎn cìr, jiāshang quānr hé diǎnr, jiùshi mǎnzú zìr.
A stem, grown over with quills; add circles and dots, that’s Manchu script.

Of course, the wondrous internet can help us find more complete versions.  Here’s one:

“竖着一根棍儿，两边毛毛刺儿，加上圈和点儿，就是满文字儿。”
“竖着一根棍儿，两边毛毛刺儿，上下一拧圈儿，就是蒙古字儿。”
shùzhe yì gēn gùnr, liǎngbian̄ máomáo cìr, jiāshang quān hé diǎnr, jiùshi mǎnwén zìr.
shùzhe yì gēn gùnr, liǎngbian̄ máomáo cìr, shàngxià yìníng quānr, jiùshi měngwén zìr.
A vertical stem, hairy quills on both sides; add circles and dots, that’s Manchu script.
A vertical stem, hairy quills on both sides; up and down twist circles, that’s Mongol script.

Some others start with 中间一根棍儿 (zhōngjiān yì gēn gùnr, a stem in the middle).  There are many variations.

Anyway, we finally got into Fuyu at midnite and checked into a hotel.

The next installment in this series will cover the unfortunate thing that happened in the minivan taxi in the morning, and our arrival at Sanjiazi and a few of the things we saw there.

Usually there are only two people in the Manchu Association office.  One is a man, Mr Guan, who is working on a Manchu-Chinese dictionary, and the other is a woman, Mrs Wu, who is quite an expert in history.  Mr Guan can speak, read, and write Manchu, and teaches it to the occasional student that comes into the office.  His knowledge of Manchu is academic, i.e. he wasn’t brought up speaking it, and he learned it not to converse with Manchu speakers, per se, but rather to research the Manchu language.

Occasionally people come by the office for various reasons.  On that day there was a woman there talking to Mrs Wu.  I didn’t pay much attention to her and just started asking Mr Guan some questions.  Later, it seemed that the woman was asking questions about me (which is quite normal, me being an oddball white guy hanging around a place that is one of the least likely places for foreigners to be).  In the periphery of my attention, I could sense that the questions were being answered (again quite normal): yes, I’m studying Manchu, I run an English school, etc.  Suddenly the woman addressed me and asked if I would be there for a little while.  I said I guess so, why?  She wanted to call her son to come over so I could give him advice on how to study English.  Not so normal, but it happens sometimes.  Being the polite guy I am, how could I refuse?

So her son comes over and I give him advice.  Then it’s time for lunch and the woman wants to invite everybody out.  The people in the office encourage me to go along, and I say OK.  After all I did just give that woman’s son a free English lesson, and my one-on-one English lessons are normally pretty expensive, so I didn’t refuse too strongly (which in China equals accepting an offer).

During the lunch I found out who she is.  She has a farmhouse just outside of Jilin City, in a little village called 阿什 (ashi).  She is of Manchu ethnicity and claims to be a shaman, as both of her parents are (?were) shamans.  On her business card she has two titles.  One is Village Leader of a place called 朱雀山风景区 (zhūquè shān fēngjǐng qū, Rose Finch Mountain Scenic Area).  I can’t find such a village on the map — the closest I can come is a 朱雀山国家森林公园 (zhūquè shān guójiā sēnlín gōngyuán, Rose Finch Mountain National Forest Park).  I guess it’s too small to be on the map.

The other title is President of the Hong Kong Manchu nationality [sic] Culture Association, which she says has 600 members and thus is the largest group of its kind in China.  Her website is: www.manzuhk.cn.  If you can read Chinese (traditional characters), look around her website, because that will give you a good idea of what she’s about.  There is nothing about Manchu culture on her site; only pictures of her with various VIPs, and descriptions of her achievements, like how many countries she has been to, how many bank presidents she knows, how many people she has “healed”, etc.  The discussion during lunch was all that kind of stuff, which I mostly ignored, only paying attention to when glasses were raised so I could duly vaccinate myself against the cacophonous horn-blowing.

What pricked my ears was when she said she wanted to go to Sanjiazi.  As we all know, Sanjiazi (三家子, sānjiāzi, Three Families) is the only place known to have living Manchu native language speakers, so throwing propriety aside, and in the interest of furthering research in Manchu studies, I said “I wanna go too!”.  The woman, Mrs Guan (no relation to the Jilin Manchu Association Manchu language teacher, Mr Guan — that’s just a fairly common sinicized Manchu surname), had no objections about that.

We were to go four days later, on Monday.  That’s not much time to prepare anything, but I assume that once I’ve been there, I could go again.

Stay tuned for the next installment, in which we try to go there.

P.S. This post was entirely written under Linux!  Go to hell, Microsoft! 

He filled up two tour busses and hired two tour guides, one for each bus.  The tour guides talked about the usual things — Manchu people don’t eat dog meat, their chimneys run under their beds to provide a heated surface to sleep on, they are great archers, etc.  Not much linguistic stuff outside of the fact that there is only a handful of mother-tongue speakers left.

Our first stop was the same government outpost that I mentioned in an earlier post, where I saw a strange word in Manchu script on an outside wall.  The word is strange because it spells “kisi”, which is not in any Manchu dictionary that’s available to me.  So what is this word?

When I saw the word the first time, the caretaker (who doubles as an antiques seller), said he didn’t know what it said, and that it was there for a long time.  This time (it’s amazing how people change their stories for no apparent reason) I guess the excitement of having two tour busses full of people come to see his lonely little place (and interupting his Mahjong game!) was overwhelming enough that it gave him one of those “oh, yeah, now that you mention it” moments, and he said that the mayor of the village wrote it there a few years ago; it says “fortune” (in Chinese: 福, fú).  No way, I told him.  I looked it up and it wasn’t in any dictionary I looked in.  He said that was what the mayor said it meant.

Let’s refresh our memory a little.  The word on the side of the building is this:

Which I mentioned looks pretty much like it reads “kisi”, which in Manchu script looks like:

One commenter said it might be a transcription of a Chinese word, like “qishi”, but the middle part is definitely “s”.

In Manchu, “s” looks like , and the “sh” sound  would be .  Sometimes in initial position, the stroke to the left is connected, making a letter that looks like the first one on the building, but that would put two consonant sounds in a row, and Manchu words never start with two consonants.

Looking up the word 福 in the Anaku Manchu-Chinese (and sometimes Japanese) dictionary, we do in fact find a similar word in the output: “kesi”, which is given as 福分 (fúfen), which means the same thing as 福.

So there you have it.  He spelled it wrong.

For comparison, here is the right way to spell it (kesi), followed by the wrong way (kisi):

This is certainly one of the (if not the) largest pieces of Manchu script in existence.  It’s only one word.  Four letters.  And he spelled it wrong.

Instead of going into a big tirade about how this isn’t the only language I’ve seen prominently spelled wrong in China, I’ll leave you with some disappointing pictures.  The place is in terrible disrepair.  I’ll have to mention one bright note though.  I heard a rumor that the government is going to put some money into Wulajie and clean the historical places up for tourism.  They should; it’s a 600 year old town and was an important Qing outpost.  Click on the pictures for larger images.