Sibe

The Sibe are a Tungusic people of the Songnen plain between the Nen and Songhua rivers. Russian and Chinese scholarship derives them from the southern Shiwei; after the Xianbei conquest of Buyeo in 286 their forebears took to agriculture, their lands once stretching from Jilin to Hulunbuir.

With the fall of the Liao they became vassals of the Khorchin Mongols, who settled the Nen and Songhua valleys in 1438, and remained dependents until Nurhaci routed them at Gure in 1593. In 1692 the Khorchin handed the Sibe over to the Kangxi Emperor for silver, and they were enrolled in the Eight Banners at Qiqihar, administered separately from the Manchu. In 1700 thousands were resettled at Hohhot and Shenyang.

In 1764 the Qianlong Emperor transferred a Sibe garrison to the Ili valley in Dzungaria, where migrants built Buddhist monasteries and farmed the frontier. Organized into clans called hala, they combined shamanism with Buddhism and kept their Southern Tungusic speech into the nineteenth century, in their Manchurian homeland and Ili alike.