Know her name : history, identity, and onomastics of Manchu women in the Qing dynasty

Abstract

During the Qing dynasty (1644–1912), names for Manchu people were politically significant. Naming according to officially prescribed principles was associated with the government’s efforts to construct Manchu identity and strengthen the legitimacy of Manchu rule. However, while the state-directed goal of expressing Manchu identity through names has been long understood as a gendered practice, the names of Manchu women have been largely overlooked. Our understanding of Manchu onomastics has been built primarily on the male-dominant name corpus in state-produced materials.

This dissertation challenges such conclusions based on the state-centered historiography and male-oriented perspective. It reveals the greater diversity of how Manchu identity was expressed through “proper” names and name documentation. Examining the names of Manchu women recorded in official and private texts throughout the Qing period proves that name, language, and identity are not inherently intertwined. Manchu women, like Manchu men, were known by various names composed of elements from Manchu and Chinese languages. A major discovery of this research is that women were subject to naming and name documentation regulations at the state level but according to criteria that differed from those applied to men. In the state-commissioned biographies of exemplary women and name registry files produced by the Eight Banners system, the names of married Manchu women were first standardized in Sinophone writing using feminine homophones and then systematically replaced by lineage names. All Manchu women became known only as members of their natal clans rather than identified by individual forenames. Unmarried women were named identically by their birth order and the character niu 妞 attributing femininity in Chinese. The numeral niu name functioned as a universal appellation highlighting their affiliation with the banner system through paternal lines. The disparity of practice between documenting Manchu males and females proves how gender was expressed and Manchu womanhood articulated through names.

The thesis also examines the names of Manchu women in sources of evidence produced by groups other than the imperial state. Women were recorded as daughters or wives by their lineage names in family genealogies until the late nineteenth century. Still, the names of Manchu women writers in privately composed biographies in poetry anthologies were very similar to those of literati of both genders and Han and Manchu backgrounds. Their individuality, therefore, was expressed through the names they chose to adopt. However, these private sources also reveal that towards the end of the Qing, there were more Manchu female names with overtly feminine characteristics in Manchu and Chinese languages.

This thesis stresses the significance of Manchu women’s names in understanding Manchu names and writing names in different mediums of languages and contexts. The findings of this research comparing state-directed publications with private writings reveal new conceptions of Manchu identity derived from a female-centered perspective which sheds new light on our understanding of not only the names of females and males of Manchu identity in Qing but also the construction and expression of gender and ethnicity beyond names in the history of China.