Khitan people

The word Cathay, Europe's old name for China, comes from the Khitans, a nomadic people of the grasslands of eastern Mongolia and western Manchuria. They spoke a language related to Mongolic, lived for centuries in the shadow of Chinese and Turkic empires, and then, under Abaoji, founded the Liao dynasty, which ruled northern China, Mongolia and Manchuria for two centuries. After its fall, Khitan exiles built a second empire in Central Asia, and the Daur people of north-east China are today regarded as their descendants.

Chinese histories trace the Khitans to the Yuwen branch of the Xianbei. The Book of Wei, the history of the Northern Wei completed in 554, is the first to describe a Khitan state; a Korean chronicle records a Khitan raid as early as 378. According to the usual reconstruction, the Yuwen broke apart after a defeat in 345, and in 388 one fragment split again into the Kumo Xi and the Khitans. Their own origin story, preserved in the later History of Liao, tells of a holy man on a white horse and a heavenly woman in an ox cart whose eight sons founded the eight Khitan tribes.

For several centuries the Khitans were a confederation of tribes that herded horses, hunted and fished, and paid tribute in turn to northern Chinese states, the Turks and the Uyghurs. The eight early tribes rotated leadership every three years; in the seventh century the Dahe clan united them into a federation able to field 34,000 troops, and it submitted to the Tang dynasty in 628 and 648. A Khitan rising in 696, sparked by famine and a harsh Tang governor, defeated large Tang armies before it was crushed. From 755 the Khitans were vassals of the Uyghur Khaganate until its fall in 840, and in the later ninth century they subdued the Kumo Xi, Shiwei and other neighbours.

Abaoji united the tribes and founded the Liao dynasty, dated to 907 in some accounts and 916 in others. Exploiting the turmoil after the Tang collapse, the Khitans gained sixteen prefectures of northern China in 936 for backing a rebel who founded the Later Jin, and briefly took Kaifeng in 947. They destroyed the kingdom of Balhae and fought three wars with Goryeo between 993 and 1018. The Chanyuan Treaty of 1005 began roughly 120 years of peace with the Song dynasty. The Liao kept the Khitan language, shamanic rites and seasonal hunts while governing farmers and city people, and used two scripts of their own, the large and the small, which are still not fully deciphered.

Khitan religion centred on the sun and on animal spirits: tents faced east, hunters made offerings to their prey, and at the winter solstice white horses, sheep and geese were sacrificed. Women rode, hunted and managed herds and property, and empresses such as Shulü Ping and Xiao Yanyan commanded armies and shaped policy.

Discontent among the Jurchen subjects led to their revolt, and in 1125 the Liao fell to the Jurchen Jin dynasty. A Khitan prince, Yelü Dashi, led followers west to found the Qara Khitai, or Western Liao, in Central Asia, which lasted until the Mongols took it in 1218; a small branch later ruled Kirman in Persia and was absorbed into the local population. Other Khitans were swept into the Mongol Empire, and a band that fled into Korea in 1216 was destroyed by Goryeo in 1219. Genetic studies have found Khitan ancestry among the Daur, and some communities in Yunnan also claim Khitan descent.

Our 900 map draws an approximate Khitan territory, labelled Khitans, on the steppe and forest lands north-east of China, shortly before the Liao state was proclaimed. It lies beside the Tang Empire to the south, the Uyghurs to the west and Balhae to the east.