Khitan

Rouran epoch Göktürk epoch Uyghur epoch Kirghiz epoch

Rouran First Göktürk Tang rule Second Göktürk Uyghur Kirghiz Huns Western Göktürk Türgesh Karluk Khazar

Rouran 400–554
First Göktürk 552–630
Tang rule 630–682
Second Göktürk 682–744
Uyghur 744–840
Kirghiz 840–924
Huns 370–469
Western Göktürk 552–659
Türgesh 699–766
Karluk 766–800
Khazar 650–969

The Khitan lived in the pine-moors north-east of the Chinese frontier, between the Xianbei country and Manchuria.^[1] In the period of the khaganates they are a subject people on the eastern edge of every steppe empire in turn: the Rouran, the Göktürks, the Tang. They are never the centre of one. The empire they made for themselves, the Liao, came two and a half centuries after the khaganates.

The Wei Shu entry

Chapter 100 of the Wei Shu gives them their own notice. It is the earliest sustained account. The text says that the Khitan lie east of the Kumo Xi. They are a different stock of the same kind, and both peoples had fled into the pine-moors.^[1] In the Dengguo period the Wei army broke them badly. They scattered, and they and the Kumo Xi went separate ways.^[1] After some decades they multiplied and had tribes again. They settled several hundred li north of Helong and raided a good deal.^[1]

From the Zhenjun period they asked to bring tribute and offered fine horses every year.^[1] Another dating puts the first recorded tribute embassy in 468.^[2] Under Xianzu their envoy, a mofu named Hehechen, brought tribute and was given a place at the end of the ranks of the states at the audience feast.^[1] Going home, he and his people spoke of the splendour of the empire. As a result, the tribes of the north-east all conceived a wish to submit.^[1] The chapter then names eight Khitan tribes. It says they brought horses and hides to the treasury and asked to make it a regular thing. They were allowed to trade at Helong and Miyun.^[1]

The names of the eight are the earliest list of Khitan tribes that exists. The picture they sit in is of a confederation dealing with a Chinese court as a set of parts rather than as one body.

Caught between larger powers

The text also records the moment that made them clients. In 479 Koguryŏ plotted secretly with the Rouran to take the Didouyu and divide them.^[1] The Khitan feared they would be overrun in the same movement. Under their mofu He Wuyu they came in with three thousand carts and more than ten thousand people, driving their mixed herds, and asked to be taken in.^[1] They were settled east of the Bailang river. From then on they brought tribute every year.^[1] When famine came, the emperor let them buy grain inside the passes.^[1]

The chapter records one more small detail. When a Khitan embassy of thirty men went home in the Xiping period, the empress dowager gave each of them two bolts of blue felt. At Khitan weddings blue felt was the finest garment a man could wear.^[1] It is a rare case of a Chinese court recording a steppe custom in order to act on it rather than to classify it.

Under the Göktürks

The Khitan enter Göktürk history properly with Mukan, who drove them east between 554 and 560. This was part of the expansion that also took the Kirghiz. The Zhou Shu records it in four characters, 東走契丹: he drove the Khitan off to the east.^[3] The Khitan had been drawn into the Rouran state against their will. They tried to leave it when Anagui died, and that is what exposed them. For some time in the later sixth century the Göktürks made the Khitan part of their steppe empire. A large group took refuge in Korea. A smaller one asked the Chinese for admission and was refused.^[2]

They appear twice in the Kül Tegin inscription, and the two appearances are the whole of their relation to the khaganate. They are in the list of peoples who came as mourners and wailers to the funeral of the founders. The Kıtañ and the Tatabı are named together there, as they always are.^[4] They are also in the list of enemies of the restored state, alongside the Kirghiz, the Kurıkan, the Otuz Tatar and the Tatabı.^[4] At Kül Tegin’s own funeral the Kıtañ and Tatabı came at the head of the mourners, led by Udar Sengün.^[4]

Mourners at one funeral and enemies in the same text is not a contradiction. It is what a subject people on a frontier looks like from the centre. Such a people is present at the ceremonies that mark the order, and in revolt whenever the order slips.

