Tomb Sweeping/ Manchurian

What has tomb sweeping got anything to do with Manchurians??

Apparently during last week's tomb sweeping, the hot topic was Manchu. Yes, we have all watched 步步惊心 and we all decided that we shall discuss our views on the show. In the end we ended up discussing about the manchurians. My cousins didn't know much about the manchurians and asked me why they all have weird surnames in the show. So I explained that they are manchurians and their surnames are all very odd and long. Like the emperor's surname is 爱心觉罗.

They were fascinated and asked about the diff between the Hans and the Manchus. Actually our chinese costume, the cheong sum, is a manchurian costume. It's not our Han costume.

So this is how the Han traditional costumes look like:


The Manchurians were also called 旗人 and therefore, their dress is called the 旗服, which will be this:


And then it slowly developed into what we call the 旗袍 today.

Apparently, we, the Han people, have been wearing the Manchurian costumes as our traditional costume ever since.

Ok that is out of the point, the point is my cousins got very interested in the Manchu culture so one of them googled more about their names etc. She found out that some Manchurians changed their surname to sound like the Han people so as not to be despised. Ye happens to be one of the surnames. So she happily thinks that she might be a manchurian. I call her 阿叶那真吟.

On the other hand, the other cousin who is a Huang, like me, insisted that she will be 马尔泰楚云 from now on, adopting the surname of Ma'er tai.

So the other cousin, the Ye one, said that if chu yun marry a man with surname Mah, she can name her son as Er Tai, and hence the full name Ma Er Tai. Then when her son got children, they can convert to Muslim, she will have her grandchildren to be called XXX bte Ma'er tai....

I was like.. lidat also can ah?

Very creative.