Changbaishan 長白山, or golmin šanggiyan alin ᡤᠣᠯᠨᠮᡳ ᡧᠠᠩᡤᡳᠶᠠᠨ ᠠᠯᡳᠨ as it has been known in Manchu, certainly has an interesting place in the overlapping mythic space of Northeast Asia. Attempts to centre various identities on the mountains were a consistent feature of the early Qing, though which identities could vary. One thing I will note is that to begin with, I will be discussing how the Qing emperors tried to present the mountains, before I discuss how far other Manchus actually bought into it.

The Kangxi Emperor had, beginning in 1677, instituted ritual sacrifices to the mountains, and during his second tour of the northeast in 1682, he and his retinue performed the series of three kneelings and nine prostrations (the 'kowtow') in the direction of the mountains while detouring to Girin Ula (modern day Jilin Shi), which was actually some 230km to the northeast. From 1677 onward, the mountains were described as zuzong faxiang zhongdi 祖宗發祥重地 ('the momentous ancestral birthplace'), cementing their integral place in the Aisin Gioro ideological space. But this went beyond just applying to the Aisin Gioro clan. For one, Inner Asian tribal formations like the Manchus tended to recognise a single common ancestor, irrespective of actual genealogy, so for instance the Yongzheng Emperor in 1728 declared that the Manchus were all the descendants of Nurgaci, Hong Taiji, and the Shunzhi Emperor. As such, in theory the Aisin Gioro were the progenitor tribe for the Manchu people, and because the Changbai/Golmin Šanggiyan Mountains were the birthplace of the Aisin Gioro's legendary ancestors, they were by extension the birthplace of all Manchus.

But the Kangxi Emperor's programme went beyond just creating a centre of Manchu identity. As Stephen Whiteman has argued, he was in fact attempting to re-centre the sacred geography of the entire Qing empire. After the institution of sacrifices to Changbai, the Kangxi Emperor chose not to perform fengshan 封禪 ceremonies when, in 1684, he ascended Mount Tai 泰山 in Shandong, the most sacred site in Taoism, in what seems to have been an attempt to drag the centre of the empire's sacred geography northeastward into the Manchu homeland and away from the lands of the Han Chinese. This extended as far as the assertion that the geomantic energy attributed to Mount Tai in fact found its origin in the Changbai range. In an essay in Chinese titled 'Tai shan’s Mountain Veins Originate in Changbai shan', which is undated but was almost certainly composed by 1684, the Kangxi Emperor asserted that the contours of the Changbai's southern foothills directed the mountains' energy in two directions – the first curving north towards Shengjing (Mukden), the second pointing southwest towards Lüshun (Port Arthur), where it then went under the sea, emerging occasionally as islands in the Bohai strait until becoming the mountain ranges in eastern Shandong, culminating at Mount Tai. The acceptance of this among non-Manchus was probably pretty minimal.

Interestingly, this was one of the aspects of the Qing programme of Manchu cultural definition that was not a pure Qianlong-era construction. The myth of Bukūri Yongšon as the progenitor of the Manchu people was certainly expanded on by the Qianlong Emperor, under whose auspices came the Manchu Veritable Records and the Researches on Manchu Origins, but it evidently traced back to the Kangxi period. Ditto the focus on the Changbai Mountains as a key geographical motif, as would find form in the (comparatively) famous Ode to Mukden in the later reigh. Incidentally, a fun project done by Dr Loretta Kim and students back in 2006 involved a multilingual translation of the Bukūri Yongšon extract of the Manchu Veritable Records, which was made into an open-access PDF just last year that can be found here for those interested.

Although the cultural programme of the Kangxi-Qianlong periods was not, in the end, wholly successful (and I have in other past answers discussed the transition of Manchu coherence from definition through culture to definition through institutions), identification with the Changbai Mountains did occur on some level. 'Changbai' became a common phrase for Manchu poets and writers to begin their signatures with, and a considerable amount of Manchu-penned poetry concentrated on the Changbai Mountains and their surrounding environment. This obviously represents Manchu elite culture rather than popular culture (and it is worth remembering that there was a certain stratification within the Banners), but it does suggest that acceptance went beyond the imperial clan. The extent to which we can see this carried on unchanged into the twentieth century is questionable. For one, many provincial Banner garrisons distanced themselves from the state, but still bought into the idea of Manchu lineages, so may have approached the idea of a Changbai origin differently than the state hoped them to. For another, the Manchu revivalist movement that began in the 1980s may approach the Changbai Mountains and the official imperial line on their importance in a different way than Qing-era Manchus did. This is by no means an attempt to assert that modern Manchu identity is illegitimate if so, but it would not be a useful guide to Qing-era beliefs.

