Ula (tribe)

The Jurchen Ula tribe are mostly traders, buying horses, livestock, and fur from the steppe Mongols and selling them at Jianzhou pingyuan on the Liao river basin, the economic center and farmland of the Manchu region. They in turn buy grain such as millet and corn at Jianzhou and sell them to the Mongols.

Jianzhou is on the northern Silk route to Korea. It is also an important Ming military outpost guarding the trade of products from Korea in the east, Siberian north and Monggol west to Beijing in the south through the Shanhaiguan pass at the start of the Great Wall on the Bohai coast.

The Ula tribe in the time of Nurhaci settles mostly at what is now Baicheng, Jilin at the mountain pass through which trade flows between the Mongolia and Manchuria. The Trans-Siberia railway runs through the pass between Ulan Hot in Inner Mongolia and Baicheng, Jilin, a distance of about 50 miles. Buzhantai, the last prince from the Ula clan was killed by Nurhaci's son, Cuyen.

Nurhaci's wife Abahai, the mother of Dorgon, Dodo and Ajige, comes from the Ula clan.