Liao Biblography
Dec. 9th, 2025 10:08 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
forestofgloryFor the Fandom Trumps Hate charity auction I offered to write a bibliography on a topic of the winner’s choosing. My friend Rae won the auction and asked me to write something about the material culture of the Khitan Liao or Jurchen Jin. I was not very familiar with either of these dynasties, but after some discussion and preliminary research to get a sense of what’s out there we chose to focus on Liao textiles.
The Liao Dynasty existed between 916 and 1125, roughly contemporaneous with the Song Dynasty. One of the reasons I wanted to research the Liao was that they are closer in time to bits of history I’m familiar with. Thanks to my love of The Long Ballad I got really into Tang history (618-907 CE), and more recently I’ve been working on translating stories from the Taiping Guangji (太平廣記), a group of tales compiled in the late 10th century– so I’ve been learning about that period as well.
Before I started the more in-depth research, I read a bit about Liao historiography, and I’ve included a few of those papers to help put the Liao in context, with a few other papers that aren’t on topic just for fun.
The Liao dynasty was founded by Khitan people, a steppe nomad group. For that reason they are often talked about as “non-Chinese,” but they certainly saw themselves as Chinese, and as successors to the Tang Dynasty. However, we have a lot less written material about them than we do the Song: circulation of Liao texts was forbidden in the Song, and when the Jin conquered the Liao they deliberately destroyed many of their historical documents and monuments. Because of the Liao’s status as marginally Chinese, the historical documents that did survive were considered less important. One of the main sources of Liao history has been an official history compiled several hundred years after the fall of the dynasty by the Yuan court, but that is known to be rushed and sometimes inaccurate.
I did a previous research project on the first Turkic Khaganate, an earlier and less lasting group of steppe nomads, and we have a lot more written and archaeological data about the Liao than we do about them.
A lot of the information we have about the Liao is from archaeology, including the tombs of high-ranking people, and epitaphs, which are some of the only written material about the Liao by the Liao that survive. A lot of the papers in this bibliography use existing textiles from Liao graves as important sources; as a result, they are skewed toward textiles from the nobility.
Blessing, P., Williams, E. D., & Shea, E. L. (2023). Medieval Textiles across Eurasia, c. 300–1400 (1st ed.). Cambridge University Press. https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/9781009393379/type/element
This is a novella-length overview of the topic, about 80 pages with a lot of pictures. I liked how it tied together such a big area and a long time period. Zooming out helps put the Liao textiles in a larger context, even though there’s not much specifically about the Liao.
Chen, Y. J. (2018). Frontier, Fortification, And Forestation: Defensive Woodland On The Song–Liao Border In The Long Eleventh Century. Journal of Chinese History, 2(2), 313–334. https://doi.org/10.1017/jch.2018.7
Not really a paper about Liao material culture, but I thought this was really interesting and wanted to include it anyway. It’s about the Song using planned forests as part of their defenses against the Liao, which I thought was a really neat tactic and also something Rae would enjoy reading about.
Crossley, P. K. (2024). What keeps the Kitans enigmatic: Roots of the ethnic narrative in Liao historiography. Modern Asian Studies, 58(4), 1095–1125. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0026749X24000179
An interesting and useful overview of Liao historiography and ethnicity. This paper argues that the distinction between Han and Liao wasn’t important to most Liao elite, who were more interested in class distinctions than ethnicity.
Ge, R., Cong, L., Fu, Y., Wang, B., Shen, G., Xu, B., Hu, M., Yu, H., Zhou, J., & Yang, L. (2023). Multi-faceted analysis reveals the characteristics of silk fabrics on a Liao Dynasty DieXie belt. Heritage Science, 11(1), 217. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40494-023-01064-6
The authors of this paper used various scientific techniques to analyze small pieces of silk found on a Diexie belt (a type of belt with many hanging pouches) in a Liao tomb. They were able to identify different weave structures, the original colors of the textile, and even what species of silkworm produced the silk!