Sources, Notes, and Further Reading

• Lian Bai, 'Identity reproducers beyond the grassroots: The middle class in the Manchu revival since the 1980s', Asian Ethnicity 6:3 (2005)
• Pamela Kyle Crossley, A Translucent Mirror: History and Identity in Qing Imperial Ideology (1999)
• Pamela Kyle Crossley, 'An Introduction to the Qing Foundation Myth', Late Imperial China 6:2 (1985)
• Brian R. Dott, Identity Reflections: Pilgrimages to Mount Tai in Late Imperial China (2004)
• Mark C. Elliott, The Manchu Way: The Eight Banners and Ethnic Identity in Late Imperial China (2001)
• Mark C. Elliott, 'The Limits of Tartary: Manchuria in Imperial and National Geographies', The Journal of Asian Studies 59:3 (2000)
• Ruth Rogaski, 'Knowing a Sentient Mountain: Space, science, and the sacred in ascents of Mount Paektu/Changbai', Modern Asian Studies 52:2 (2018)

It’s sacred to all Manchu people technically since Manchu heritage is very diluted in present day and there’s not much of Manchu culture to speak of. It’s common knowledge Baekdu Mountain is where we come from, but we don’t worship it in daily life and most don’t “make a pilgrimage” to it or anything, unless they are weird like me.

I am of Manchu heritage through my paternal grandfather who was born and raised in the same province as Baekdu Mountain, about five hours from it. I’ve been to Baekdu Mountain but it’s indeed billed more as an ethnic Korean (North Korean & Chinese with Korean heritage) heritage site at the moment, with people performing Korean ethnic dances and selling Korean ethnic food at every corner in the area. Perhaps because ethnic Koreans in the area still quite often speak Korean, while Manchus don’t have much of an ethnic identity and none of us speak Manchu (about a dozen speakers left in the world) or wear traditional Manchu clothing (considered somewhat not-ok in China compared to other ethnic clothing or historical Han clothing) etc.

At any rate, the historical/mythological record is that the pre-Manchu Jurchen people originated from the Baekdu Mountain.

For example, in the History of Jin Dynasty 金史 part of Twenty-Four Histories 二十四史, an official historical chronicle recording all prominent Chinese dynasties, it was said that 生女真地有混同江、长白山，混同江亦号黑龙江，所谓白山、黑水是也 meaning “the Jurchen people come from Huntong River, also known as Heilongjiang (name of a river, also of a present day Chinese province, literally Black Dragon River) and Baekdu/Changbai Mountain (literally Long White Mountain), which are the White Mountain and the Black Water”, while “White Mountain and the Black Water” are in the common vocabulary of presentday Northeastern China (东北) and considered important local geographical and cultural features for all ethnicities alike.

The Jurchen people of the Jin Dynasty gave Baekdu Mountain its name of Changbai, and honored it with temples; the fifth Jin emperor Emperor Shizong made the mountain a “King”, and the sixth emperor Zhangzong gave the mountain title of Emperor. The mountain was worshipped with temples and sacrifices, being viewed as the origin and root of all Jurchen people.

Eventually, the Jurchen people “evolved” into Manchu people when Qing dynasty’s founding emperor Aisin Gioro Hong Taiji renamed his people, one of the three major groups of Jurchen, the Manchu. The worship and respect for the Baekdu Mountain thus carried over for all the Manchu people, but the Aisin Gioro clan claimed to have even closer ties with the mountain - my hypothesis is it’s one of the myths to make their ruling legitimate, similar to how historical Chinese rulers would claim to be the Son of Heaven. The mythical figure of Jurchen chieftain Bukuri Yongson linked Nurhaci, Hong Taiji’s father and founder of the Later Jin dynasty, to the Jurchen chiefs and thus to the rulers of Jin dynasty, giving Later Jin the kind of continuity and legitimacy it needed to unite the Tungusian people into one ethnicity and later mold them into the Manchu people. I would conjecture that it was because the Baekdu Mountain was sacred to all Manchu (and Jurchen, before they were Manchu), that the Aisin Gioro clan claimed their ancestor was conceived near it.

But it could also be true to an extent instead of purely myth-making; to this day Manchu people still concentrate in the same area of Northeastern China, or Manchuria (historically also Manchukuo during WWII, and some of the historical Manchuria area is in present-day Russia), even if we’ve also spread all over China; and it’s not far-fetched for the Aisio Gioro clan to originate near the mountain since they had to have originated somewhere somewhat close the to mountain, as literally all Manchus did. The question was only how close they were.

Lastly, an anecdote I heard from my late grandfather: according to him, our old two-part Manchu family name shared the first part, Aisin, with Aisin Gioro, while we shared the second part with another clan, though we don’t know what that implies - could it be Aisin was an area marker for a large group of several clans that came from the same general area? Because we did not live very far from the mountain, and if the Aisin Gioro clan indeed came from the same area, then they did live near the mountain too. (Though 5 hours by car today would mean... two weeks by horse during Qing?) Aisin literally means “gold” and it’s the same Hanja character for the most common Korean last name Kim, and the Koreans are only on the other side of the mountain, very close to us as well. Not sure if that means anything. Again, this part is just a small anecdote without real sources; don’t take it too seriously.