for "sun" () and "moon" (), both associated with the fire element of the Chinese zodiacal system. The character Qīng () is composed of "water" () and "azure" (), both associated with the water element. This association would justify the Qing conquest as defeat of fire by water. The water imagery of the new name may also have had Buddhist overtones of perspicacity and enlightenment and connections with the Bodhisattva Manjusri. The Manchu name daicing, which sounds like a phonetic rendering of Dà Qīng or Dai Ching, may in fact have been derived from a Mongolian word ", дайчин" that means "warrior". Daicing gurun may therefore have meant "warrior state", a pun that was intelligible only to Manchu and Mongol peoples. In the later part of the dynasty, however, even the Manchus themselves had forgotten this possible meaning. Early European writers used the term "Tartar" indiscriminately for all the peoples of Northern Eurasia but in the 17th century Catholic missionary writings established "Tartar" to refer only to the Manchus and "Tartary" for the lands they ruled. After conquering "China proper", the Manchus identified their state as "China" (中國, Zhōngguó; "Middle Kingdom"), and referred to it as Dulimbai Gurun in Manchu (Dulimbai means "central" or "middle," gurun means "nation" or "state"). The emperors equated the lands of the Qing state (including present-day Northeast China, Xinjiang, Mongolia, Tibet and other areas) as "China" in both the Chinese and Manchu languages, defining China as a multi-ethnic state, and rejecting the idea that "China" only meant Han areas. They used both "China" and "Qing" to refer to their state in official documents. In the Chinese-language versions of its treaties and its maps of the world, the Qing government used "Qing" and "China" interchangeably. In English, the Qing dynasty is sometimes known as the "Manchu dynasty". It is rendered as "Ch'ing dynasty" using the Wade–Giles romanization system. History Formation The Qing dynasty was founded not by the Han people, who constitute the majority of the Chinese population, but by the Manchus, descendants of a sedentary farming people known as the Jurchens, a Tungusic people who lived around the region now comprising the Chinese provinces of Jilin and Heilongjiang. The Manchus are sometimes mistaken for a nomadic people, which they were not. Nurhaci What was to become the Manchu state was founded by Nurhaci, the chieftain of a minor Jurchen tribethe Aisin-Gioroin Jianzhou in the early