China

The Tangut

In the northwest the Tangut (Pinyin: Dangxiang), a Tibetan-speaking branch of the Qiang, inhabited the region between the far end of the Great Wall in present-day Gansu and the Huang He bend in Inner Mongolia. Their semi-oasis economy combined irrigated agriculture with pastoralism, and, by controlling the terminus of the famous Silk Road, they became middlemen in trade between Central Asia and China. They adopted Buddhism as a state religion, in government and education followed the Tang model, and devised a written script for their own language. This richly mixed culture blossomed, as evidenced by the storing at the Dunhuang caves of an unparalleled collection of more than 30,000 religious paintings, manuscripts, and books in Chinese, Tibetan, Uighur, and other languages. In 1038 the Tangut proclaimed their own kingdom of Xi (Western) Xia, which survived for nearly two centuries with remarkable stability despite a series of on-and-off border clashes with the neighbouring states in northern China. The kingdom’s end came at the hands of the Mongols, the first nomads to conquer all of China.