into a rout, killed four thousand men, and captured three thousand
horses, besides other booty. Following up this victory by further
annexations, he now began to present a bold front to the Chinese,
declaring himself independent, and refusing any longer to pay tribute.
In 1604, he built himself a new capital, Hingking, which he placed not
very far east of the modern Mukden, and there he received envoys from
the Mongolian chieftains, sent to congratulate him on his triumph.

At this period the Manchus, whose spoken words were polysyllabic, and
not monosyllabic like Chinese, had no written language beyond certain
rude attempts at alphabetic writing, formed from Chinese characters, and
found to be of little practical value. The necessity for something more
convenient soon appealed to the prescient and active mind of Nurhachu;
accordingly, in 1599, he gave orders to two learned scholars to prepare
a suitable script for his rapidly increasing subjects. This they
accomplished by basing the new script upon Mongol, which had been
invented in 1269, by Baschpa, or 'Phagspa, a Tibetan lama, acting under
the direction of Kublai Khan. Baschpa had based his script upon the
written language of the Ouigours, who were descendants of the Hsiung-nu,
or Huns. The Ouigours, known by that name since the year 629, were once
the ruling race in the regions which now form the khanates of Khiva and
Bokhara, and had been the first of the tribes of Central Asia to have a
script of their own. This they formed from the Estrangelo Syraic of
the Nestorians, who appeared in China in the early part of the seventh
century. The Manchu written language, therefore, is lineally descended
from Syraic; indeed, the family likeness of both Manchu and Mongol
to the parent stem is quite obvious, except that these two scripts,
evidently influenced by Chinese, are written vertically, though, unlike
Chinese, they are read from left to right. Thirty-three years later
various improvements were introduced, leaving the Manchu script