Hansen, V. (2011). The Kitan People, the Liao Dynasty (916-1125) and their World. Orientations. https://buddhism.lib.ntu.edu.tw/DLMBS/en/search/search_detail.jsp?seq=564977
An overview of Liao material culture with special attention to trade and contact with other groups. Contains the delightful fact that the Liao would give envoys for the Song ten marmots each. The language feels othering in a few places.
Johnson, L. C. 2011. Women of the Conquest Dynasties.
A book about the lives of Liao and Jin women. This didn’t have a huge amount about textiles but it did have a lot about interesting and badass women. There are some good descriptions of various outfits, but not a lot on textile production. The sections on daily life have the most details about material culture (you would think that textile production would be an important part of daily life, but it’s not really mentioned.)
Johnson, L. C. (1983). The Wedding Ceremony for an Imperial Liao Princess. Wall Paintings from a Liao Dynasty Tomb in Jilin. Artibus Asiae, 44(2/3), 107. https://doi.org/10.2307/3249594
This doesn’t go into a ton of detail about textiles but I thought it was super interesting! This paper argues that two specific wall paintings from a tomb depict the wedding of a Liao princess. Lots of interesting details about Liao weddings! Also some interesting discussion of Liao dress and Central Plains dress and how each featured the Liao court.
King, A. (2013). Early Islamic Sources on the Kitan Liao: The Role of Trade. Journal of Song-Yuan Studies, 43(1), 253–271. https://doi.org/10.1353/sys.2013.0024
As it says on the tin, this paper focuses on Islamic sources that reference the Kitan Liao and the goods they traded. While the paper doesn’t focus solely on textiles, it does have interesting details about tribute textiles presented by the Liao to various Islamic states.
Krahl, R. (1997). Mediaeval silks woven in gold: Khitan, Jürchen, Tangut, Chinese or Mongol ? Orientations, 28(4), 45–51.
This article describes a group of silk textiles with golden designs woven on a monochrome background. Discusses the designs in detail, and talks about technical aspects of the fabric production, and attempts to figure out when and where these fabrics were produced. Features many excellent color photos.
Shea, E. L. (2020). Mongol Court Dress, Identity Formation, and Global Exchange (1st ed.). Routledge. https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/9780429340659
This book is mainly about the Mongols, but it has a section about pre-Mongol court dress as well, which mostly focuses on the Liao and Jin.
Shea, E. L. (2021). Intentional Identities: Liao Women’s Dress and Cultural and Political Power. Acta Via Serica, 6(2), 37–60. https://doi.org/10.22679/AVS.2021.6.2.003
A paper about elite Liao women’s dress. The paper argues that Liao elite women did not wear Song-style clothing and that this was an expression of their unique cultural identity. I’m not totally convinced, but there are also lots of descriptions of Liao women’s clothing as found in tombs or depicted in tomb art.
Steinhardt, N. S. (1998.). Liao Archaeology: Tombs and Ideology along the Northern Frontier of China.
This paper primarily consists of a description of four Liao-era tombs and their contents. The author, who does history of architecture, has a lot to say about how these tombs are built, but also briefly describes the textiles found in these tombs.
Watt, J. C., & Wardwell, A. E. (1997). When silk was gold: Central Asian and Chinese textiles. Metropolitan Museum of Art.
This is a big coffee-table-size museum exhibit catalog and I have only skimmed it. The exhibit included textiles dating from the late Tang to the Yuan. The majority of the textiles are post-Liao but there are several Liao textiles with good color pictures and helpful descriptive text. There are also several Jin textiles.
Zhao, F & Yu, T. (2011). Liao Silk Textiles: The Elegant Lifestyle of the Kitan Royals. Liao Silk Textiles: The Elegant Lifestyle of the Kitan Royals, 42(1), 43–49.
This piece describes a variety of artifacts displayed as part of the "Adornments of the Noble Riders--the Elegant Lifestyle of the Qitan Royals” exhibit at the China National Silk Museum in 2010. These include hats, boots, a bag, and a glove. Color photos accompany detailed descriptions.
