The Manchus are a minority.

The Manchu population is distributed throughout the country, with the majority in Liaoning, Hebei, Heilongjiang, Jilin, Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, Beijing and other provinces, autonomous regions, and municipalities. Others are scattered in Xinjiang, Gansu, Ningxia, Shandong, Hubei, and Guizhou and other provinces and regions as well as large and medium-sized cities such as Xi'an, Chengdu, Guangzhou, and Fuzhou.

The Manchus are a hard-working, brave and intelligent nation. It is also a nation that is good at absorbing foreign cultures and integrating innovation. In the long-term historical development, customs and culture with rich national characteristics have been formed. The customs of the Manchu people are mostly similar to those of the Han people, but they maintain many Manchu characteristics. According to the "China Statistical Yearbook-2021", the population of Manchus in China is 10,423,303.

Traditional festivals of the Manchu people:

In the long social and historical development, the ancestors of the Manchu people have formed a culture rich in their own national characteristics. For example, as far back as the Bohai Kingdom, There are already festival customs such as Spring Festival and Dragon Boat Festival. These customs are related to the influence of Han culture, but they also have their own national characteristics. For example, the Jurchens have customs such as picking mugwort, eating mugwort cakes, tying longevity locks, and shooting willows to worship the sky during the Dragon Boat Festival.

After the Qing Dynasty entered the Pass, the Manchu culture and the Han culture combined, absorbed each other, and gradually became consistent, while still showing some characteristics of the Manchu culture. For example, the Manchu people eat dumplings and Saqima during the Spring Festival. The Manchu people's Dragon Boat Festival is not about worshiping Qu Yuan but about keeping fit and curing diseases, etc.

The Spring Festival is an important traditional festival for the Manchu people. Before the festival, make Saqima, a traditional Manchu cake, and put up couplets, window grilles, hanging notes (red, yellow, blue, and white according to the flags), and hang the word "福". After the "sacred paper" is distributed at midnight, the younger men go to each family in the clan to "say goodbye to the New Year."

At midnight on New Year's Eve, every family eats dumplings, which means "new year dumplings". You also need to put a copper coin (some wealthy families use money as small guarantees and gems, etc.) secretly in the dumpling. Whoever eats it will have good luck all year round. On New Year's Eve, lantern poles are erected in every courtyard, up to two feet high, with pine branches tied on them and red lanterns hung high. The red lanterns remain on until the sixth day of the lunar month and stay on all night. In the palace, "sky lanterns" were hung on the 24th of the twelfth lunar month and lasted until the third day of the second lunar month of the following year.

The Lantern Festival on the fifteenth day of the first lunar month is also known as the "Lantern Festival". In addition to hanging colored lanterns, the Manchus also make "ice lanterns". The main content of the Lantern Festival is not to eat Lantern Festival, but to watch the colorful lanterns. In towns where the Manchu people live together, thousands of ingeniously colored lanterns are hung on the streets.

In rural areas, there is also the custom of "steaming noodle lanterns" on the night of the Lantern Festival. In the "Yangcheng Lantern Market" in Guangzhou in the late Qing Dynasty, the lanterns made by the bannermen were the most dazzling and became a specialty of Guangzhou.

Reference for the above content: Baidu Encyclopedia-Manchu