1 Fals - Yelü Dashi

Yelü Dashi founded the Western Liao — known in Islamic sources as the Qara Khitai — after fleeing the Jurchen Jin conquest of the Liao dynasty in 1125, leading a small retinue westward across the steppe before carving out a Central Asian empire that eventually stretched from the Tarim Basin to the Syr Darya. His coinage continued the cash tradition of his ancestral Liao dynasty almost without interruption, a deliberate political act signaling continuity with the Khitan imperial line he had left behind. The Jurchen, meanwhile, were issuing their own cash in the east.

Surviving examples attributable to his reign are scarce in Western collections — most institutional holdings derive from Soviet-era archaeological work in modern Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan.