manchu

It must be noted that both the Yuan and Qing empires were non-Han (Mongol, Manchu respectively).

It's on the same level as the Turner Diaries or Fu Manchu or the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

The OP itself cites how the Mongol invaders established the Yuan dynasty, and the Manchu did the same with the Qing.

More importantly, Mandarin is heavily influenced by Manchu in other ways, for example, tones.

The Manchu language is from the Tungusic language family, and has absolutely no genealogical relation to Mandarin or any other Sino-Tibetan languages.

Do you have any proof that Manchu influence is the reason for Mandarin's relative paucity of tones in comparison to southern Chinese languages?

But why did the Manchu become more Han-like and base out of Beijing?

China's largest ethnic group being Han which outstrips the far fewer Zhuang, Manchu & Uyghur etc (order of billion to order of million).

Mandarin Chinese was originally spoken by Han Chinese only and is nothing like the original language spoken by the Manchu (save for a few loanwords).

For example the Manchu lineage and the Uí Néill lineage.

It's not just the addition of Manchu vocabulary and/or phrases.

> More importantly, Mandarin is heavily influenced by Manchu in other ways, for example, tones.

If you're Chinese, they may say the ethnicities are "Han, Zhuang, Hui, Manchu, Uyghur, …" where those are all ethnic groups within China.

Even Hokkaido wasn't truly settled and colonized by the Japanese until the 1860s, and there's a reason Tungusic peoples like the Jurchen and Manchu preferred migrating south into China and Korea instead of northward - it was inhospitable land whose inhabitants were viewed as "barbarians".

The Chinese are fully aware of the "north-south" differences themselves, although they often attribute it to other reasons, such as legacy effects of numerous mongol/manchu/other "barbarian" invasions from the north through out China's history, which often times were stopped around the Yangtze River.

Moreover, the fates of the Mongols, who became the Yuan, and Manchu, who became the Qing, provide the ultimate deterrent: “Invade us and be consumed from the inside,” rather like the movie Alien.

Manchu now has ~20 native speakers, with its closest non-endangered relative being Xibe, with ~30,000 native speakers[1].

However, that doesn't change the fact that modern Mandarin overwhelmingly bears more similarity to Classical Chinese than it does to Manchu.

This applies to all minorities who use different writing systems (Uigher, Manchu, Mongolian, etc...).