The History of China - #126 - 5D10K 3: Lineage of the Liao

Episode Date: August 4, 2017

We track the Khitan people of Mongolia/Manchuria from their origins in the mythological mists of pre-history, all the way through their reformation under Abaoji Kaghan into a Chinese-style state, known as the Liao Dynasty. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to an Airwave Media Podcast. TD Direct Investing offers live support. So whether you're a newbie or a seasoned pro, you can make your investing steps count. And if you're like me and think a TFSA stands for Total Fund Savings Adventure, maybe reach out to TD Direct Investing. Hey everyone, just a quick note before launching in today.

Upon editing this episode, I noticed, as you may also, that the audio is a little bit funky. It's a little weird. My best guess is that maybe my mic got roughed up under the airplane on the trip from the U.S. back to China. Anyway, I'm going to be working on it to see what I can do up to and maybe including just buying a new mic. We'll see. Anyways, I hope you don't find it too terribly off-putting, but I just wanted to let you know that I am aware of it. Anyways, please enjoy. Hello and welcome to the History of China.

Episode 126, Lineage of the Liao. Hey everyone, welcome back from my month-and-change hiatus from the show, and from China altogether for that matter. Did you miss me? I sure missed you. I used my summer vacation this year to visit my family and hometown in the States for the first time in some two years, and it was a great time. But now I'm back in the oppressive, humid, miserable August heat of Shanghai summer, and so that means that we're back to our regularly scheduled program. So ready, set, let's go. Up to this point, we've been focused primarily on the stories of the people of the Yellow River Valley and south of that. This, I would say, is pretty justifiable, since the title of the show is, after all, the history of China. Nevertheless, starting today, we're going to

increasingly be looking at the peoples and cultures around the periphery of the Middle Kingdom, especially of the North and Northwest. Since, beginning now in the 10th century, and then lasting for another half-millennium pretty much without stop, these peoples, or as they're called in the Cambridge history of China, these alien regimes and border states, will come to play a central and pivotal role in the shaping of Chinese history, for better and for worse. We begin today, then, as promised, with the first of these non-Han but semi-Chinese states, the tribes of the Khitan and their formation into what is known in the Chinese historical annals as the Liao Dynasty. The Liao will pave the way for many other alien regimes to come to dominate all or part of northern China. They'll be followed by the

Xisha state of the Tangut peoples in the far west, and then supplanted by the Golden Jin dynasty of the Manchuria Jurchen peoples, which in turn will all come under the ruthless domination of the Yuan dynasty of the Mongolian hordes, led by the great Khans of the Borjigin clan in the 13th century. Each of these states, in turn, would compel the weakened and often fractious Chinese state, or states, to the south, to tacitly acknowledge their conquests and claims of dynastic equality, if not outright supremacy, over the sons of Han, and would frequently be forced to pay annual subsidies or even outright tributes to their foreign overlords. It's easy to see why

such a situation would have been particularly grating to the Chinese, not since the likes of the Xiongnu Empire of the early Han Dynasty or the Guktar Khanate of the period of disunion had most or all of China been forced to acknowledge the supremacy of foreign peoples. And all the more demeaning those uncultured brutes of the steppes. When your entire civilizational worldview is formed around the notion that yours is the fount of all culture and civilization, the literal and metaphorical center of the universe around which all lesser peoples orbit and strive to emulate, such reversal as we'll see in the beginning of the 20th, such reversal as we'll see beginning in the 10th century, is a bitter pill to swallow indeed.

And yet, once again, here we are. Up until now in the last two episodes, I've made reference to what was going on in the Khitan territories as the Chinese princes and pretender emperors of the five dynasties duked it out down south. But now is the time to take a deep dive into the history, formation, and rise of the great Liao dynasty and its founding father, Yeleu Abauji Kaghan, or Emperor Taizu of Liao. Now, you may not think you've ever heard of the Khitan tribes, or of the Liao dynasty, or of its founder, Abauji, but actually you almost certainly have. Professors Dennis Twitchett and Klaus-Peter Tietze write in volume six of the Cambridge History of China, quote, nothing better illustrates the new power of the North Asian tribal peoples than the fact that

throughout Eurasia, the name of the Khitan, the founders of the Liao dynasty, in such forms as Kataya, Kathaya, or Cathay, became a synonym for China. In Russia and throughout the Slavonic world, it still remains the standard designation for China, end quote. True enough, the Russian word for China is indeed Kitei. In Slovenian, it's Kitaiska, and in Bulgarian, it's Kitai. This designation used to, of course, be far more universal across Eurasia, as Tudjit and Tietze point out, and the writings of such famous Asiatic travelers as Marco Polo himself describe the northern China of Kublai Khan as Cathay, while naming the southern Song regime against which the great Khan battled

