Jurchen in Henan

Who he is

Title

Heads of the meng'an and mouke settled in the Nanjing circuit

Since

not known

Born

not known

Family

not known

Confidence

low

No holder is named for 1 January 1200 in anything we could reach. The Jinshi names officers only inside individual biographies (zh.wikisource, ctext, Baidu Baike and CBDB were all unreachable from here), so the office, not the man, is what this record gives.

Overlord

the Jin emperor Zhangzong (Wanyan Jing), Cheng'an 4, through the Department of State Affairs at Zhongdu

What it holds

• Hereditary military households living on assigned land (sites not pinned)
• Officers in the garrisons of Kaifeng, Luoyang and the frontier prefectures
• Claim on the court's relief when they fall into poverty

How it was acquired

Settled in Henan from the 1130s and 1140s and again under Hailing (from 1153); the large Hebei move into Henan is 1214 to about 1216 (recalled).

Allies and rivals

They stand with the emperor and the Jurchen great clans (the Wanyan, Tushan and others) against the court's Chinese officials on questions of land and rank. In Henan their neighbours and tenants are Chinese households; relations are not recorded in what we read.

How things stand that morning

A poor, scattered and partly assimilated minority. The dynasty's policy in Zhangzong's reign is to keep Jurchen language and custom alive and to stop the sale of their land, with repeated land surveys (recalled; dates not pinned).

Wealth

Assigned land, rented to Chinese tenants; relief grain from the court; no tolls or towns of their own.

Military

Hereditary service in the Jin armies, with weapons and horses at their own cost; the frontier garrisons of Henan are drawn from them and from Han troops. No numbers.

Threats

• Debt, land sales and loss of horses
• Loss of the Jurchen language and customs
• Resentment of Chinese tenants and neighbours

What the year holds

What happened next, if nothing in play changes it. Each event carries what it depends on and what would stop it.

1. 1214 to about 1216 (Zhenyou 2 to 4)Jurchen households of Hebei are moved south of the Yellow River into Henan, and land is found for them at the cost of local Chinese owners (recalled).Depends on: The Mongol attacks on North China that begin in 1211 and the court's move to Kaifeng in 1214. Stopped by: No Mongol war.

Places of note

• Kaifeng: Reference point only: the Jurchen households are scattered across the plain and the sources we could reach give no village sites.

Where the sources disagree

• The assignment also asks for Chinese local magnates ('strong households', military families, Red Coat precursors) with real force. We found none documented for Henan in 1200 in anything we could reach, and a record for them would be invention. The Red Coats (Hongaojun) belong to 1214 and later, in Shandong (the nce researcher's).
• The sizes of the Jurchen units differ between the researchers of this atlas. The Homeland researcher gives a mouke of 300 households and a meng'an of seven to ten mouke (English Wikipedia, read); the Henan and Shaanxi researchers give a meng'an of a thousand households and a mouke of a hundred, which is what the two names mean (recalled); the Heartland researcher gives no figure because the sizes differ between places and times. The atlas takes the first as the better sourced and treats every figure as a nominal size, never as a roll of 1200: it holds no count of men for any unit.

Evidence: The unit system and the move of 1153 are from Hsu's abstract (read) and Tao's work (recalled). The statement that the Dili zhi's Nanjing section names no meng'an or mouke is from a search of the text (read through a summariser). Where the Henan units lived is not known to me.

On the map: An office record draws the ground the office directly works, not the whole circuit; the prefectures themselves are in the province records. Edges follow modern county seats and the nearest-unit rule.

Primary sources for Jin empire

Chronicles, registers, sagas and inscriptions written in or near 1200 that cover this entry. Each has its own page with editions, translations and where to read it.

• Annals of the Western Xia, Wu Guangcheng (吳廣成) (1825 to 1827, compiled from Song, Liao, Jin and Yuan sources). A Qing scholar's year-by-year reconstruction of Tangut history from the Chinese histories, since the Xia left no surviving annals of their own in Chinese. Read online
• Continuation of the Comprehensive Mirror for Aid in Government, Bi Yuan (畢沅), completed by Feng Jiwu after his death (late eighteenth century, finished after 1801, from Song and Yuan sources). A Qing scholar's continuous month-by-month chronicle of the Song and Yuan centuries, compiled from the Song shi, the Liao, Jin and Yuan histories, Li Tao, Li Xinchuan and other Song sources. Read online
• Essentials of the History of Goryeo, Kim Jong-seo (金宗瑞) and the Joseon history office (1452). The chronological companion to the Goryeosa, finished a year after it and drawing on the same lost records, sometimes with entries the Goryeosa omits. Read online
• Outline and Details of Two Reigns (thirteenth century, after 1224). A Song outline-and-detail chronicle of exactly the two reigns around 1200, drawn from the court's daily records. Read online
• Record of the Personal Campaigns of the Holy Warrior (Chinggis Khan) (presented to Khubilai in 1288, finished in Mongolian in 1290; the surviving Chinese version dates from 1369). A year-by-year Chinese account of Temujin's wars, drawn from the lost Altan Debter (the same source behind the Yuan shi's first chapter and Rashid al-Din). Read online
• The Secret History of the Mongols (1228 or 1240 (the colophon's Year of the Rat is disputed), with later additions; the surviving Chinese transcription and gloss were made under the Ming in the 1380s). The only Mongol account of Temujin's rise, written within living memory. Read online
• History of the Jin, Toqto'a (脫脫) and the Yuan history office, with Ouyang Xuan among the chief compilers (1343 to 1344, from the Jin veritable records and the Jin national history). The official history of the Jurchen empire that ruled north China and Manchuria in 1200. Read online
• Record of the Great Jin State, Attributed to Yuwen Maozhao (宇文懋昭); the attribution is doubtful (preface dated 1234; probably assembled in the Southern Song from Song and Jin material, with later accretions). A Song-side history of the Jin, with annals for each emperor and chapters on institutions, customs, the capitals and the Jurchen way of life. Read online

14 more in the sources library for North China and Manchuria.