Jurchen

Jurchen refers to a Tungusic-speaking people of Manchuria whose historical prominence came with the founding of the Jin Dynasty in northern China in the 12th century. The exonym Jurchen is used in Chinese and Western sources; their own ethnonym is reconstructed as Jušen. The Jurchen language belongs to the Northern Tungusic branch, and the Jurchen script was created in the early 12th century for official use; it was adapted from the Khitan script and later largely supplanted by Chinese script in administration.

In the early 1100s, Wanyan Aguda united several Jurchen tribes and founded the Jin Dynasty in 1115. The Jin quickly overran the Khitan Liao Dynasty, capturing the Liao capital Shangjing in 1125. They then waged war on the Song Dynasty and captured Kaifeng in 1127, forcing the dynasty to retreat south and establishing a bilingual administrative system. The Jin regime governed northern China for several decades, maintaining a capital at Huining Fu (near present-day Harbin).

The Jin ultimately fell to the Mongol conquest; after a protracted war, Huining Fu was captured in 1234, ending Jin rule. The Jurchens continued as a regional people and were later among the ancestors of the Manchu, who founded the Qing Dynasty in 1644. The Manchu language descends from Jurchen, and the historical Jurchen script and inscriptions contribute to knowledge of Tungusic languages and early medieval China.