Khitan Erotic

The Khitan were a historical pastoral people of the steppe and forest margin in what is now Inner Mongolia, Liaoning and eastern Mongolia, attested from the fourth century and dominant across northern East Asia from 907 to 1125 as the ruling house of the Liao dynasty. Over the following centuries they were absorbed into Han Chinese, Mongol and Jurchen populations, with the Daur of Inner Mongolia and Heilongjiang the most likely direct descendants. The name outlived the people: it is the root of Cathay, and of Kitay, the ordinary Russian word for China.

What set the Khitan apart from the other herding peoples of their world was that they built a state and ran it two ways at once. Yelü Abaoji ended the old practice of electing a khan from among eight tribes every three years, made himself emperor, and his successors governed the nomadic north through a Northern Chancellery and the farming Chinese south through a Southern Chancellery modeled on Tang practice. The court never sat still. Emperors moved with the seasons between hunting camps and five capitals, and business was done from tents as much as from palaces. Two writing systems, the Khitan large and small scripts, were commissioned within five years of each other in the 920s. Both are read today only in part, which is why so much of Khitan history comes through Chinese sources and archaeology rather than in their own words. The language is usually placed in the Para-Mongolic group, a sibling of Mongolic rather than its ancestor.

Religion layered rather than replaced. The ancestral cult of sky and mountain centered on Mount Muye, where the founding legend has a man on a white horse meeting a woman on a gray ox, and white horses and gray oxen remained the sacrifice of choice. Onto that the Liao court laid intense Buddhist patronage, printing the canon and raising pagodas, some of which still stand, including the timber pagoda at Yingxian. Emperors also performed a rain rite of shooting at willow branches and a periodic rebirth ceremony in which the ruler reenacted his own birth. Society was organized around two great lineages, the imperial Yelü and the consort Xiao, who intermarried generation after generation. Xiao women held real power, as regents and occasionally as field commanders. Elite dead were dressed for burial in gilt metal face masks and body nets of silver or copper wire, a custom without close parallel among their neighbors. When the Jurchen destroyed the Liao in 1125, the prince Yelü Dashi led survivors west across the steppe and founded the Qara Khitai in Central Asia, which lasted nearly a century before it too fell to the Mongols.