Shiwei people

Shiwei (simplified Chinese: 室韦; traditional Chinese: 室韋; pinyin: Shìwéi; Wade–Giles: Shih4-wei2) were a Mongolic people that inhabited far-eastern Mongolia, northern Inner Mongolia, northern Manchuria and the area near the Okhotsk Sea beach.

As a result of pressure from the west, south and south-east they never established unified, semi-sedentarized empires like their neighbors, but remained nomadic confederations led by tribal chieftains, alternately submitting to the Turks, the Chinese and the Khitan as the political climate changed.

The Da Shiwei tribe is thought to be descended from some Rouran who fled east after being defeated by the Turks in 555.

The Huangtou ("yellow head") Shiwei may have been named so because of a high incidence of blondness within their tribe, but it is not certain.

96 records, "Eastward again, there was the Wuluohu tribe, the other name was Wuluohun, it was called Wuluohou in the Yuan Wei.

They informed him that their people had heard of a cave located in what is now the Elunchun Autonomous Banner in northeastern Inner Mongolia.

This find and other historical and archaeological evidence has helped to verify that the Tuoba Xianbei probably emigrated south from this area sometime in the early first century CE.

The Shiwei's political fate, as the Khitan in great part of their pre-dynastic period, was largely determined by their far more powerful neighbors and by ever-changing balance of power between the successive regimes ruling northern China, on the one hand, and belligerent tribal neighbors on the other.

When China had fallen into an anarchy at the end of the Sui dynasty and the other nomadic people, the Türks, were getting stronger in northern Asia simultaneously, the Shiwei submitted to the Türks, under the control of the three Tutuns sent by the Turkic supreme leader, so did the Khitan who were controlled by the Tutun, Pandie, who was sent by the Turkic Shabolue khaghan.

As a response, the Tang court set Shizhou, which was subordinate to the governor-general of Yingzhou to control the Shiwei and Khitan tribes in 629.

[11] According to the historical records, in the fourth year of Zhenyuan (788), the Xi raided the Zhenwu army (located in modern Hohhot) together with the Shiwei, slaughtering both the Chinese and the Uighur commissioners, capturing the frontier people and plundering their domestic animals.

From 789 onward, no aggressive actions conducted by the Shiwei could be found throughout the Chinese historical data, until some of their tribes were incorporated into the Khitan and some others migrated to the northwest around the turn of the 10th century.

[12] In 1087 representatives of the subject Menggu Shiwei came to show respect to the Khitan court at Yanjing (Beijing).

Asia in 900 AD, showing location of the Shiwei and their neighbors.