Manji, a minor corruption of the Chinese word manzi, meaning, ironically enough, southern barbarian. Anyways, all of this to say the Khitan will prove themselves to be a much bigger deal than they might first appear, and certainly worth an episode of consideration. This is not to imply, I must point out, that the Khitan Liao will ever come close to ruling the whole of China, far, far from it. They would at their maximum territorial extent only ever control a tiny piece of China proper, but because their two centuries of power would have them controlling the borderlands around China itself, all the way from Korea to the Altai Mountains in the west, it was through the Khitan that virtually all trade from the west and to it occurred. And thus their name was the

name that those western traders simply assumed applied to all of China, aka Cathay, or to once again quote Tujet and Tietze, quote, the Liao effectively blocked China's direct communication with Central and Western Asia. As a consequence, in the West, there was an unavoidable impression that the Khitan, now the intermediaries between East and West, were the real masters of China, end quote. Such a misunderstanding would long outlive the Liao dynasty itself. Let's look first, then, at the Khitan as they existed prior to the Reformation into the Liao. The information we have to go on is, unfortunately, but unsurprisingly, pretty scant. As is typical of the steppe peoples,

the majority of Khitan history is recorded only in Chinese sources, since they themselves spent the majority of their history as preliterate nomads. And I doubt any of us need reminding of just what the standard position on non-Chinese peoples Chinese histories tend to, no, wait, invariably take. Somewhere on the scale ranging between those poor uncultured brutes are in need of our enlightened hand, to those disgusting barbarians need to be wiped out. The name itself, Kitan, or as it's most commonly phoneticized in Chinese, Qidan, starts cropping up in Chinese sources around the 4th century, with potentially the oldest record being the Book of Wei,

though there only briefly end in passing when discussing the Goguryeo-Korean Kingdom. As to which it puts it, quote, Not surprisingly, the Chinese sources are of little help in solving this problem of ethnic affiliation. Traditional Chinese historians writing about foreign peoples were not interested in anthropology or descriptive ethnography, but rather in the relationship of the foreign peoples with the Chinese court. They were interested either because their submission increased the prestige of the Chinese court, or because they threatened China's national integrity, end quote. In any case, though details of their background are typically sparse, the general consensus seems to be that the Khitan

came from the Proto-Mongolian Xianbei peoples of the northeast, and more specifically from the Yuan branch of them. So it's little wonder that they'd start appearing in the Book of Wei, since the state of Northern Wei was founded and controlled by another Xianbei group, namely the Tuoba. In fact, as part of their rise to power, the Tuoba would defeat the Khitan and force them into tributary status during the 4th or 5th century. The late 5th century would see them forced south from their ancestral homelands in what is now Mongolia by the rise of the Rouran Khanate, and they'd resettle in the Liao River Valley by the 6th century, where they continued to grow stronger and incorporated their neighboring peoples and tribes in the never-ending and infinitely complicated process of Steplander confederation

and fracture. In terms of their own sense of self-identity and understandings of their origin, we look to the 14th century history of Liao, which tells of the origins of the Khitan as being very Chinese indeed. They claimed to have descended from one of the legendary three sovereigns of China, none other than Shen Nong, the horned god of agriculture and medicine. It seems pretty clear, though, that this Sinified backstory is just that, a later invention of the dynastic Liao state to justify their claim to the Chinese throne. Far more important to the Khitan themselves, Twitchit writes, was their culture myth of Zishou Kayan, the first ancestor. According to the tale, Zishou was once riding a white stallion through the Luo River Valley, to where it met and joined with the mighty Yellow River.

At the confluence of these two bodies, he met a woman riding a cart pulled by a great gray ox. The pair fell in love and married to produce eight sons, who would become the founders of the eight tribes that would become the Khitan nation. The place where they met, the confluence of the Luo and Yellow Rivers, would thereafter be identified with the ancestral grazing grounds of both the Khitan and the Xi peoples. Even as they plotted on through the 6th century, however, the intensely personal nature of the Khitan confederations remained quite weak. By the time of the founding of the short-lived Sui dynasty, at the end of the period of disunion in the mid-7th century, when the Book of Sui was completed, they were

denounced by their Chinese contemporaries as the, quote, most primitive of all barbarians, end quote, though that was likely more a reference to their internal instability than a slight against their level of culture, as such. As the steppe peoples would have seen it, however, that was a feature of their lifestyle, rather than a bug. In large part owing to the great need for self-sufficiency and constant nomadism in search of food and the occasional border town to plunder, in times of relative peace, the tribes of the steppe typically kept loose alliances with one another, and primarily each just went their own way, tending their flocks, hunting, and caring for their herds of horses.

