A report on Inner Mongolia and Manchuria

The Manchu are an officially recognized ethnic minority in China and the people from whom Manchuria derives its name.

Among them, Liaoning has the largest population and Hebei, Heilongjiang, Jilin, Inner Mongolia and Beijing have over 100,000 Manchu residents.

It usually corresponds specifically to the three provinces east of the Greater Khingan Range, namely Liaoning, Jilin, and Heilongjiang, but historically is meant to also encompass the four easternmost prefectures of Inner Mongolia west of the Greater Khingan.

The area has long been known in Indo-European languages as Manchuria, as it was the homeland of the Manchu people who established and ruled the Qing dynasty of China from the 17th to early 20th century.

It was emerged from the Khanate of Later Jin (1616–1636) founded by the Jianzhou Jurchens, and proclaimed in 1636 as an empire in Manchuria (modern-day Northeast China and Outer Manchuria).

Qing China reached its largest extent during the 18th century, when it ruled China proper (eighteen provinces) as well as the areas of present-day Northeast China, Inner Mongolia, Outer Mongolia, Xinjiang and Tibet, at approximately 13 million km2 in size.

The Mongols (Монголчууд,, Moŋğolçuud, ; ; Монголы) are an East Asian ethnic group native to Mongolia, Inner Mongolia in China and the Buryatia Republic of the Russian Federation.

Based on Chinese historical texts the ancestry of the Mongolic peoples can be traced back to the Donghu, a nomadic confederation occupying eastern Mongolia and Manchuria.

Jilin borders North Korea (Rasŏn, North Hamgyong, Ryanggang and Chagang) and Russia (Primorsky Krai) to the east, Heilongjiang to the north, Liaoning to the south, and Inner Mongolia to the west.

Manchuria was the staging ground from which the communists eventually conquered the rest of China in the Chinese Civil War.

Historically a gateway between China proper and Manchuria, the modern Liaoning province was established in 1907 as Fengtian or Fengtien province and was renamed Liaoning in 1929.

Liaoning is also known in Chinese as "the Golden Triangle" from its shape and strategic location, with the Yellow Sea (Korea Bay and Bohai Sea) in the south, North Korea's North Pyongan and Chagang provinces in the southeast, Jilin to the northeast, Hebei to the southwest, and Inner Mongolia to the northwest.

Hebei borders the provinces of Shanxi to the west, Henan to the south, Shandong to the southeast and Liaoning to the northeast, as well as the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region to the north.

The founding of the People's Republic of China saw several changes: the region around Chengde, previously part of Rehe Province (historically part of Manchuria), and the region around Zhangjiakou, previously part of Chahar Province (historically part of Inner Mongolia), were merged into Hebei, extending its borders northwards beyond the Great Wall.

An Lushan was a half-Sogdian, half-Turk Tang commander since 744, had experience fighting the Khitans of Manchuria with a victory in 744, yet most of his campaigns against the Khitans were unsuccessful.

In the year 630, Tang armies captured areas of the Ordos Desert, modern-day Inner Mongolia province, and southern Mongolia from the Turks.

The province is bordered by Jilin to the south and Inner Mongolia to the west.

These areas deep in Manchuria were closed off to Han Chinese migration.

It is generally suggested that the homeland of the Tungusic people is in northeastern Manchuria, somewhere near the Amur River region.

The Oroqen, Solon, and Khamnigan inhabit some parts of Heilongjiang Province, Inner Mongolia, and Mongolia and may be considered as subgroups of the Evenk ethnicity, though the Solons and the Khamnigans in particular have interacted closely with Mongolic peoples (Mongol, Daur, Buryat), and they are ethnographically quite distinct from the Evenks in Russia.