A History of China (43 page)

Development of written scripts marked still another change for Khitan society. As the Khitans sought to rule rather than plunder the domains they had subjugated, they recognized the need for a written language for their proto-Mongol spoken language (which also incorporated Tungusic words). They developed both a large script and a small script, each of which had similarities to Chinese characters. Because neither has been fully deciphered, knowledge of their society is somewhat limited. Yet their creation of these scripts reveals recognition of new responsibilities incurred with annexation of new lands and the need to govern them.

Having adopted a Chinese name for their dynasty and Chinese reign titles and temple names for their emperors, having built a Chinese-style capital city, and having devised a Chinese-influenced administrative system and written scripts, the Khitans governed in their traditional domains and in the territories they occupied in China for about two centuries. By the middle of the tenth century, the Khitans, with a population of about 750,000, directly ruled about two and a half million Chinese, with whom they traded and had diplomatic relations; they also stayed in touch with a China whose population numbered in the tens of millions. How did they retain their identity and remain under their own dynasty and leadership with so much exposure to and adoption of many features of Chinese civilization? How did they resist assimilation?

The Khitans’ relations with China, although initially hostile, eventually ­bolstered their self-image and contributed to the preservation of their identity. By 926, Abaoji had crushed and occupied the Bohai kingdom (in Manchuria), which China had perceived as a vassal state. Twelve years later, his immediate successor gained control over the sixteen prefectures in China, including the area around modern Beijing. In 947, his troops ventured as far south as the Yellow River, briefly occupying the city of Kaifeng. However, the Khitans had overstretched their supply lines and could not maintain their hold over a region so distant from their base. They abandoned the city, but not before the emperor adopted the Chinese name of Liao for his dynasty. Emperor Shenzong ­(982–1031) turned his attention to Korea, and in 994, after several Khitan military expeditions, the kingdom of Koryo accepted a status as a vassal of the Liao. Meanwhile the Song dynasty reunified China in 960, fifty years after the collapse of the Tang dynasty.

After an initial fracas, the Song achieved a rapprochement with the Liao court, thus offering prestige to the Khitan emperors. The second Song emperor led an abortive attempt to recover the sixteen prefectures. After this failure, the Song began to reevaluate its policies toward its northern neighbors. Analyzing the ­reasons for the collapse of the Tang dynasty, Song officials concluded that its predecessor had expanded beyond the Chinese cultural frontiers, in part precipitating its fall. Thus, as mentioned above, the Song determined to be a “lesser empire” in order to avert the fate of the Tang. It deemphasized the use of the military and valued a peaceful relationship with its northern neighbors, including the Liao. To achieve this objective, it negotiated the Treaty of Shanyuan, described earlier.

Coexistence with the Liao proved beneficial and contributed to what some scholars have labeled a Song technological and economic revolution. The Song witnessed the development of a substantial iron industry, a profusion of inventions in agriculture and navigation, an increase in population and an ensuing accelerated pace of urbanization, and a cultural efflorescence in painting, ­porcelain production, literature, and philosophy. Peace along its northern frontiers allowed greater Song investment in the economy and was one factor in these remarkable economic and cultural developments.

The Liao also benefited from the new relationship with the Song. Treatment as equals by the most powerful dynasty in east Asia bolstered the Khitan image. They could borrow Chinese institutions and practices without blurring their own identity. Recognizing that they needed such institutions to govern their Chinese domains, they selectively adopted Tang-dynasty institutions without totally abandoning their own system of governance. They maintained a balance between the Chinese institutions and their own more rudimentary administrative structure, choosing what they perceived to be the most useful or appealing Chinese practices.

Establishment of a dual administration was thus a second means of ­preserving their identity. Two governments ruled from the supreme capital. The northern government, manned by Khitan officials, dealt principally with the mostly pastoral peoples of the steppes, while the southern administration, staffed mainly by Chinese officials, governed the mostly sedentary agricultural society with agencies and institutions familiar to the mostly Chinese inhabitants. The Khitans eventually constructed five capitals, with four of them administering local regions within the Liao domains. Although the Khitans were the first seminomadic people to build cities in the Mongol steppelands, the dual administration permitted the Khitans in the north to maintain their traditional lifestyles as stockbreeders.