It was really only in times of war that these small bands would gather together to elect a war leader, a war chief as one might call him, and even that was only on a temporary basis until the crisis had passed. There was more than a passing resemblance, in fact, between the steppe tribes of Central Asia and the tribes of the other vast, seemingly endless steppe land of the world, the North American Great Plains. Now, there certainly is no one-to-one comparison between the two regions and their hundreds of individual cultures and ways of life. For instance, the Asian steppe tribes had by this point millennia of experience with their signature companions, the horse, whereas Plains Indians wouldn't encounter them

for another 600 years when the Spanish conquistadors brought them over in the 1540s. Still, the similarities in lifestyle are striking. The political position of the Catan were determined, like virtually all other East and Central Asian peoples, by the current power of China itself. When China had become critically weakened, such as due to internecine conflict during the fall of the Han, the Catan fell into the political orbit of other steppe confederations, such as the Gukturk Khanate. When China was strong, however, as at the height of the Tang regime, the Khitan were inexorably drawn into its orbit as vassals and or tributaries, such as when Emperor Taizong defeated the Gukturks and declared himself Great Kayan of All the Turks, which naturally would have included the Khitan. Yet it would be incorrect to paint

the pre-dynastic Khitan tribes as some kind of completely unified political unit that all moved from one paymaster to the next altogether. Remember how I said that they were, at their core, a loose confederation who liked to do their own things? Well, even though the bulk of the Khitan in the 7th century may have pledged themselves to the Tang, still others had promised their loyalty to the likes of Goguryeo or the remnants of the Gukturks. The budding relationship between Tang China and the Khitan tribes was anything but smooth, though, and as Chinese power ebbed at the latter half of the 7th century into a defensive posture, especially when a second front opened up against them by the rise of the Tibetan Empire, mistreatment at the hands of Chinese governors would drive the Khitan into open revolt against their imperial hegemon, a decision that

would prove catastrophic when they were stabbed in the back by the revitalized Turks in 697, leading to a crushing defeat and a renewed flight southward, only to be rebuffed and routed out of the Chinese lands back north again. Still, it would be another 15 years or so before the Tang would be able to reassert control over the Catan under Emperor Shanzong's renewed expansionism. The mid-8th century infamously saw the devastation wrought by the An Lushan Rebellion, and the Catan, being as they were people of the northeast, General An's own backyard, bore first-hand witness to that carnage. They were among the first targets of An Lushan in 751,

while were able to deal the general's armies a stunning defeat and drive them back. An would invade again in 755, this time with an even larger army and better knowledge of the Khitan tactics, and would this time claim victory over them, just in time for An Lushan himself to be overthrown and killed, and that whole snafu to get fubar. In any case, following 755, the history of the Catan becomes extremely hard to track, owing, you know, to that whole protracted civil war thing getting in the way of accurate Chinese record-keeping of their non-Chinese neighbors. We know that they didn't seek to take advantage of China's internal weakness to expand their own territories, but we don't really know why. Tuchit and Tietze suggest that

it might have been because of the Khitan's own weakness following heavy losses inflicted by An Lushan's armies, but it's impossible to confirm. In any event, when the Uyghur Khanate rose to power over the steppes in the latter half of the 8th century, the Khitan were among the dozens or even hundreds of groups to join this latest and greatest of grassland confederations, though that new alliance by no means saw an end to the ongoing Sino-Qitan relations, though they would become far more localized than before, owing to the fact that the Chinese governors of the northeast were no longer paying anything but lip service to the imperial court in Chang'an. Nevertheless, Qitan envoys continued to make regular tributary missions to the imperial capital, with at least 30 such embassies being admitted to the court between 756 and 842, the year that

would finally see a formal renunciation of their relationship with the waning Uyghur state and a renewed pledge of vassaldom to the revivified Tang. But at that point, seriously and frustratingly, the Chinese sources seemed to have broken off and turned an effective blind eye to the further dealings between the Imperium and the Catan tribes. Instead, any further records of the Catan in the 9th century must come from the Liao Shi, the History of Liao, which was only written almost half a millennium later under the Mongol Yuan dynasty's historians and completed in 1344. As we might then expect, we need to take such a distant accounting with a grain of salt. The governmental system of the Khitan prior to their reorganization under Abauji, as we've mentioned before, stemmed largely from their tradition of eight co-equal founding

