A Japanese exonym still labels the Jurchen-Manchu homeland
Manchuria names a Northeast Asian historical region covering today’s Northeast China and a slice of Russia’s Far East below the Uda River and the Tukuringra-Dzhagdy mountains. The label is a Japanese-origin exonym built from “Manchu”, and scholars still argue over whether Chinese speakers ever used Manzhou for a place at all.
Narrowly drawn, the region means Heilongjiang, Jilin and Liaoning plus four eastern Inner Mongolian prefectures: Hulunbuir, Hinggan, Tongliao and Chifeng. The broader version adds the Amur basin, much of which the Qing gave up to Russia in 1858–1860. That lost land, called Outer Manchuria, now covers Primorsky Krai, Amur Oblast, southern Khabarovsk Krai, the Jewish Autonomous Oblast and a sliver of Zabaykalsky Krai. The 1689 Treaty of Nerchinsk had recognised it as Qing territory before the Treaty of Aigun and the 1860 Convention of Beijing handed it over.
Manchus, Mongols, Koreans, Nanai, Nivkhs and Ulchs all live here, and several early Koreanic kingdoms rose in the area. It is the ancestral land of the Tungusic-speaking Jurchens, whom Hong Taiji renamed Manchus in 1635. Under the Ming, Jurchen country went by Nurgan; Qing writers preferred Guandong, meaning beyond the pass to the east, or simply the Three Provinces.
The word itself comes from Japanese Manshū, region of the Manchus. Mark Elliott dates its first map use to Katsuragawa Hoshū’s 1794 Hokusa Bunryaku, while another account credits Takahashi Kageyasu’s 1809 chart. Philipp Franz von Siebold carried such maps to Europe, and by the 1830s European forms had spread, reaching those languages through Dutch.
Herbert Giles wrote in 1912 that neither Chinese nor Manchus knew the term as a geographic expression, and Owen Lattimore found no single Chinese name for the unit in the late 1920s. Elliott and Li Narangoa counter that the Qing built a homeland identity around the Changbai Mountains, and that Chinese writers used Manzhou by the late 19th century. Japan promoted the label to back its puppet Manchukuo from 1932 to 1945, so China now avoids it and some historians call it imperialistic.
Source: Manchuria
