The Manchu are an ethnic group native to Manchuria in northeastern China, descended from the Jurchen people, who under the leadership of Nurhaci and his successors conquered China and founded the Qing dynasty in 1644, ruling the country until the dynasty's collapse in 1912. Though a demographic minority even at the height of their rule, the Manchu maintained a distinct hereditary military and social caste system known as the Eight Banners and imposed cultural markers such as the queue hairstyle on the Han Chinese majority. Centuries of assimilation into Han Chinese society have left the Manchu language critically endangered, spoken today by only a small number of elderly speakers, even as several million people in China still identify ethnically as Manchu, an officially recognized ethnicity in the country.
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