Jurchen

Jurchen was the Tungusic language of the Jurchen of eastern Manchuria and the Jin dynasty that ruled northern China in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; it was the ancestor of Manchu. After founding Jin in 1115, the Jurchen wrote in Khitan script.

In 1119 the chancellor Wanyan Xiyin, on Emperor Aguda's orders, devised the Jurchen large script from Khitan and Chinese models; Emperor Xizong promulgated a small script in 1138, used officially from 1145. From 1164 Emperor Shizong's court translated classics and histories into the script; the Jin Victory Memorial Stele was erected in 1185.

The Mongol destruction of the Jin in 1234 threw the script into decline. Ming eunuch Yishiha erected a Jurchen inscription on the lower Amur in 1413, and Ming bureaus compiled Chinese-Jurchen vocabularies in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The language evolved into early Manchu; in 1635 Hong Taiji renamed the people and language Manchu.