Niu Chu

Overview

Niu Chu was a member of the Manchu Samarji clan, belonging to the Bordered Blue Banner, and hailing from the Hurha region. He once served as a military officer. The Qing dynasty official genealogy, *the Comprehensive Genealogy of the Manchu Clans of the Eight Banners*, Volume 44, lists him in a group with an unknown year of submission, noting that his son, Semuken, served as a third-class guard, and his grandson, Serte, served as a vanguard officer.

A military officer was a junior officer in the Eight Banners' military organization, involved in training and duty within their assigned banner; a vanguard officer belonged to the vanguard battalion, participating in advance and guard duties. Although both Niu Chu and his grandson Serte held banner military positions, they belonged to different organizations, making it inappropriate to conflate their titles or presume them to be from the same official lineage.

Semuken's third-class guard position is found in the system of princely residences, undertaking duties such as guarding and accompanying, distinct from the third-class guards of the Emperor's personal guard. The original text continuously records the family's service paths across three generations—grandfather, father, and grandson—but does not specify the particular princely residence they belonged to. The clan name Samarji, the banner affiliation of Bordered Blue Banner, and the ancestral home of Hurha all indicate different information, and it is impossible to change their surname by using the first character of their given name, "Niu". The location of Hurha's ancestral home, the princely residence they belonged to, and the dates of their three generations of service still need to be verified.