Booi Aha - Usage

Usage

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".

In the book A History of Chinese Civilization, Jacques Gernet pointed out that Chinese agricultural slaves were employed as early as the fifteenth century, and by the late sixteenth century it was observed that all the Manchu military commanders had both field and house servants. Between 1645 and 1647, Qing rulers enclosed (Chinese:圈地) large numbers of previously Chinese owned estates over vast areas of North China, eastern Mongolia and neighborhood of Peking, and for land cultivation they were using a labor force consisting of bondservants which were previous land owners and prisoners of war. According to Gernet, regardless of repeated calls from the tribal chief Nurhachi that "The Master should love the slaves", Manchu slave masters treated their slaves very harshly, arranged numerous corvees (Chinese:徭役, 强迫的劳役), and sold and bought their slaves as if they were animals.

Booi was sometimes regarded as synonymous with booi aha, but booi usually referred to household servants who performed domestic service, whereas aha usually referred to the servile people who worked in fields.