Nurgan

Nurgan stood beside the lower Amur near the mouth of the Amgun, a meeting place for peoples of the river and the coast. At the cliff of Tyr, Ming envoys founded the Yongning Temple, dedicated to Guanyin, and left inscriptions recording their journeys and dealings with local communities.

The Yongle Emperor sent the Jurchen eunuch Yishiha to the lower Amur in the early fifteenth century. In 1413 he erected a stele at the temple in Chinese, Mongolian and Jurchen; another followed in 1433 after the temple was rebuilt. The inscriptions describe gifts and tribute exchanged with peoples including the Nivkh and Ainu, whose networks reached beyond the river to Sakhalin and the northern coast. Nurgan became the seat of a Ming regional military commission, though the court's presence in this distant region was short-lived.