Manchuria from the Fall of the Yuan to the Rise of the Manchu State (1368-1636)

1 peoples and cultures of Manchuria In the non-Chinese materials, the word “Jurchen ” was firstly recorded in the Aice of the Liao emperor Daozong. In the Khitai small scripts, it was pronounced as “julisen”. In the Nüzhen yiyu compiled by Siyiguan (the Bureau of Translations) of the Ming dynasty in the early fifteenth century, it was “jushen ” in pronunciation. In the Yongningsi inscription inscribed in 1413, the pronunciation of the Jurchen scripts was jushe. In the Jiumanzhoudang edited in the early seventeenth century, the Manchu scripts were written as jushen or jusen. By comparison, it is evident that the second syllable in “Julsen ” is only a foot consonant “l”. The fact that Nüzhen and Nüzhi were interchangeable in Chinese materials has been usually accounted for that the latter was employed as the taboo against using the name of the Liao emperor Xingzong whose name was Zongzhen. But according to julisen in Khitai small scripts and the coexistence of jushen, jushe in Jurchen scripts in the Ming era, Nüzhi was not coined for the sake of taboo, but a reflection of the uncertainty of the consonant “n ” in transliteration. In the epitaphs written in Khitai small scripts, the terminal consonant “n ” in the tribe names are sometimes kept and sometimes omitted. For example, the word Kithai was written both as kita-i and kita