Western Xia

The Western Xia was a kingdom of the Tangut people in north-western China, ruling from 1038 to 1227 from its capital near modern Yinchuan, on the Yellow River. It controlled the Hexi corridor, part of the Silk Road, and held its own against the Song, Liao and Jin dynasties before being destroyed by Genghis Khan.

The Tanguts were a people speaking a Tibeto-Burman language, related to Tibetan and Yi, who originally lived in today's Qinghai and Sichuan. Pressed by the Tibetan Empire, many moved north-east in the seventh and eighth centuries to the Ordos region, inside the great bend of the Yellow River. Their leaders served the Tang dynasty, helping to suppress the Huang Chao rebellion, and the Tang gave their leader the imperial surname Li and the title of Duke of Xia. For over a century, the Tanguts held a semi-independent territory around Xiazhou.

In the early eleventh century, the Tangut leaders Li Jiqian and Li Deming expanded their territory, taking the Hexi corridor from the Uyghurs and controlling trade routes between China and Central Asia. In 1038 Li Yuanhao declared himself emperor of the Great Xia, called Western Xia by the Chinese. He ordered Tangut men to shave their heads, leaving a fringe, to distinguish them from the Chinese. He waged war on the Song, winning several battles between 1040 and 1042. In 1044 the Song agreed to pay annual gifts of silk, silver and tea in exchange for peace and Yuanhao's nominal submission. He was assassinated by his son in 1048.

Yuanhao had a script created for the Tangut language by the scholar Yeli Renrong, completed in 1036. It contained about 6,000 complex characters, inspired by Chinese characters but entirely different. It was used for government, law codes, dictionaries, literature and a huge body of Buddhist texts. In 1908–1909 the Russian explorer Pyotr Kozlov found thousands of Tangut texts at the ruined city of Khara-Khoto, in Inner Mongolia, which allowed scholars to begin to decipher the language, a process still continuing.

The Western Xia was a strongly Buddhist state. Its rulers sponsored the translation of the whole Buddhist canon into Tangut, completed in the 1090s, and printed Buddhist texts on a large scale, using woodblocks and movable type; the oldest surviving books printed with movable type, in Tangut, date from the twelfth century. Tibetan Buddhism also became influential, and Tibetan lamas served as imperial preceptors. The Western Xia royal tombs, west of Yinchuan, with their large conical earth mounds, are called "the pyramids of the east".

The Western Xia had Chinese-style government institutions and a law code, the Tiansheng Code of the 1140s, one of the most detailed medieval codes in East Asia. The state included Tanguts, Chinese, Tibetans and Uyghurs. Its economy depended on herding, irrigated farming along the Yellow River and trade.

Genghis Khan attacked the Western Xia in 1205, 1207 and 1209, besieging the capital, Zhongxing, and diverting the Yellow River to flood it, though the dyke broke and flooded the Mongol camp too. In 1210 the Western Xia submitted and agreed to send troops. When they refused to provide troops for his campaign against the Khwarazmian Empire in 1219, Genghis vowed revenge. In 1226 he invaded again. He died in August 1227 during the campaign, but his army took the capital and, according to accounts, massacred much of the population. The Tangut state disappeared, though Tanguts served the Mongols, and their language survived for some centuries.

Our maps show the Western Xia on the 1000, 1100 and 1200 maps, entirely within today's China. Its largest outline, about 750,000 square kilometres on the 1100 map, covers the Ningxia, Gansu and Inner Mongolia regions. The 1000 outline marks Tangut territory before the empire was formally declared in 1038. On the 1279 map the region is part of the Mongol Great Khanate.