The Manchu-Language Archives of the Qing Dynasty and the Origins of the Palace Memorial System

One of the more noteworthy recent trends in scholarship on late imperial Chinese and Inner Asian history is the growing recognition of the importance of Manchu as a research language. This change owes principally to two developments. One is the opening, beginning in the late 1970s, of the First Historical Archives of China (FHA) to general scholarly use. This liberalization inaugurated an ongoing process of discovery that has enabled historians to gain a first-hand familiarity with the variety and nature of the more than 10,000,000 items on deposit there, most of which are from the Qing period (1636–1912). Fuller information has emerged concerning that portion of the Qing archives not in the Chinese script—meaning primarily, though not exclusively, materials in Manchu—which puts us in a better position to appreciate the significance of these sources. In consequence, opinion has shifted away from the old view that Manchu materials are of little relevance for Qing history after 1644, toward the view that documents written in a language so