The means of selection of the ruling families furthered the Khitan efforts to retain their identity. The Yelü clan supplied the emperors but was limited to consorts from the Xiao clan. The ruling emperors could not marry women from the Chinese, Tungusic, Uyghur, or other foreign communities that the Khitans had subjugated. The purity of the imperial family was thus assured.

Although the imperial family enjoyed opulent lifestyles in the palaces built in the various capitals, they persisted, both symbolically and in practice, in maintaining their links to their pastoral nomadic heritage. The Chinese ­chronicles indicate that the Liao emperors periodically moved from one ­capital to another and one site to another, continuing the Khitan legacy of mobility. Even after the construction of elaborate palaces, the emperors and their ­retinues, on occasion, slept in tents. It may be that this supposed link was a gesture and perhaps artificial. Nonetheless, the courts appeared to have felt duty bound to share the traditional lifestyles of their people. A likelier and probably more heartfelt link to their heritage was the emperors’ repeated organization of hunts and other outings – a standard activity in Khitan society designed both to obtain food and to sustain proper rituals.

Several of the Liao’s policies also diverged from traditional Chinese ­practices and beliefs and thus charted a unique identity. First, unlike the Confucian scholar-official class, the Khitan supported merchants and commerce. Traditional Confucians considered trade to be a parasitic pursuit, but the Khitans, whose nomadic pastoral economy required the exchange of goods, had a much more favorable attitude toward merchants. They developed extensive commercial networks, trading with the Song, the Tungusic peoples, Koryo, the Tangut of northwest China, and other peoples as far away as central Asia. They provided horses, sheep, furs, carpets, lumber, and slaves to the Song and received silver, silk, tea, and gold and silver ornaments in return. Their other trading partners offered ginseng, jade, and cotton cloth among other goods.

Second, the Liao elites adopted Chinese religions, particularly Buddhism, but they did not abandon their traditional beliefs. The Liao emperors provided funds for the construction of monasteries and temples and for the printing of texts. To be sure, Buddhism influenced their views and their funerary ­practices. However, they also maintained practices associated with divination and shamanism, some of which the state sponsored. Even as they adopted Chinese-style ancestral rituals, they made offerings of deer meat rather than the ­traditional Chinese fruits and grains. Third, although Buddhism inspired some of their artworks (which were often produced by Chinese craftsmen), the Khitans also valued objects that reflected and glorified their nomadic pastoral heritage. They commissioned artisans to produce elaborately designed and often gold-encrusted saddles, stirrups, boots, funerary urns in the form of tents, and amulets, all of which evoked their love of horses and other animals. Fourth, their development of two written scripts reflected still another means of differentiating themselves from the traditional Chinese dynasties.

Their political culture differed somewhat from the Chinese model. At least three Liao empresses had tremendous power and often decided on court ­policies – a distinct deviation from Chinese practices, where historians reviled strong women, such as Empress Wu of the Tang dynasty, who sought to play political roles. The authority and status of ordinary Khitan women are not known, but some elite women had more power than their Chinese peers.

More critical was the Liao’s inability to settle on a regular system of succession to the imperial throne. In the predynastic state, the Khitan leaders would ­convene and elect the next leader. The Chinese favored a hereditary system. As a result, clashes repeatedly arose between different elite factions about the ­principles of succession. At the same time, conflicts reared up between the nomadic pastoral Khitans and the more sinicized Liao court elites. The traditional lifestyle was pitted against the increasingly Chinese values that began to characterize the Khitans in the south. These internal struggles weakened the Liao.

The dynasty’s neighbors and subordinates capitalized on such disharmony and the ensuing disarray at the Liao court. The Bohai of Manchuria rebelled and sought assistance from the Jurchens, a Tungusic people who had previously accepted the supremacy of the Liao. Aguda, a capable Jurchen military leader, challenged Liao control, and in 1115 proclaimed himself Emperor Taizu of the Jin dynasty. The Song, renouncing the Treaty of Shanyuan, also attacked the Liao, but without much success. Nonetheless, these hostilities made the Liao vulnerable and facilitated the Jurchens’ final defeat of the dynasty in 1125.

