Tanguts Erotic

The Tanguts were a Tibeto-Burman speaking people who, between the seventh and thirteenth centuries, moved off the eastern edge of the Tibetan plateau into what is now northwest China and built an empire there, the Western Xia (1038 to 1227), before the Mongols destroyed it and the Tanguts ceased to exist as a distinct people. They called themselves Mi or Minyak. Tangut is the Turkic and Mongol name for them, Dangxiang the Chinese one. Their territory as an empire ran from the Ordos loop of the Yellow River west along the Hexi Corridor, taking in today's Ningxia, much of Gansu, and slices of Qinghai, Shaanxi and Inner Mongolia, with a capital at Xingqing, the modern city of Yinchuan. That put them astride the overland Silk Road, and they taxed it.

Their language belonged to the Qiangic group of Tibeto-Burman, and recent work places it in the Gyalrongic branch, which makes its closest living relatives the Gyalrong languages of western Sichuan rather than Tibetan or Chinese. What sets the Tanguts apart is that they wrote it down in a script of their own. The founding emperor, Li Yuanhao, commissioned the Tangut script in 1036, two years before he declared himself emperor. It looks like Chinese from across a room, dense with strokes, but not one character is borrowed, and there are nearly six thousand of them. The same emperor ordered his subjects to adopt a distinctive haircut, shaved on the crown with hair left long at the temples, and banned Chinese dress at court. Identity was state policy. The Western Xia was a Buddhist state that translated the canon into Tangut and printed it, drawing on both Chinese and Tibetan tantric traditions: the office of Imperial Preceptor held by a Tibetan lama, later famous under the Mongol Yuan, first appears at the Tangut court. Confucian learning and older shamanic practice ran alongside.

The end came in 1227. Genghis Khan died during his final campaign against them, and the Mongols answered by leveling the capital and killing much of its population. Survivors were absorbed into Han, Mongol, Tibetan and Hui communities over the following centuries. The Minyak people around Kangding in Sichuan and a few clans in Anhui with Tangut epitaphs are the closest thing to descendants. The script outlived the empire by nearly three hundred years, with the last dated inscription on a pillar in Hebei from 1502, then went unread until a Russian expedition dug a sealed library out of a stupa at the dead city of Khara-Khoto in 1909. The imperial tombs outside Yinchuan, nine earthen pyramids on the flats below the Helan Mountains, are the most visible thing the Tanguts left standing.