Manchu Culture Corridor

Manchu Culture Corridor

The Manchu History and Culture Corridor, built in 2002, is located within the China Manchu Folk Culture Park in Hetu Ala City. Stretching 560 meters in length, it is not only a famous scenic spot in our city but also the first corridor dedicated to Manchu culture in China.

The paintings narrate the legend of the Three Fairies and depict the Qing emperors worshipping at ancestral tombs, all the way to the twelve emperors of the Qing Dynasty, whose historical moments are recreated in murals. It is like a magnificent epic, engraved with the rise and fall of the Qing Dynasty. Here, you can gain a comprehensive understanding of the rise and growth of the Manchu people. The gallery consists of a total of 503 murals, which can be broadly divided into three parts. The first part tells the origin of the Manchu people. Like every ethnic group, the Manchus have their own origin myths. According to the Manchu Veritable Records, at the beginning of time, three fairies descended from heaven, bathed in the Lake of Bulhūri, and after emerging from the water, a divine magpie flew down from the sky carrying a red fruit in its beak, which it placed on the clothes of the fairy Fekulen. She couldn't help but pick it up, put it in her mouth, and accidentally swallowed it, becoming pregnant. She gave birth to a boy, who bore the surname Aisin Gioro and was named Bukūri Yongšon. This boy born of the fairy is the founding ancestor of the Manchu people. The ancestors of the Manchus were called the Sushen during the pre-Qin period, changed to Yilou in the Han Dynasty, to Wuji during the Northern and Southern Dynasties, to Mohe in the Sui and Tang Dynasties, and to Jurchen in the late Yuan and early Ming periods. In 1559, Nurhaci was born into the family of a slave owner in Jianzhou.

The second part of the gallery depicts the life of Nurhaci—how he grew from a young boy picking pine nuts and mushrooms in a remote borderland into a great politician and military strategist. As the founder of the Qing Empire, he exerted a foundational influence on the history of the Qing Dynasty; he planted the seeds of the “Prosperous Era of Kangxi and Qianlong” as well as the roots of the “Decline during the Guangxu and Xuantong Reigns.” The third part of the gallery illustrates the ten emperors after the Qing entered the Pass, along with scenes of four emperors—Kangxi, Qianlong, Jiaqing, and Daoguang—returning to worship at their ancestral tombs. Through the corridor, we see that the Qing Dynasty spanned a total of 268 years of history, ultimately embodying the saying, “Leaves return to their roots.” Why is this? The first emperor of the Qing Dynasty, Nurhaci, rose to prominence in Xinbin, Fushun, and the last emperor, Puyi, was reformed and educated in the Fushun War Criminals Management Center. The entire lifespan of the Qing Dynasty began and ended in Fushun—a perfect historical cycle, one might say it was fate. That’s a brief introduction to the corridor. If you’d like to learn more about the development history of the Manchu people, then please visit the Manchu History and Culture Corridor.

Source: Xinbin County People's Government Website