Tang, Uyghurs and the rise of the Yelü

Their homeland lay in the north of what is now Jehol, near the upper Liao and its tributary the Laoha. It was a country of river plains with abundant grass and forests full of game, which the Chinese called Songmo.^[2] The name Khitan seems to go back to the fourth century. Several chiefs of the Yuwen branch of the Xianbei then bore names that may be related to it. The Khitan formed a federation with the Kumo Xi until they broke away in 388.^[2]

Under the early Tang emperors the Khitan were allies of the Chinese. In 644 they and the Xi, descendants of the Kumo Xi, helped the Chinese against Korea. Some of their chiefs were given Chinese titles and organised into small principalities under nominal Chinese rule.^[5] In 696 a Khitan leader turned on his Chinese overlords and took the title of khagan. This set him on a level with the rulers of the Göktürk empire.^[5] Several Chinese campaigns failed. Not until 714 was a new alliance made, in which the Khitan ruler became Regional King of Songmo and received a Chinese princess.^[5] A Chinese punitive expedition and a new agreement, again sealed by the marriage of a princess, followed in 745.^[5] The policy of siding by turns with the Chinese and the Turks went on when the Uyghurs became the leading power in the east. At first the Khitan declared themselves vassals of the Uyghurs. In 842 they joined the Chinese side.^[5] With the decline of the Tang and the breakdown of its central control, they took the chance to extend their rule at China’s expense.^[5]

Most sources agree that the Khitan had eight basic tribes in the ninth century, each under a chief the Chinese call daren, “great man”. They also agree that the ruler of the federation was chosen from among the eight tribes every three years.^[5] Two families rose to the lead in the ninth century, the Yelü and the Xiao. The Yelü, of pure Khitan stock, gave the empire-builder Abaoji. The Xiao, who received this Chinese name only in 947, were of Uyghur ancestry.^[6] The two allied and replaced the earlier khagans of the Yaolian tribe. The alliance lasted throughout the Liao: the emperors came from the Yelü and took their empresses from the Xiao.^[6] The Uyghur element in the Xiao is one reason offered for the Turkic traits in Khitan society and administration. Another is that the Xi, the descendants of the Kumo Xi, are generally regarded as Turks.^[6] Hu Jiao, a Chinese who lived among the Khitan from 947 to 953 and recorded the journey in his diary, ate watermelon there for the first time. He was told that the Khitan had obtained the crop after the destruction of the Uyghurs.^[7] A typical Khitan institution was the military camp, in Khitan ordo. Each ruler had his own. It served as bodyguard in peace and elite corps in war and held up to 15,000 warrior households. After his death its families were kept together as guards of his tomb. Whether this goes back to before the dynasty is not clear.^[6] The chieftains had no fixed residence. They moved between seasonal camps, called nabo, according to the hunting and fishing seasons.^[6]

Language and continuity

The Khitan are classified as para-Mongolic, on the strength of the later Liao material and of names transcribed in Chinese. For the period of the khaganates there is no connected text in their language at all. About two hundred Khitan words are preserved in Chinese transcription, many of them titles. Titles pass easily from one language to another and prove little. Some tribal titles have counterparts in Turkic, other words are related to Mongolian, a few may be Tungusic, and some have so far resisted all etymology. Most scholars take Khitan for a Mongolic language, and some hold it to be an isolated language that has died out.^[8] Whether the Qidan of the fifth-century Wei Shu, the Kıtañ of the eighth-century inscriptions and the Khitan of the tenth-century Liao are one people under one name is the ordinary question about steppe ethnonyms. The ordinary answer applies: the name is continuous, and what it names need not have been.

References

^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m Wei Shu, juan 100
^ a b c d Sinor 1990, p. 402
^ Zhou Shu (Book of Zhou), juan 50
^ a b c Kül Tegin inscription
^ a b c d e f g Sinor 1990, p. 403
^ a b c d e Sinor 1990, p. 404
^ Laufer 1919, p. 438–439
^ Sinor 1990, p. 407

Sources

Literature

Emre-E. Yavuz, The Gokturk Empire: 2nd Edition (2025)
Peter B. Golden, An Introduction to the History of the Turkic Peoples (1992)
Denis Sinor (ed.), The Cambridge History of Early Inner Asia (1990)
Berthold Laufer, Sino-Iranica. Chinese Contributions to the History of Civilization in Ancient Iran (1919)