The Liao Dynasty existed between 916 and 1125, roughly contemporaneous with the Song Dynasty. One of the reasons I wanted to research the Liao was that they are closer in time to bits of history I’m familiar with. Thanks to my love of The Long Ballad I got really into Tang history (618-907 CE), and more recently I’ve been working on translating stories from the Taiping Guangji (太平廣記), a group of tales compiled in the late 10th century– so I’ve been learning about that period as well.
Before I started the more in-depth research, I read a bit about Liao historiography, and I’ve included a few of those papers to help put the Liao in context, with a few other papers that aren’t on topic just for fun.
The Liao dynasty was founded by Khitan people, a steppe nomad group. For that reason they are often talked about as “non-Chinese,” but they certainly saw themselves as Chinese, and as successors to the Tang Dynasty. However, we have a lot less written material about them than we do the Song: circulation of Liao texts was forbidden in the Song, and when the Jin conquered the Liao they deliberately destroyed many of their historical documents and monuments. Because of the Liao’s status as marginally Chinese, the historical documents that did survive were considered less important. One of the main sources of Liao history has been an official history compiled several hundred years after the fall of the dynasty by the Yuan court, but that is known to be rushed and sometimes inaccurate.
I did a previous research project on the first Turkic Khaganate, an earlier and less lasting group of steppe nomads, and we have a lot more written and archaeological data about the Liao than we do about them.
A lot of the information we have about the Liao is from archaeology, including the tombs of high-ranking people, and epitaphs, which are some of the only written material about the Liao by the Liao that survive. A lot of the papers in this bibliography use existing textiles from Liao graves as important sources; as a result, they are skewed toward textiles from the nobility.
Blessing, P., Williams, E. D., & Shea, E. L. (2023). Medieval Textiles across Eurasia, c. 300–1400 (1st ed.). Cambridge University Press. https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/9781009393379/type/element
This is a novella-length overview of the topic, about 80 pages with a lot of pictures. I liked how it tied together such a big area and a long time period. Zooming out helps put the Liao textiles in a larger context, even though there’s not much specifically about the Liao.
Chen, Y. J. (2018). Frontier, Fortification, And Forestation: Defensive Woodland On The Song–Liao Border In The Long Eleventh Century. Journal of Chinese History, 2(2), 313–334. https://doi.org/10.1017/jch.2018.7
Not really a paper about Liao material culture, but I thought this was really interesting and wanted to include it anyway. It’s about the Song using planned forests as part of their defenses against the Liao, which I thought was a really neat tactic and also something Rae would enjoy reading about.
Crossley, P. K. (2024). What keeps the Kitans enigmatic: Roots of the ethnic narrative in Liao historiography. Modern Asian Studies, 58(4), 1095–1125. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0026749X24000179
An interesting and useful overview of Liao historiography and ethnicity. This paper argues that the distinction between Han and Liao wasn’t important to most Liao elite, who were more interested in class distinctions than ethnicity.
Ge, R., Cong, L., Fu, Y., Wang, B., Shen, G., Xu, B., Hu, M., Yu, H., Zhou, J., & Yang, L. (2023). Multi-faceted analysis reveals the characteristics of silk fabrics on a Liao Dynasty DieXie belt. Heritage Science, 11(1), 217. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40494-023-01064-6
The authors of this paper used various scientific techniques to analyze small pieces of silk found on a Diexie belt (a type of belt with many hanging pouches) in a Liao tomb. They were able to identify different weave structures, the original colors of the textile, and even what species of silkworm produced the silk!
Hansen, V. (2011). The Kitan People, the Liao Dynasty (916-1125) and their World. Orientations. https://buddhism.lib.ntu.edu.tw/DLMBS/en/search/search_detail.jsp?seq=564977
An overview of Liao material culture with special attention to trade and contact with other groups. Contains the delightful fact that the Liao would give envoys for the Song ten marmots each. The language feels othering in a few places.