brother tribes coalescing into a unified nation. As such, it reasonably followed that each tribe would have an equal say in choosing their collective leader. This system would either be taken up or emerge in parallel to many other steppe confederations, eventually up to and including the Mongols, and it is known as the Kurultai. The Kurultai, meaning literally gathering, featured representatives of each branch of the nation arriving at a predetermined place to elect, yeah, elect their next leader. Markedly unlike Chinese or even the Mongol system though, the Khitan curl tie was not a lifetime appointment. Instead, a Khan would be elected for a period of just three years,

after which a new curl tie would be convened and the old Khitan either reaffirmed for another term in office or replaced by a new candidate from another of the attendant tribes. Should the latter occur, Twitchit writes, The old Khan would bear no malice against his successor and would be allowed to return unmolested to head his own tribe. Though certainly not democratic in any real sense. The candidates, after all, were determined only from among the tribal heads rather than from the community as a whole, as were the votes. In any case, such a system was far more reflective of the relative egalitarianism that characterizes many

nomadic tribal peoples than the steep and strict hierarchies of more quote-unquote developed societies, and served as, quote, a device to ensure that leadership was in the hands of a capable man enjoying the confidence of his tribal peers, end quote. An elected executive with a limited term of office to protect against corruption and abuse? Psh, those silly barbarians. But gee, when you put it that way, it kind of makes the Chinese-style modifications Abaoji's about to put in place, hereditary primogeniture being first and foremost on his docket, seem a lot more like a great step backwards than one into further civilizing influence. Ah well. Alright, so with that in mind, let's move right on ahead to the figure who's

really at the center of this whole episode on the Catan, the guy who pretty much single-handedly brought them from pre-dynastic steppe confederation to the quote-unquote civilizing light of Chinese-style dynastic imperium. I refer to Abauji of the Ila tribe. Now, like virtually all of the steppe peoples across time that history has bothered to record, he's got a few names that we, or at least I, must keep track of. Abauji seems to be either a close enough Chinese phonetic approximation of his Turko-Mongol name's pronunciation, Ambagyan, to keep track of. A Baojie seems to be either a close enough Chinese phonetic approximation of his Turko-Mongol name's pronunciation, Ambagyan, or perhaps that's just outright how it was

pronounced in Khitan. But then he's also got a fully Chinese name as well, Yeluyi, as usual, with the family name, or in this case tribal affiliation, Ila, coming first as the sanitized Yelu, and his given name, Yi, using the character for 100 million, because why not? Oh yeah, and then he's also got his posthumous imperial name, Taizu of Liao, since he was the dynastic founder. But in spite of this round of name game, I'm just going to stick with Abaoji, because it's both easier and also cooler to say than the others. So that's the one you're going to want to write down in your fastidiously organized notes that I'm sure you're all keeping. Why not Ila-Abaoji or Yalu-Abaoji,

in the typical style of surname given name? Well, because at this point among the steppe tribes, as with many other people, including the Koreans, surnames were purely markers of nobility, and thus only used by ruling households, which, as we'll get into momentarily, Abaoji's clan was decidedly not. So yeah, Abauji of the Ila tribe, but not Ila-Abauji. At least, not yet. Abauji was born in or around the year 872, likely somewhere in either present-day

southern Mongolia or perhaps around the Kingan mountain range of north-central Manchuria, since that seems to have been the Khitan's go-to spot as of the late 9th century. Interestingly and problematically, his clan was not one of the ruling groups among his people at the time of his birth. Instead, the Ila were subordinate in the late 9th century to another Khitan family known as the Yaolian. This wasn't really a problem at the time, but it would become so once Abaoji had seized power, since there was supposed to be some neat justification for them suddenly getting to be in charge in all, but we'll get back to that in just a second. The Yaolian clan had dominated this particular group of Khitan since at least the 750s, and had maintained consistent good

relations with the Tang regime to their south since the resolution of the An Lushan Rebellion and the resumption of normal relations between the two nations. In spite of this, by Abauji's birth at the end of the 9th century, the Yaodian regime had become rather grating to many of their subordinate Khitan tribes, including, of course, the Ila clan, which had, wouldn't you know it, just elected Abauji's father, Saladi, as their chieftain. Now, there's a great deal of portent and tracing of ancestral lineage thrown about to account for the Ila clan's rise to power. All of it, I feel pretty safe in saying, was made up long after the fact in order to retroactively justify their usurpation. I mean, completely legitimate seizure

of power. For instance, later Chinese historians would go on to record legends of Abaoji's mother dreaming that the sun itself had fallen into her womb, knocking her up, and that when the time had come to give birth, the room she was in was overcome with blinding light and potent otherworldly fragrance. The magical sky baby that emerged from her womb wasn't even a baby, so the story goes, but a fully formed three-year-old who began to walk at just three months and could predict the future. Yeah, sounds totally legit. In all human history, there are few stories like that of ancient Egypt. On the banks of the Nile,

