Mongols destroy the last Xi Xia resistance

1230

Three years after Genghis Khan's death, Mongol armies completed the subjugation and near-extermination of the Tangut people of Western Xia. Entire valleys were depopulated; the distinctive Tangut script, derived from Chinese, began its slow slide toward oblivion. The thoroughness of the destruction was so complete that the Tangut civilization was nearly forgotten until twentieth-century archaeologists rediscovered their buried cities in the Gobi Desert.