In any case, the Chinese and their enemies (such as the Khitan, the
Jurchens, and the Mongols) were using iron ammunition well before European even had guns.
In historical East Asia, pastoral and nomadic polities (Xiongnu, Uighurs, Tibetans, Khitans,
Jurchens, Mongols, and Manchus, among others) had their distinct political structure and ways of governance.
The Chinese Song Empire planned with Din'ang and
Jurchens a military campaign against Liao.
(37) What is more, in mainland Southeast Asia, China and South Asia alike, interventions by mobile warriors from beyond the frontier--Tais,
Jurchens, Mongols, Turkic peoples, Yadavas and Hoysalas--redrew the political map while in some cases accelerating commercial or agrarian expansion.
In the early twelfth century the
Jurchens, who first lived in the southern part of the area that became known later as Manchuria, began to pose a major threat to Song security.
This is one of the poems Fan wrote in 1170 when he was sent on a diplomatic mission to the court of the
Jurchens, a Tungusic nomadic tribe that had taken much of the northern part of the Song territories, and the bridge in the poem is the famous bridge in Bianliang, the old capital of the Northern Song, lost to the
Jurchens in 1126 and now under enemy occupation.
In addition, the latter was a militarily strong neighbour of Song China which, having suffered countless defeats in battles with the Khitans,
Jurchens and Tanguts, agreed to send it an 'annual tribute of 50,000 tales of silver, 130,000 bolts of silk, and 10,000 catties of tea in exchange for peace' in 1044, (38) coincidentally the first year of King Anawrahta's reign.
Three centuries earlier these peoples had organized a powerful state, eventually conquering North China where they ruled for the better part of a century before being overcome by the Mongol armies of Cinggis Qavan in 1234; the Tungusic groups that created the confederation that we know as the Jin [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] dynasty (1115-1234) are known to history as the
Jurchens (Nuzhen [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] in Chinese).
Of the four major conqueror peoples examined, namely the Khitans, the
Jurchens, the Mongols, and the Manchus, only the Mongols had their home base on the steppe.
It was against this backdrop that the new Choson Korean state's foreign policy was to be built upon the Confucian principles of sadae with Ming China and kyorin ("neighborly relations") with Japan and the
Jurchens in the north.
Jurchens could trade in the Korean capital only after receiving a nominal military post appointment (K.
The existence of a significant corpus of Mongolian loan words used to translate these terms, combined with the fact that some of them occur in
Jurchen, suggests that among the northern border peoples there may have been a kind of tradition of Lunyu interpretation which began in the twelfth century with the reign of the
Jurchens, and possibly even as early as the tenth century with the Khitans.