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The History of Egypt podcast is available on all podcasting platforms, apps, and websites. Come, visit ancient Egypt, and experience a legendary culture. Somewhat easier to swallow, though only a little less straining on credulity, would be the official genealogy chart drawn up by the Liao dynasty, tracing their bloodline, according to Twitchit, quote, from Qishou Kayan to a certain Ya Li, who was the direct ancestor of the Yellow Clan. Ya Li is rather arbitrarily identified with Nie Li, a partisan of Ketuyu, who is said to have murdered the Daho leader, Li Guochi, whom the Tang had tried to establish as leader after Ketuyu's death in 734. Nie Li reorganized the fragmented Khitan tribes after the end of the Dahou Confederation,

and led the Khitan for some time before abdicating in favor of a certain Cu Wu from the Yaolian clan. End quote. Are you confused yet? Are your eyes crossing? Well, don't worry about it. All this is simply to say that, trust us everyone, we're totally legit, we ruled the Khitan way before the Yaolian, we're definitely nobility, we got this. No further questions. But as I said, all that rather dubious justification came much, much later on. At the time, the year 906 or 907, when the Kuril Tai in question actually took place, it wasn't so much a question of bloodlines and magic portents as it was the current ruler, the Yalian Kayan Handijin, having screwed up royally and lost the confidence of his tribesmen. The eight tribal chitins were convinced by the young but battle-proven man who had been the lauded and successful Yuye, or war chief, of their armies for some five years, and had made

not just a treaty of peace but also a pact of brotherhood with the great Li Kayong, and had proven himself bolder than the prior Khan had ever been in launching raids against both the Khitan's hostile neighbors to the north and the chaotic Chinese to the south, the 35-year-old Aboji. For all his military prowess and battlefield successes, it seems unlikely that Aboji's Khitan coalition, a naturally fractious arrangement, would have held together for very long at all if he hadn't likewise been a leader of uncommon vision as well. Even before his official election to the office of Kayan, his raids to the north and south were very clearly strategic rather than purely resource-driven. Abauji understood that he

needed more than anything additional manpower to be taken seriously by the other regional warlords of the era, and not just any manpower, but very specific sorts of it. To that end, from the hostile neighboring Xi and Shiuwei tribes, his warbands often focused on taking artisans and metalworkers captive, while from Chinese-held territories he seemed to have been somewhat less discriminatory, taking large swaths of the populations he occupied and resettling them into what he termed Hancheng, meaning Chinese cities. These in particular were built as walled cities in the traditional Chinese style, quote, with gates on four sides, lookout towers, streets, and markets with drum and bell towers.

Some had Confucian, Buddhist, and Taoist temples, ancestral shrines, and postal relay stations, end quote. In spite of the walls and towers, they weren't punitive or prisons in their nature, but rather intended and constructed as homes away from home for the populations of Chinese who, as often as not, were voluntary refugees from the ongoing chaos of the South. Abaoji, the latest in a long line of not just Khitan, but all steppe peoples along China's periphery, understood well that his ultimate power would be not just in unifying the Khitan people, but with providing them with a foundation of state that could endure beyond the ephemeral alliances of chieftains inherent to steppe confederations. And in that, the Chinese and

their many cultural and state institutions would prove essential. But even this fundamental shift in the old way of life wouldn't be Abauji's greatest change to his people. As put by Twitchit, quote, Abauji's strength did not come only from captives, important as was their role. Many Kidhan warriors from all the tribes joined his personal following, and he gradually built up a personal power base that undermined the traditional tribal structure and the balance of power among the tribes. Eventually, he was able to eliminate not only the old leadership, but the system of leadership itself, end quote. Or to put it into other words, from of the people, by the people, for the people,

to les tates, c'est moi. There are two big dates when it comes to Abadji's establishment of his rule over the Khitan, and their formation into what would eventually be known as the Liao State, and those are the years 907 and 916, respectively. 907 is the year that traditional histories like the Yuan-era Book of Liao give as the birth date of the Liao, or more specifically, when Abauji was first elected Kayan of the Khitan. By itself, this is already a wobbly date to give at best, since other sources give a variety of other dates, ranging from 904 all the way to 922 for that critical election. But when we step back and see what else was going on in that particular year,

