Revisiting the Early History of the Khitan People

Abstract: Recent efforts on textual criticism of The History of Liao Dynasty (《辽史》) have elevated our understanding and interpretation of its reliability to a new level in general. Building on these new developments, this paper attempts to reconstruct and reintegrate the later historical memories of the Liao royal clan itself and the outsiders’ records kept in official histories of China’s central dynasties since the Northern Wei regime about the core group of the Khitan people located in the West Liao region, to the south of the early pastoral land of the tribes led originally by the Liao royal clan, in order to elucidate some facts hitherto unclarified in the early history of the Khitan people.