The history and people of the Western Xia, a state created by fierce Tanguts one thousand years ago.
Western Xia (previously known as Hsi Hsia) was a state created by steppe nomads on the north-west of China during the period of the Sung Dynasty (960-1279). A Tangut people, the Xia ousted both Tibetans and Uighurs from territories they had controlled and took over important trading centres at Wu-weh and Chang-yeh. They established their capital at Yin-ch’uan (Ning-hsia) and, while Tanguts remained the dominant ruling elite, they intermarried with the Hsienpei peoples who were descendants of the Tabgatch. The Tagbatch had themselves created important states in Chinese history such as the Northern Wei. The rise and fall of nomadic peoples was systemic and relied on such factors as population, military victory, presence of charismatic and powerful leaders and environmental factors such as disease among the livestock and climate change.
The Xia had managed to control a variety of different types of terrain and so there were able to supplement their traditional animal-rearing economy with additional forms of agriculture, most of which were learned from the neighbouring Chinese farmers. The Xia also controlled a variety of trade routes and this gave them the opportunity to administer trade to and from the Sung Empire, which therefore gave them access to considerable opportunities to enrich themselves. Border markets were organised at which it was possible to but lacquer, silks, incense, camels, beeswax, carpets, medicines, ceramics and all the very finest offerings of the civilized world.
However, raiding Chinese territory remained of more interest to those inveterate hunters and opportunists. In 1044, Xia leaders forced the Sung throne to sign a treaty in which, in return for stopping raids on Sung territory, the Chinese would pay the Xia an annual tribute of 30,000 pounds of tea, 72,000 ounces of silver and 135,000 rolls of silk. This was a princely ransom indeed, although the Chinese were seemingly quite prepared to pay it rather than suffer from continued depredations of warfare – horses in China were rare throughout history and the nomads always had a powerful advantage in military actions because of their ownership of large numbers of them. Chinese campaigns against the Xia were uniformly unsuccessful and it was only when the Mongols organised themselves under the fiercesome Genghis (Chinggiz) that their star began to wane before being completely extinguished.
Xia institutions followed the examples of both China and Tibet and the language spoken by the political elites was Lolo (Yi), which is a tongue still spoken in the southern province of Yunnan, some millennium later.