ah yes, there it is, the formal dissolution of the Tang dynasty. Its choice becomes pretty clear. Yes, that's right, we were always the natural successors to the Tang, uh-huh. It's probably rather less nefarious than that, though. In all likelihood, later historians sat down to write up the Book of Liao, saw all the different conflicting dates written down, and just took the most convenient one and ran with it. Regardless, the other date, 916, marks the fourth election of Abaoji as Kayan. But far more importantly, the election in which he dispensed with all that troublesome tradition of three-year terms and, really, elections altogether. To be supplanted with, quote, a formal ceremony of

accession to the throne, adoption of a reign title, and some of the institutional trappings of a Chinese-style emperor, thus declaring his equality of status with the Chinese rulers of the Liang, end quote. But it's certainly not as though Abaoji and his Khitan just sat around on their collective laurels between those two years. To the contrary, quite a bit happened in the meantime. Campaigns of pacification against local tribal peoples, for instance, including the Shiwei in 908, the Shi in 910, and the Chibuku in distant northwestern Mongolia in 912. In 915, there was a campaign against a people called the Wuku, which later historians had tentatively identified as being the Angirad people. And all the while, it was necessary through arms or alliance to attempt to check the creeping northward march

of later Liang territorial domination. Nor was later Liang the only Chinese or Chinese-style state with hegemonic ambitions against Khitan territories. In 911, you'll recall, the chieftain of the Xiatou Turks, Li Shouguang, proclaimed himself the Emperor of Yan and began invading northward into Khitan lands. The following year, the son of Li Kayong, an eventual emperor of later Tang, Li Cunshu, invaded the province directly bordering Catan lands, called Lulong, and annexed it. Nevertheless, and in spite of some rather bad blood between the two states, Li Cunshu and the Baoji came to a shaky truce, owing in large part to the fact that Li had bigger fish to fry to the south

and needed his northern border with the Catan at peace, not opened into an unaffordable second warfront. This was all fine with Abadji at this point, because he too was facing a crisis at home, though his was internal rather than a foreign threat. Quote, after his election as leader in 907, his plans to consolidate his absolute authority did not go unchallenged. The biggest threat came from his younger brothers and other members of the Yalu clan, who had become the new Khitan aristocracy following the eclipse of the Yaolian, end quote. The customs of old stipulated every three years

there should be a new curl tie to either reaffirm or choose a new kayan. And damn it, the other Yalu clansmen wanted their turn at the steering wheel. But when 910 rolled around necessitating a new election, Abauji just said, nah, rolled around necessitating a new election, Abauji just said, nah, and didn't have a new election. As you might imagine, the Klansmen, who had waited patiently in line for the pony ride for three years now, thank you very much, were rather less

than amused. And so they rebelled, led by the people who felt most cheated by Abauji's apparent goal of hereditary succession, his four younger brothers, who were suddenly faced with the prospect of never ever getting to ride the pony, like ever. This initial fraternal rebellion was bad enough, an assassination plot here, a military clash there, but it wasn't until 913, when the second would-be election date came and went, with no election, that the Khitan revolt really picked up steam. This time, it was led by Abauji's, quote, brother, his uncle, and his cousin, who was chieftain of the Yila, and was suppressed with much bloodshed, end quote. Bloody though it was, this rebellion's failure helped to cement Abauji's grip on power, though not absolute power, not yet at any rate.

From Twitchit, quote, he was not yet a complete despot. He remained sufficiently enmeshed in the Khitan tribal systems that he could not simply eliminate all his rivals. His brothers' lives were spared, although his uncle and cousin and more than 300 of their supporters were executed, end quote. Following this rebellion, Abauji attempted to compensate his brothers by establishing them and their families into the so-called Sanfu Fang, or Three Patriarchal Households, which going forward would essentially be the creme de la creme of Khitan aristocracy and one of the preeminent lineage groups. One might be forgiven for thinking that such a compensatory package had assuaged his brother's ill feelings, given that when the next schedule election rolled around in 916, a Baojie was able to roll out the whole Chinese-style imperial ceremony and that reign-era

system and thus declared the total independence of the Khitan from Chinese hegemony. As you'll recall, that marking off one's own calendar system was the absolute red line of treason against the empire, past which there was no return. Probably most significant of all in the 916 ceremony was his proclamation that his eldest son, Khitan named Tuyu, Chinese name Ye Lu Bei, as his heir in contravention of all traditional Khitan governance. Bei was probably the best, and perhaps only, choice for Abaoji to become the first heir of the Khitan people, since he'd been raised from birth in an at least semi-Chinese way alongside their customs, and thus was probably the least likely of any potential heir to revert to pre-dynastic Khitan customs. Finally, as a symbol of the founding of his new