Johnson, L. C. 2011. Women of the Conquest Dynasties.
A book about the lives of Liao and Jin women. This didn’t have a huge amount about textiles but it did have a lot about interesting and badass women. There are some good descriptions of various outfits, but not a lot on textile production. The sections on daily life have the most details about material culture (you would think that textile production would be an important part of daily life, but it’s not really mentioned.)
Johnson, L. C. (1983). The Wedding Ceremony for an Imperial Liao Princess. Wall Paintings from a Liao Dynasty Tomb in Jilin. Artibus Asiae, 44(2/3), 107. https://doi.org/10.2307/3249594
This doesn’t go into a ton of detail about textiles but I thought it was super interesting! This paper argues that two specific wall paintings from a tomb depict the wedding of a Liao princess. Lots of interesting details about Liao weddings! Also some interesting discussion of Liao dress and Central Plains dress and how each featured the Liao court.
King, A. (2013). Early Islamic Sources on the Kitan Liao: The Role of Trade. Journal of Song-Yuan Studies, 43(1), 253–271. https://doi.org/10.1353/sys.2013.0024
As it says on the tin, this paper focuses on Islamic sources that reference the Kitan Liao and the goods they traded. While the paper doesn’t focus solely on textiles, it does have interesting details about tribute textiles presented by the Liao to various Islamic states.
Krahl, R. (1997). Mediaeval silks woven in gold: Khitan, Jürchen, Tangut, Chinese or Mongol ? Orientations, 28(4), 45–51.
This article describes a group of silk textiles with golden designs woven on a monochrome background. Discusses the designs in detail, and talks about technical aspects of the fabric production, and attempts to figure out when and where these fabrics were produced. Features many excellent color photos.
Shea, E. L. (2020). Mongol Court Dress, Identity Formation, and Global Exchange (1st ed.). Routledge. https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/9780429340659
This book is mainly about the Mongols, but it has a section about pre-Mongol court dress as well, which mostly focuses on the Liao and Jin.
Shea, E. L. (2021). Intentional Identities: Liao Women’s Dress and Cultural and Political Power. Acta Via Serica, 6(2), 37–60. https://doi.org/10.22679/AVS.2021.6.2.003
A paper about elite Liao women’s dress. The paper argues that Liao elite women did not wear Song-style clothing and that this was an expression of their unique cultural identity. I’m not totally convinced, but there are also lots of descriptions of Liao women’s clothing as found in tombs or depicted in tomb art.
Steinhardt, N. S. (1998.). Liao Archaeology: Tombs and Ideology along the Northern Frontier of China.
This paper primarily consists of a description of four Liao-era tombs and their contents. The author, who does history of architecture, has a lot to say about how these tombs are built, but also briefly describes the textiles found in these tombs.
Watt, J. C., & Wardwell, A. E. (1997). When silk was gold: Central Asian and Chinese textiles. Metropolitan Museum of Art.
This is a big coffee-table-size museum exhibit catalog and I have only skimmed it. The exhibit included textiles dating from the late Tang to the Yuan. The majority of the textiles are post-Liao but there are several Liao textiles with good color pictures and helpful descriptive text. There are also several Jin textiles.
Zhao, F & Yu, T. (2011). Liao Silk Textiles: The Elegant Lifestyle of the Kitan Royals. Liao Silk Textiles: The Elegant Lifestyle of the Kitan Royals, 42(1), 43–49.
This piece describes a variety of artifacts displayed as part of the "Adornments of the Noble Riders--the Elegant Lifestyle of the Qitan Royals” exhibit at the China National Silk Museum in 2010. These include hats, boots, a bag, and a glove. Color photos accompany detailed descriptions.
no subject
Date: 2025-12-09 06:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-12-10 12:24 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-12-09 07:55 pm (UTC)Just something I've noticed from my own reading which is admittedly nowhere as in-depth as yours.
no subject
Date: 2025-12-10 12:29 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-12-10 07:32 pm (UTC)