International Gifting and the Kitan World, 907–1125

[During the Tang dynasty (618–907)], the territory of the Kitan, which was located more than five thousand li [roughly 1,700 miles or 2,750 km] directly northeast of the [Tang] capital, reached Koryǒ 高麗 in the east, the Xi 奚 people in the west, Ying prefecture 營州 [modern Chaoyang, Liaoning] in the south, and the Mohe 靺鞨 [Mojie 靺羯] and Shiwei 室韋 peoples in the north.

Liaoshi (The dynastic history of the Liao)¹

This passage, dating to the 1340s, identifies the immediate neighbors of the Kitans during the Tang dynasty (618–907) when they still occupied their traditional homeland northeast of modern-day Chifeng, Inner Mongolia: the Chinese, the Koreans, the Mojie, and the Xi and Shiwei tribes, to whom they were closely related.² Following the collapse of the Tang, the Kitans launched a series of successful conquests, taking the Bohai (also spelled Parhae) in 926, gaining modern Beijing and the surrounding prefectures in 938, and defeating the newly founded Song in 979 and again in 1004. The treaty of Chanyuan, signed in 1005, opened a new era in which the annual payments of silk and silver from the Song brought the Kitans great wealth. The treaty also solidified the position of the Liao as the leading military power of East Asia around the year 1000.

Outside East Asia, other states were similarly engaged in conquest. The Islamic world had not been united since 945, when the Buyids had conquered Baghdad and reduced the Abbasid caliph to a figurehead. Even so, the territory under Muslim rule continued to expand with the rise of new dynasties, such as the Ghaznavids (977–1186), who gained control of eastern Afghanistan and northern India. Similarly, the Qarakhanid conquest of Khotan in 1006 marked the expansion of Islam into the modern region of Xinjiang for the first time. As a result, the tenth and eleventh centuries witnessed a boom in Arabic geographical writing about previously unknown places. As Ibn Fadlān (fl. 921–922) journeyed to the Volga and al-Bakrī (1014–1094) described sub-Saharan Africa, al-Bīrūnī (973–1048) and Marwazī (fl. 1050–1120) both wrote about the peoples of Central and East Asia, including the Kitans and their neighbors.

Also at this time, but farther to the west, the Vikings sailed from northern Europe to Iceland and Greenland, touching down in the Americas around the year 1000. The Vinland Sagas, oral epics in old Norse recorded between 1200 and 1400, describe a land that sounds like the east coast of Canada or northern Maine. Excavations at L’Anse aux Meadows produced exact duplicates of objects found in northern Europe, providing irrefutable evidence of the Viking presence.³ The various goods shipped from the Americas included walrus tusk, an item prized by the Kitans.

The simultaneous expansion of the Kitans, the Muslims, and the Vikings caused an unprecedented explosion in knowledge about the world’s various peoples circa 1000. This essay aims to explore the edges of this world and the world view of the Kitans at this time. Their world extended far beyond the lands with which they exchanged envoys to include localities under both Muslim and Scandinavian rule, from which they imported different, valued commodities.

Surviving Kitan-language documents shed little light on Kitan relations with their neighbors.⁴ Chinese-language sources provide more guidance. The Liaoshi, on which all historians continue to depend in spite of its rushed compilation and errors,⁵ remains the fundamental starting point because it names the different peoples who presented gifts to the court. In addition, envoy reports and other official Chinese-language sources shed light on the experiences of envoys traveling to and from the Kitan lands. Some of the received items were locally made, but others were not.

The Kitans also had much in common with the diverse and far-flung empire of the Inca (1438–1532), who ruled from Peru some three hundred years after the Liao dynasty ended. The Inca did not have a single currency but required almost all of their subjects to perform labor service. In addition, the Inca exacted different products from...