Sinitic regime, Abaoji concluded what would be his last curl's high with the establishment of his people's very first Confucian temple, which Twitchit writes, quote, must have seemed very out of place among these bloodthirsty and violent warriors, even though a small minority of Khitan nobles were beginning to become versed in Chinese letters, end quote. But if Abaoji, now emperor in all but name, thought that such a ceremonial overthrow of the old ways had quieted his brothers, he would be proven sorely mistaken. The following year, 917 saw his eldest brother, Lako, once again rise in rebellion before taking his forces and fleeing to the city of Yuzhou, where he was received by Li Cunxu and appointed as a prefect. 918 would see yet another brother, Tiella, rise against him again, before being

crushed shortly after. As it would turn out, though, Laco's decision to defect wasn't very smart in the long run, as less than six years later, when Li Cunxu went on to formally found the later Tang dynasty, he would take his Khitan prefect into custody and then have him executed to demonstrate his goodwill and friendship toward Abaoji and the Liao state. Though in retrospect, these two short-lived rebellions proved to be the death rattle of true resistance to Abaoji's Chinese style of rule. For generations going forward, the Liao would be periodically racked by leadership and succession crises, all stemming from this flouting of tradition and the denial of his

brother's birthright. The year 918 would see yet another critical step taken by Abaoji to consolidate and legitimate his rule, this time in the form of a vast construction project. The building of a massive, permanent, and yes, of course, Chinese-style capital city. This city, built at the heart of the ancient Khitan territories in modern Mongolia, a place known as Linhuang by the Chinese, Borok Khatan in Mongolian, and Shiramuren by the Khatan himself, would initially be called Huangdu, meaning imperial capital, but would later be renamed as Shangjing, meaning supreme capital, and rather ironically, relegating modern Beijing, meaning north capital, to the name of Nanjing, south capital. The city's construction must have been truly a sight to behold, for the histories

tell of major construction being begun and completed in the span of just 100 days, though obviously major projects continued well after that span. To complete this monumental task, Abauji ordered the conscription of mass amounts of corvée laborers from among his territory's farming populations, though in a singular moment betraying his total lack of understanding of the annual agrarian cycle, such labor was ordered to be carried out during the busiest months of the farming year, undoubtedly leading to widespread hardship. In spite of this vast construction project and permanent city, we shouldn't be fooled into thinking that Chinese culture, style, and systems were adopted wholesale by the Khitan. In fact, even early on in his rule,

Abauji had come to understand the necessity of utilizing what was known as a dual administration system. Simply put, his Khitan, Uyghur, and other steppe nomad populace could and would never assent to being governed by laws and customs designed of, by, and for a sedentary farming population. Nor would his Chinese and southern subjects ever agree to nomadic horse law. And no matter how he tried, Abaoji understood that the oil and water of his two populations were never going to truly mix. Nor really did he seem to want them to. For instance, though Shangjing was a grand southern-style capital city,

its center, where the palace should have been, was instead a large empty space. This is where the emperor and his court would encamp with their yurts, pavilions, and felt tents when he was in residence. And at other times, the whole of the government, such as it was, would decamp from the capital entirely to go ranging and hunting, or elsewise, on military campaign. And these campaigns were as far-reaching as they were seemingly never-ending. Between 719 and 721, Emperor Abaoji launched a series of southern campaigns into China proper, aimed at seizing what he could from the warring southern states. On each of these occasions, however, his momentum was halted and he

was ultimately forced back into his own lands by the resistance of Li Cunxu and his adopted son Li Suyuan, the first two emperors of what would quickly become later Tang. Instead, Abaoji looked northward and westward, finally subduing the Wukou people in 919, and then in 924, leading a great expedition into the steppelands, capturing as far west as the ancient ruins of the old Uyghur capital, Ordu Balik, on the Orkhon River, while other Khitan elements brought the Uyghurs to Yuhun and Tangut as far south as the Gansu Corridor under Abauji's command, thus seizing control of the critical gap between the Tibetan Plateau and the nigh-impassable Gobi Desert. Abauji's final great conquest would be none other than the North Korean-slash-Manchurian kingdom of Balhae, known as Bohai in Chinese

