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Did you know about the origin of the word "Cathay"?
An important focus of Rise of the Black Dragon: Cultural Treasures from China was the Jin Dynasty (1115-1234), founded by Jurchen people, who originated in what is now Heilongjiang. The Jin Dynasty came to rule the north half of China. The Jurchen had immediate predecessors in the Khitan (or Qidan) of the Liao Dynasty (A.D. 907-1125).

When the Liao Dynasty collapsed in 1124-25 under the Jurchen onslaught, this was not the end of a Khitan political identity. A scion of the Liao court gathered Liao troops and headed west. There he founded a regime known as Kara Khitay—literally "Black Khitan"—which controlled a large portion of central Asia until the early Thirteenth Century.

Qidan, Khitan, Khitai or Khitay are all variant spellings for the name of the people who founded the Liao and Western Liao (as Kara Khitay was also known) states. Use of this term continued amongst Moslem and Persian historians, so that even the Jin Dynasty was known in the Thirteenth Century as the "Djerda" (i.e., Jurchen) Khitay. As Mongol power emerged, this term continued to spread through Persia, Arabia, and Europe. While many early observers applied this term to northern China (calling southern China Mangi, Manzi, Chin or Sin), the Mongol conquest of China caused in Europe a conflation of terms like Khitay with all of China.

This is the origin of the term "Cathay," for which Columbus and Cabot set sail (see Wittfogel and Feng 1949:1-2).

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