{"id":94657,"date":"2026-09-13T01:00:15","date_gmt":"2026-09-13T05:00:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=94657"},"modified":"2026-09-12T09:48:49","modified_gmt":"2026-09-12T13:48:49","slug":"qotd-naming-cathay","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/qotd-naming-cathay\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Naming &#8220;Cathay&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p><a href=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" style=\"float:left; padding: 0px 25px 10px 0px\" src=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"400\" height=\"400\" class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-48672\" srcset=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400.png 400w, https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400-150x150.png 150w, https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400-50x50.png 50w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 400px) 100vw, 400px\" \/><\/a>This is all a very long way of getting around to why I&#8217;m so interested in the Khitans.<\/p>\n<p>You may think you&#8217;ve never heard of the Khitans (Chinese: \u5951\u4e39 or &#8220;<em>qidan<\/em>&#8220;), but you probably have, albeit indirectly. &#8220;Khitan&#8221; is their ethnonym within their own proto-Mongolic branch of the Altaic languages. In the Turkic languages a little further West, the same people are called &#8220;<em>Khitai<\/em>&#8220;. A splinter group of the Khitans who settled in Dzhungaria and Transoxiana called themselves the &#8220;<em>Kara-Khitai<\/em>&#8221; (Black Khitans), a name that should be <a href=\"https:\/\/youtu.be\/q_K658E0-DQ?feature=shared&#038;t=260\" target=\"_blank\">instantly recognizable to anybody who played <em>Age of Empires II<\/em><\/a>. If you prefer Paradox map-painting games to more traditional RTS, they do also show up in the <em>Crusader Kings<\/em> series, resulting in <a href=\"https:\/\/www.reddit.com\/r\/CrusaderKings\/comments\/fna8um\/beware_the_karakhitai_they_are_without_honor\/?rdt=46759\" target=\"_blank\">memes like this one<\/a>. Oh dear, where was I? Right, the Khitans. The word &#8220;<em>Khitai<\/em>&#8220;, via a continent-wide game of Chinese whispers (get it?), became &#8220;Cathay&#8221;, which the confused Europeans took as the name of the Middle Kingdom itself, finally resulting in the birth of a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.cathaypacific.com\/cx\/en_US.html\" target=\"_blank\">wonderful airline<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Right, the Khitans. There they were, grazing their flocks on the Greater Khingan Mountains, just bein&#8217; a horde, doing horde stuff. Suddenly, opportunity fell into their laps: the Tang empire was unravelling. The bustling cities and ports of Northeastern China were sitting right there, defenseless, full of gold, and skilled craftsmen, and all the soft and delicate sensuality of settled life. It was about to happen again, right? The nomadic horsemen riding in from the wild steppe, pillaging the effete townspeople and becoming their masters, only to succumb to pleasure and become effete in turn, the endless cycle of history? How could it be avoided? Here is how Mote (yes, we&#8217;ve finally gotten to the book) describes their Catch-22:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<p><em>&#8230; the Khitans probably saw quite clearly that when a steppe people by degrees gave up its nomadic mobility in exchange for the more comfortable sedentary life, it ran great risks of having to compete with the Chinese on their ground. Losing in that way their comparative advantage inevitably cost the nomads their cultural integrity; they slowly became just &#8220;little Chinese&#8221; &#8230; no steppe people on China&#8217;s borders could become sinified and survive, except by migrating into China and being absorbed \u2014 another form of extinction &#8230; the warning to nomadic peoples was clear: they must master the art of drawing resources from China without sacrificing their steppe integrity &#8230; The wealth that could be wrung from it could give mastery over all Inner Asia.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The Khitan response to this pickle was unlike any I&#8217;ve ever heard. Roughly half of the Khitan aristocracy, including the royal clan, immediately adopted Chinese customs,<sup>1<\/sup> moved to the city, and began building a bureaucracy. The other half, including the clan that Khitan kings traditionally picked their wives from, stayed in the steppe and had nothing to do with any of this. They then established two governments, two sets of laws,<sup>2<\/sup> two taxation regimes, two writing systems, two of everything. One was civilized, the other was barbarian. Two completely incompatible social structures living side-by-side, passing through each other, but never interacting. Like dark matter, or like <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Mirror_life\" target=\"_blank\">life-forms with mirror chirality<\/a>. As a Khitan subject, you belonged to just one of these systems (if you were low class, you were sometimes allowed to pick!), and only that system had any authority over you.