This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
The Qinding Manzhou Jishen Jitian Dianli, completed in Manchu in 1747 under the Qianlong emperor and rendered into Chinese in 1780, is the only codified manual of shamanic ritual ever compiled under imperial sponsorship anywhere, and it reorganized Manchu shamanism from the inside out. Before codification, shamanic practice among Manchu clans ran through individual shamans who entered trance and spoke with spirits directly on a family's behalf, a form scholarship calls ecstatic shamanism and treats as the older, wider Tungusic pattern the Manchu shared with related Siberian peoples. The Qianlong manual replaced open-ended trance work with standardized, non-ecstatic court ritual, prayers and offerings performed in dedicated shrine halls according to a fixed text, administered less as living revelation than as state liturgy. The court's motive was as much political as religious: having conquered China and founded the Qing dynasty in 1644, Manchu rulers used a codified, distinctly Manchu religious practice, alongside language, dress and mounted archery, to keep a numerically small ruling minority visibly distinct from the much larger Han Chinese population it governed. Trance based practice did not vanish, but it was increasingly sidelined at court and, in places, treated as heterodox and suppressed outside it, leaving two strands of the same tradition running on different tracks.