"Manchuria" is a translation of the Japanese word
Manshū, which dates from the 19th century. The name
Manju (Manzhou) was invented and given to the
Jurchen people by
Hong Taiji in 1635 as a new name for their ethnic group; however, the name "Manchuria" was never used by the
Manchus or the Qing dynasty itself to refer to their homeland. According to the Japanese scholar Junko Miyawaki-Okada, the Japanese geographer Takahashi Kageyasu was the first to use the term 满洲 (Manshū) as a place name in 1809 in the
Nippon Henkai Ryakuzu, and it was from that work that Westerners adopted the name.
[6][7] According to Mark C. Elliott, Katsuragawa Hoshū's 1794 work, the "Hokusa bunryaku", was where 满洲 (Manshū) first appeared as a place name was in two maps included in the work, "Ashia zenzu" and "Chikyū hankyū sōzu" which were also created by Katsuragawa.
[8] 满洲 (Manshū) then began to appear as a place names in more maps created by Japanese like Kondi Jūzō, Takahashi Kageyasu, Baba Sadayoshi and Yamada Ren, and these maps were brought to Europe by the Dutch Philipp von Siebold.
[9] According to Nakami Tatsuo, Philip Franz von Siebold was the one who brought the usage of the term Manchuria to Europeans after borrowing it from the Japanese, who were the first to use it in a geographic manner in the eighteenth century although neither the Manchu nor Chinese languages had a term in their own language equivalent to "Manchuria" as a geographic place name.[10] According to Bill Sewell, it was Europeans who first started using the name Manchuria to refer to the location and it is "not a genuine geographic term".[11] The historian Gavan McCormack agreed with Robert H. G. Lee's statement that "The term Manchuria or Man-chou is a modern creation used mainly by westerners and Japanese", with McCormack writing that the term Manchuria is imperialistic in nature and has no "precise meaning" since the Japanese deliberately promoted the use of "Manchuria" as a geographic name to promote its separation from China at the time they were setting up their puppet state of Manchukuo.[12] The Japanese had their own motive for deliberately spreading the usage of the term Manchuria.[13] The historian Norman Smith wrote that "The term 'Manchuria' is controversial".[14] Professor Mariko Asano Tamanoi said that she "should use the term in quotation marks" when referring to Manchuria.[15] In his 2012 dissertation on the Jurchen people to obtain a Doctor of Philosophy degree in History from the University of Washington, Professor Chad D. Garcia noted that usage of the term "Manchuria" is out of favor in "current scholarly practice" and that he had ceased using the term, instead using "the northeast" or referring to specific geographical features.
[16]
In the 18th-century Europe, the region later known as "Manchuria" was most commonly referred to as "[Chinese]
Tartary". However, the term Manchuria (
Mantchourie, in French) started appearing by the end of the century; French missionaries used it as early as 1800.
[17] The French-based geographers
Conrad Malte-Brun and
Edme Mentelle promoted the use of the term Manchuria (
Mantchourie, in French), along with "Mongolia", "Kalmykia", etc., as more precise terms than
Tartary, in their world geography work published in 1804.
[18]
During the Qing dynasty, the area of Manchuria was known as the "three eastern provinces" (san dong sheng) 三東省 since 1683 when Jilin and Heilongjiang were separated even though it was not until 1907 that they were turned into actual provinces.
[19] The area of Manchuria was then converted into three
provinces by the late
Qing government in 1907. Since then, the phrase "Three Northeast Provinces" (
traditional Chinese:東北三省;
simplified Chinese: 东北三省;
pinyin:
Dōngběi Sānshěng) was officially used by the Qing government in
China to refer to this region, and the post of
Viceroy of Three Northeast Provinces was established to take charge of these provinces. After the
1911 revolution, which resulted in the collapse of the Manchu-established Qing Dynasty, the name of the region where the Manchus originated was known as "the Northeast" in official documents in the newly founded
Republic of China, in addition to the "Three Northeast Provinces".