<\/p>\n<p>The only point of official contact between the two worlds was at the top, where the Khitan king spent half the year reigning as a Chinese-style emperor, and half of it touring around his nomadic subjects as Great Khan in a mobile court. The Khitans recognized that although the king was theoretically 50-50, extended exposure to civilization would tend to Sinify him over time, and his descendants even more so. This is why they mandated that every empress was a pure-strain barbarian from a wild clan. They expected these formidable women to wield influence over their sons and to ensure that as the years rolled past and the royal clan grew more and more Chinese, they would be replenished each generation with the barbarian perspective of their mothers. This totally worked, but also resulted in no end of conflict between the empresses and their palace retainers, who exemplified different worlds.<sup>3<\/sup><\/p>\n<p>Sometimes you read about a social or legal system, and you are just <em>certain<\/em> that it could not be stable. I had this reaction reading about the Spartan diarchy as a kid, and I had it again reading about the Khitans last year. But their system not only endured, it flourished, and eventually turned into the <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Liao_dynasty\" target=\"_blank\">Liao Dynasty<\/a> which ruled China for centuries. And it functioned basically as it said it would on the tin \u2014 the civilized parts of their empire keeping things efficient and organized, supporting craftsmen and tradespeople; while the Strategic Nomad Reserve was always there ready to be called on in times of war, and prevented the administration from getting too soft and decadent.<\/p>\n<p>John Psmith, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.thepsmiths.com\/p\/review-imperial-china-by-fw-mote\" target=\"_blank\">&#8220;REVIEW: <em>Imperial China<\/em>, by F.W. Mote&#8221;, <em>Mr. and Mrs. Psmith&#8217;s Bookshelf<\/em>, 2025-02-24.<\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<ol>\n<li><em>The decisive thing they actually did was to adopt <strong>surnames<\/strong>, which as James C. Scott will tell you is about the most forceful possible way to reject your barbarian heritage.<\/em><\/li>\n<li><em>The differences in laws could be extreme. For instance, under Chinese law, as in most &#8220;civilized&#8221; places, treason was punished with ultimate severity and brutality. But in many &#8220;barbarian&#8221; cultures, treason isn&#8217;t actually a huge deal (almost akin to a playground fight) and defeated rebels are customarily forgiven. The Khitans, again, simply did both. Traitors were executed if they lived under city law, and received amnesty if they were under tribal law.<\/em><\/li>\n<li><em>One such an empress, upon the death of her husband, was asked by a Chinese courtier if she would follow ancient custom and be buried alongside him. She responded: &#8220;I of course do not refuse to join the Emperor underground, but my children are young and the country has no leader, so I am not free to do that&#8221;. Then she ordered that her right hand be severed at the wrist to represent her within her husband&#8217;s tomb.<\/em><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p><\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This is all a very long way of getting around to why I&#8217;m so interested in the Khitans. You may think you&#8217;ve never heard of the Khitans (Chinese: \u5951\u4e39 or &#8220;qidan&#8220;), but you probably have, albeit indirectly. &#8220;Khitan&#8221; is their ethnonym within their own proto-Mongolic branch of the Altaic languages. In the Turkic languages a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[32,22,84,7,41],"tags":[495,262,396,1533,43],"class_list":["post-94657","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-china","category-government","category-history","category-quotations","tag-civilization","tag-culture","tag-monarchy","tag-psmithreviews","tag-women"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-oCJ","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94657","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=94657"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94657\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":104765,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94657\/revisions\/104765"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=94657"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=94657"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=94657"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}