Khitai

• Population: 24,600,000
• Capital: Paikang (pop. 3,200,000)
• Ruler: Yah-Chieng, Master of the Scarlet Circle
• Major cities: Shu-Chen (pop. 1,370,000), Rou-Gen (pop. 670,000)
• Resources: Foodstuffs, domesticated animals, gold, silver, precious stones, silk, spices, drugs, lotus blossom, charms and amulets, exotic items (peacock feather fans, carved jade, porcelain)
• Imports:
• Historical Equivalent: Medieval China, Japan 
• Religion: Yun

An important kingdom of the Far East, shielded from western invasion by a Great Wall. Its people are called Khitans. It is comprised of many city-states in the north, the greatest of which was Paikang. 

In pre-Cataclysmic times, the far east was under the sway of a mysterious civilisation that was not autochtonous to the Thurian Continent.  After the Cataclysm, this civilisation, known as the Khari Empire, enslaved the Lemurians who had fled eastwards.  After several millenia of enslavment, the Lemurians overthrew their oppressors, and the survivors of this fallen elite fled West and founded the Stygian Empire.

Although the historical facts are shrouded in mystery, this fact makes it highly unlikely that the ruling elite of the Eastern civilisation where the Khitan themselves, as Stygian culture has nothing in common with that of Khitai.  It seems more probable that the Lemurian uprising also allowed the Khitai people, no doubt themselves pre-Cataclysmic, to also take control of their own destiny.

They then expulsed the Lemurians, who settled as Hyrkanians in the vast steppe-lands to the west of Khitai.

For centuries, the fragmented city-states of Khitai bickered like crows picking at a corpse, each maintaining the fiction that it (and it alone) represented the fallen Khari empire. Periodically, a powerful ruler rose and united some of the city-states, and the long-imagined Middle Kingdom of Khitai was (temporarily) established. But the huge distances involved in governing such a kingdom, combined with the demand for independence which burst forth at the time of the original slave-revolt, always brought these empires to collapse.

Khitai has now, however, extended its hegemony over a vast area of the Far East -- from the northern taiga forests to the edge of the Kambujan jungle. Its influence weakens beyond the western satellite kingdom of Kusan and its constellation of oasis, but it claims all the land east of the Mountains of Night.

Khitai has a varied economy. The city-states are centers of manufacturing and commerce. The craftsmen produce sophisticated art-objects. There is ample food from myriad small farms and ranches. Mines produce gold, silver, other metals, and precious stones. Silken textiles, rare drugs, spices, and magical paraphernalia are traded to the West.

Khitai is nearly legendary to the average Hyborian, although the more easterly peoples (such as the Turanians and Vendhyans) maintain considerable commerce with the kingdoms of Khitai. Regular caravans now cross the Hyrkanian steppe to reach the kingdom of Kusan and from there, the central city-states. Some traders have even approached Kambuja, hoping to curry the favor of Pra-Eun with their western trinkets. Some Westerners urge caution, however, worried that too much contact with Khitai may bring them to move westward, like their Hyrkanian predecessors.