Nurhaci

Nurhaci led the Aisin-Gioro clan in the late sixteenth century, reorganizing fragmented Jurchen tribes into a unified force that would later be called Manchu. He formalized the Eight Banners military system, a structure that became the backbone of Jurchen power. Beginning his campaigns in the early 1600s, he launched attacks on the Ming dynasty and Joseon, seizing the strategic Liaodong region in China's northeast. That conquest became the foundation for everything that followed: his descendants proclaimed the Qing dynasty a decade after his death in 1626 and went on to conquer all of Ming China. He also commissioned a new vertical script for the Manchu language, adapted from Mongolian, giving his people a written identity to match their political one.