sources, in the year 926. Markedly unlike his conquests thus far, Baolhe was not some loose conglomeration of steppe tribes, but instead a centralized, synodic state with long-standing traditions with Tang China, Goryeo Korea, and Japan. Puchit writes, quote, it was a rich country, with five capitals, 15 superior prefectures, 62 prefectures, many cities, and in the south at least, a largely sedentary agrarian population, end quote. Sounds pretty formidable, right? Well, not so much. In spite of all that, Abauji's Khitan was able to claim victory over the entire kingdom in just two months, having captured and secured the Baohei king, his family, and his court,

and placed them under house arrest at Shangjing. Yet, rather than annexing the territory outright, he instead renamed the kingdom Dongtan and relegated it to the status of Liao vassal state, with his eldest son, Crown Prince Bei, as its king. Abaoji's end came abruptly and unexpectedly. The same year as his great conquest of Baohei, he learned from his envoys to China that later Tang had experienced a court-led coup within its capital, Luoyang. As we discussed at length last episode, later Tang's first emperor, Li Cunshu, had been killed by the mutinous armies of Henan and Hebei and replaced him with his adopted son, Li Suiyuan.

This new Tang emperor sent an envoy announcing his accession to Abaoji, who was at the time still in Baohei. The Tang envoy later wrote that the Liao emperor received him, but shortly thereafter announced his plan to occupy the southern lands of both Yuzhou and Hebei, to which the Tang emissary objected. At this, Abaoji toned down his territorial ambitions to just the old province of Lulong, which still encompassed Yuzhou City. Again, the emissary objected, at which point, the account goes, Abauji suddenly fell gravely ill and died at just 54 years old. Kuchit writes, quote, he had been leader of the Khitan for only two decades, but he had transformed them from a local,

if powerful, tribal confederation into a well-organized regime controlling the nomadic peoples of Mongolia and Manchuria, as well as the former territories of Balhae. His state incorporated many Chinese from the border regions, established cities for their residents, and encouraged a diversity of industries and settled farming, end quote. In addition to all of that, Abauji had taken it upon himself and succeeded in the process of forming a written language of the Khitan's very own. He knew and understood the power of writing, and saw that his own people's illiteracy was a critical weakness in the long haul. How could they hope to hold on to their own customs, traditions, and cultural selfness if they were confined to either oral tradition or writing in another civilization's language. Thus, in the year 920, he commissioned and oversaw the creation of the Catan Large Script, which adapted Chinese writing conventions and forms to the Catan's own very different and highly inflective language.

This large script was in wide use by the end of Abauji's reign, but in 925, following the arrival of a Uyghur embassy, the emperor's younger and formerly insurgent brother, Tiela, being recognized by the emperor as the cleverest among his kin, was entrusted in adapting the Uyghur's own written language, itself alphabetic in nature as opposed to the Chinese ideographic characters, into what would be known as the Khitan small script. Together, these two systems of writing would help ensure that, whatever was to come, the authority and cultural identity of the Catan Liao dynasty would endure. With the death of Abaoji, his son Bei will take the throne as Emperor Taizong of Liao.

But our undivided focus on the Catan will end here today. Next time, we'll be reorienting ourselves largely back into China proper to see what's going on south of the Ordos Loop as later Tang's own second emperor, Li Siyuan, aka Emperor Mingzong, takes the uneasy reins of his nation and seeks to carve out a path toward ascendancy and reunification. But his clashes both with the Chinese kings of the south, the Catan emperor to the north, and within his own government will throw all of that into question. Thanks for listening. Hey everyone, before you go today, I just want to let you know that the Agora Network's podcast of the month for August is The Cannonball by Daniel Doty and Claude Myron Guzer.

This is a show where these guys have gotten a hold of, somehow or another, the literary critic and Yale Humanity professor Harold Bloom's entire list of Western canon, and then decided to read it all and discuss it. This is a mind-bogglingly large task, everyone. Bloom's list is everything from Gilgamesh to the Bible, the Bhagavad Gita, Homer, Sophocles, Plato, Aesop, Beowulf, Dante, all the way up through modern authors like Robert Frost, Salman Rushdie, Chinua Achebe, and Cormac McCarthy. And those are just to name a few of the ones that I've ever actually read.

Anyways, they're already four episodes in and they're doing great. You'll definitely love them. So give them a listen. Once again, that's the Cannonball, cannon with one M, part of the Agora Podcast Network. 400 years ago, a trio of tiny kingdoms were perched on some damp islands off the coast of Europe. Within three short centuries, these islands would become the center of an empire which ruled a quarter of the globe and on which the sun never set. I'm Samuel Hume, a historian of the British Empire, and my podcast Pax Britannica follows the

people and events that built that empire into a global superpower. Learn the history of the British Empire by listening to Pax Britannica everywhere you find your podcasts, or go to pod.link slash pax.