The Khitans did not immediately disappear. Yelü Dashi (1087–1143), a descendant of the imperial family, led remnants of the Khitan military and their families westward to modern Xinjiang and neighboring regions in central Asia to found the Khara Khitai (in Chinese, Xi Liao) dynasty, which survived until the Mongol conquest of 1211. Some capable Khitan officials who remained in China served later dynasties. Yelü Chucai (1190–1244), the most prominent such official, helped Chinggis Khan (r. 1206–1227) and Chinggis’ son and successor, Ögödei (r. 1229–1241), to devise institutions suitable for ruling China.

The Liao was the first foreign dynasty that sought to combine its traditional system of governance with the Chinese administrative structure. It succeeded for about two hundred years and served as a model for other foreigners, including the Mongols, who attempted to rule China.

Also during the Song period, a group called the Tanguts occupied northwest China, which encompassed the Gansu corridor and the Ordos region and stretched farther west to Dunhuang and Yumen (Jade Gate), the traditional end point of the so-called Great Wall. Including elements of Tibetan, Chinese, and Turkic–Mongol culture, the Tanguts had a mixed economy of agriculture, herding, and commerce. Although their population and the size of their domain paled in comparison to those of the Liao and the Song, they had a sizable military force and controlled a strategic location on the routes to central Asia and west Asia. They accepted a tributary status to the Liao and Song, although they were clearly autonomous, and established the Xia (ca. 982–1227), a Chinese-style dynasty with a Chinese name, and built a capital city. Notwithstanding the Tanguts’ “tributary” status, hostilities with the Song prevailed until the two dynasties came to an agreement in 1044. Like the Song’s Treaty of Shanyuan with the Khitans, the new arrangement was advantageous for the Tanguts, as the Song pledged to provide gifts of silk, tea, and silver in return for a Xia guarantee of peace along the frontiers. Although the agreement was maintained, the Song also dispatched troops on several occasions in the late eleventh century to suppress the Tanguts.

The Xia dynasty, which the Tanguts founded, was culturally sophisticated and engaged in considerable commerce. Construction of a capital city distinguished it from nearly all of China’s mostly nomadic neighbors. Even more unusual was its development of a written script, which has, in fact, been deciphered. Printing with moveable type was another of its remarkable achievements, as was its enactment of an elaborate law code. However, its most noteworthy characteristic was state adoption and patronage of Buddhism. Devotion to Buddhism as the state religion provided for the allocation of resources for the construction of temples, for the translation and printing of sutras, and for the fashioning of ritual objects. Emperors, officials, and monks believed that they accumulated merit by subsidizing the creation of beautiful Buddhist manuscripts, drawings, paintings, and textiles. Russian archeologists who excavated the Xia capital discovered a treasure trove of such works that is now found in the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. Trade generated some of the revenues required for the sponsorship of Buddhism. The Xia sent salt, rhubarb, horses, sheep, camels, and carpets to China and received tea, silver, silk, porcelain, lacquerware, and silver and gold ornaments.

The Xia’s political history did not match its efflorescent religion and growing economy. Although the dynasty was influenced by Confucianism, which prided itself on stability and order, the Xia was plagued by periodic unrest. Struggles over the throne after a ruler’s death, as well as the power of such extralegal authorities as empress dowagers (who dominated at least one reign), led to some turbulence. The dynasty was, on occasion, plagued by banditry and uprisings and frequently acted as a tributary of the Song and Liao emperors and eventually the Jin dynasty, which drove the Song out of north China in 1126. Vulnerable to such powerful adversaries as the Mongols, in 1207 it sought assistance from the Jin against a projected attack by Chinggis Khan. The Jin refused its request, permitting the Mongols a free hand in the Xia territories. In 1209 Chinggis launched an invasion, but his troops, having no experience of laying siege to a city, had to flee from a bungled attempt to capture the Xia capital in order to avoid inundation by a river they had attempted to divert. Chinggis had to be content with the Xia ruler’s perfunctory submission, symbolized by the dispatch of the emperor’s daughter to his harem. Later the Xia emperor showed his independence by rejecting the Mongols’ demand that he supply troops for their campaign in central Asia from 1219 to 1225, which proved to be his fatal misstep. In 1227, seeking revenge for such insubordination, Chinggis and his forces, now having mastered the techniques of siege warfare, defeated the Tanguts, occupied and sacked the capital, and killed the Xia emperor. Many Tanguts survived and played roles in later history but they never reestablished an independent state.