The surname can be described as a person's business card, China has always had the saying of a hundred family names, and in ancient times, the enlightenment book for children was "Hundred Family Names". We are all familiar with han surnames, so what about the Manchus? Today, I will talk with you about the surnames of the Manchus.
For example, one of the Eight Banners, the Yehenara clan, is a descendant of the Yehe tribe, while the Niu Cobalt Lu clan uses the tribal totem as a surname, and Ninguta and Ussuri are surnamed after the region. These surnames were not necessarily created by the Manchus later, but may also have been handed down from the ancient surnames of the Jurchens, and one-third of the Manchu surnames were the surnames of the Jurchens recorded in the History of Jin. The Jurchens were also once prominent, in the Southern Expedition to the North, and after the surrender of some Mongols to Jin, they were called "Banner People", and their surnames became part of the Manchurian surnames.
As a nomadic Manchu, they generally live in places with abundant water and grass, which is convenient for grazing. This primitive way of life was very simple, so that, at first, they didn't even have a surname, only a name as a code name to call each other. However, as the contact with foreigners increased, everyone found a problem: it would be renamed! For example, at first, everyone in your family called you DaLang, and later, when you left the village, you found that the people in the next village were also called Da Lang. How can this be distinguished? Well, you can add the name of the village before the name, which later evolves into a surname.
Empress Dowager Cixi was a member of the Yehenara clan, Yehe was a tribe, and Nala was the name of a river, which also said: This person is the Yehe tribe, a person by the Nala River.
After the Xinhai Revolution, the Qing court collapsed, the flag camp was disbanded, the grain payment was stopped, and the eight flags system completely collapsed, and the impact on the Manchus was enormous. The breaking of the shackles of the Eight Flags system liberated the Manchus from a life of enslavement, drive and war by a small number of nobles, but in the context of severe ethnic discrimination during the warlord rule, they switched from relying on pay for food to making a living for themselves, during which time they underwent a painful process.
During this period, some Manchus suddenly changed from princes and nobles to the object of everyone's shouting. Eventually, in this context, most of the Manchus chose to change to Han surnames. For example, Guan Xiaotong, who is familiar with the name of the Beijing circle gege, is a descendant of the Guarjia clan, while the royal family Ai Xinjueluo changed his surname to "Jin", and the Tong Jia clan, known as the "Tong Half Dynasty" of the Qing Empire, was basically changed to Tong, Tong and other harmonic surnames.
The Niu Cobalt Lu clan is not only one of the Manchu surnames of the Eight Banners, but also a large clan in the Jurchen era. Qianlong's biological mother was originally a Han Chinese, surnamed Qian, and after the Yongzheng Emperor favored the Qian clan, in order to avoid the embarrassment of manchu and Han not intermarriage, he said that she was a yellow flagred Niu Hulu clan. According to historical records, the Niu Cobalt Lu clan was distributed near the Songhua River and Changbai Mountain. In manchu dialect, "Niu Cobalt Lu" means wolf, the ancestors took the wolf as a totem, and later generations took "wolf" as the surname.
However, it took a long time for the Niu Cobalt Lu clan to finally use Niu Cobalt Lu as a surname. The han people's name for this surname has changed many times, during the Liao Dynasty, everyone called "Niu Cobalt Lu" as "Enemy Lieshi", Jin Guo called it "Female Lieshi", until the Ming Dynasty, the Han people called it "Niu Cobalt Lu". After the fall of the Qing Dynasty, some of the people of the Niu Cobalt Lu clan changed their surname to "Niu" and some people with the surname of "Lang".
There is also a special case, that is, the gold word "button" is removed and changed to "ugly", of course, this surname may not be easy to take a name. It is worth mentioning that the ugly surname is originally in the Han surname, and is generally considered to be a side branch of the descendants of Gongsun Ugly.
During the Qianlong period, the great corrupt official He Yan did not have the surname He, he was actually a member of the NiuHulu clan. At first, he took the Chinese name "Shanbao", but later, when he was studying at a private school, his teacher felt that the name was too vulgar, so he renamed him a Chinese name and a name. "珅" in Old Chinese refers to beautiful jade, and "and" has the meaning of gentleness, and the meaning of this name is: I hope he can be like the gentle jade.
Later, because everyone ignored his surname, they falsely called him "Hezhongtang". If it is more true, it should be called "Niu Cobalt Lu Zhongtang", because the full name of He yan should be Niu Cobalt Lu and Yan.
In fact, it was not after the fall of the Great Qing that the Manchus began to sinicize their names, and there was a tendency to sinicize as early as before the Qing soldiers entered the customs. Dorgon is the son of Nurhaci, and the names of him and his brothers are obviously Manchu, while the name of Huang Taiji is obviously different, some people think that it is a harmonic pronunciation of "crown prince" in Chinese, and some people think that it is a harmonic "Taiji", which also means prince in Manchu.
The ninth son of Emperor Taiji, the later Shunzhi Emperor, directly took the Chinese name of Fulin. The emperors were all like this, not to mention the people at the bottom, who were also happy to take Chinese names. As a result, there is a situation in which some people use Manchu as their names entirely, some people use Manchu as their surnames and Chinese as their names.
In the census after the end of the War of Resistance, the Manchus were only about 80,000, probably not even one-tenth of the actual population. There are less than three thousand in Beijing who recognize themselves as Manchus, and most of them are aristocrats, and there is no way not to admit it. Nowadays, the times have developed, pay attention to national unity, the Manchus are no longer discriminated against, and some people choose to restore their Manchu surnames.
Today, the Manchu population is distributed throughout the country, including Liaoning, Hebei, Heilongjiang, Jilin and inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, Beijing and other provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities directly under the Central Government, and other scattered in Xinjiang, Gansu, Ningxia, Shandong, Hubei, Guizhou and other provinces and regions, as well as Large and medium-sized cities such as Xi'an, Chengdu, Guangzhou and Fuzhou. It can be said that the Manchus have grown stronger and stronger.
Resources:
["Manchu Old Files", "Manchu Surname Development", "The Tragic Situation of the BannerMen after the Xinhai Revolution"]