At the beginning of the 10th century, a tribe related to the Mongols, the Khitans with an admixture of Mongols, founded a vast empire, stretching from the Pacific to Lake Baikal and the Tian Shan, displacing the Turkic population. The Khitan language has been classified as para-Mongolic: distantly related to the Mongolic languages of the Mongols. Reportedly, the first Gurkhan was a Manichaean.