The Golden Empire of Yi Ti

Yi Ti rose from the wreck of an older realm, the Great Empire of the Dawn, which legend says went under during the Long Night. On its ruins stood the Golden Empire, and eleven separate dynasties have since worn the crown of god emperor.

None of them lasted the same span. One guttered out in barely fifty years; the longest held the throne for seven centuries. The change from one house to the next was not always peaceful — four times the throne sat empty while warlords and petty kings tore the country apart fighting over it, and the longest of those gaps dragged on for more than a hundred years.

The land of Yi Ti is thick jungle; people say — though no one swears to it — that basilisks lurk somewhere in the undergrowth. A great river runs the length of the country from north to south, from the Bleeding Sea down to the Jade Sea, and along its banks stand more cities than almost any other region can claim: Tiqui, Asabhad and Jinqi among them.

What ties them together is a network of stone roads laid down under the Nine Eunuchs, so well built that only the roads of Valyria can rival them; because of it, crossing the country from end to end is quick and, above all, safe.

Yi Ti is bounded on every side: the Jade Sea to the south, the Five Forts to the north watching the gap between the Bleeding Sea and the mountains, the Shadow Lands to the east, and to the southeast the Great Sand Sea alongside the plains where the Jogos Nhai ride, with the Shivering Sea beyond them. Close to the coast lie islands such as Leng and the Isle of Whips.

Even the Yitish themselves disagree about where their people came from. Maester Yandel thinks their civilization is as old as the Fisher Queens of the Silver Sea; the scribe-priests of Yi Ti prefer to say that writing and the world's first cities rose along their own Jade Sea coast, and give little credit to what the Sarnori or the Ghiscari claim for themselves.

They are known by their teak-coloured skin, narrow pale eyes, and the hats made of monkey tails they wear. They worship their god emperor, along with the Lion of Night and the Maiden-Made-of-Light, whom they hold to be the parents of the first god emperor, called the God on Earth.

The Yitish went on to settle the northern two-thirds of the island of Leng, but there the worship shifts hands: its people look not to the god emperor, but to an empress of their own.

The Empire reached its high point under the jade-green emperors. Jar Har annexed the island of Leng after its empress ordered every foreigner on it put to the sword; his eldest son, Jar Joq, added the conquest of Great Moraq to the crown.

Another son, Jar Han, opened trade with the Free Hold of Valyria and forced tribute out of Qarth, Asshai and the Ghiscari Empire, among other distant lands.

That expansion did not last forever: some four hundred years ago Leng broke from Yi Ti and returned to rule under its own line of empresses.

In the north, against the nomadic Jogos Nhai, the Empire fights a war with no end in sight. For those zorse-riders, raiding the Yitish borderlands is simply a way of life: it wins them the gold and gems they offer up to their jhats and moon-singers, and the slaves who tend their herds. Over two thousand years they have left a dozen cities in ruins and a hundred villages besides.

Imperial generals, three god emperors among them, have crossed those plains to break them, always with the same outcome: they slaughter herds, burn yurts, force out oaths and tribute, and the moment the army turns for home the Jogos Nhai go right back to raiding.

Under the long reign of Lo Han, forty-second Scarlet Emperor, three more invasions failed. When he died, his son Lo Bu swore to end the threat for good: he raised an army said to be three hundred thousand strong and split it into thirteen columns to hunt the nomads across the steppe. More than a million Jogos Nhai are said to have died.

Facing extinction, a thousand rival clans banded together for the first time under a single jhattar, a woman named Zhea. She isolated the thirteen columns, cut off their food and water, drove them into traps and destroyed them one by one, then rode down on Lo Bu's own host. The forty-third and last Scarlet Emperor died in that battle; Zhea had his skull gilded in gold, and jhattars have drunk from it ever since — the nomads remember him as the Boy Who Was Too Bold.

The seat of Yitish power has moved as often as its dynasties have fallen. Some emperors ruled from Yin, the oldest of its cities, on the shore of the Jade Sea; others chose the heart of the jungle, at Si Qo the Glorious, now reduced to ruins; others settled at Tiqui, or kept a military court at Jinqi to better guard the eastern border against raiders out of the Shadow Lands.

Today Yin is once again the capital, and Emperor Bu Gai holds court there in great splendour. He is not the only one who claims the title: a sorcerer claims the throne from Carcosa, beyond the Hidden Sea, and a general named Pol Qo has proclaimed himself emperor on his own account from a garrisoned frontier town.

An outbreak of grey plague has spread through the region.

Yi Ti is one of the great trading crossroads of the known world, cut through by routes arriving from every direction. Spices are among its chief exports — saffron above all — along with its wines.

Even its poetry has a name beyond its own borders: in Qarth it is especially prized.