Booi Aha

Booi Aha (Manchu: ᠪᠣᠣᡳ ᠨᡳᠶᠠᠯᠮᠠ(booi niyalma) for male, ᠪᠣᠣᡳ ᡥᡝᡥᡝ(booi hehe) for female; Chinese transliteration: 包衣阿哈) is a Manchu word literally meaning "household person", referring to hereditarily servile people in the 17th century China. It is often directly translated as "bondservant", although sometimes also rendered as "slave" ("nucai").

Pamela Kyle Crossley wrote in her book Orphan Warriors: "The Mongol is the slave of his sovereign. He is never free. His sovereign is his benefactor; [the Mongol] does not serve him for money." This Mongolian "traditional model of slave to owner" was taken up by the Manchu during the development of the Eight Banner military system.

Crossley gave as the definition of Manchu: "A Manchu was, moreover, a man who used his skills exclusively to serve the sovereign....banners as institutions were derived from Turkic and Mongolian forms of military servitude, all enrolled under the banners considered themselves slaves of the emperor and called themselves so (aha, Chinese:奴才, pinyin:nucai) when addressing him...".

In his book China Marches West, Peter C. Perdue stated: "In 1624 (after Nurhachi's invasion of Liaodong), Chinese households who had 5 to 7 Manchu sin of grain (800 to 1,000 kg) were given land and houses, while those with less were made into slaves." The Manchu established a close personal and paternalistic relationship between masters and their slaves, as Nurhachi said: "The Master (Chinese:主子) should love the slaves and eat the same food as them". Perdue further pointed out that booi aha "did not correspond exactly to the Chinese category of "bondservant-slave" (Chinese:奴僕); instead, it was a relationship of personal dependency on a master which in theory guaranteed close personal relationships and equal treatment, even though many western scholars would directly translate "booi" as "bondservant".

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Wikipedia