The Turtle led me to Kung et al., explaining the slow growth of what's now China and, also, of whatever states China has absorbed. I've some interest in the latter inasmuch as my maternal ancestry derives from these borderlands, in my case the southwest. On point, a footnote mentions the "Dali" state.
That's "Dali" in modern Mandarin. Locally, the people were and are Bai, who spoke some other dialect. It is hard to say a dialect of what exactly, as Bai has done the Armenian thing of perhaps being a related language during the Bronze Age but taking on more and more Imperial terms as the same sort of empire kept ruling over China. As of the "Dali" stage, the local Duan rulers - like the Arsacids - actually claimed to be Chinese, if Gansu west-Chinese.
"Dali", or "Dablit" as it went in Bai (=tenth-century Middle Chinese), means... "Marmara". It means "the Marble-stan". That and horseflesh is what Dali exported. Dali wanted to export tribute as well but the Chinese powers at the time, the Song, wouldn't accept it. What's up with THAT?!
The previous dynasty in China were the Tang and they were NOT shy about wanting to rule the trade-routes. Hence how the Tang got Gansu and beyond to the east Turkestan then Khotanese and Sogdian. (Especially after the Tang wiped out the local Turks.) There was, at the time, a second silkroad; this went through the Bai-speaking territories, southwest. Tang wanted it too. The local authorities, Nanzhao, resisted 738-900ish AD. Then came some upheaval for a generation or so, and the Duan took command. Over in China, the southwest was disunited; but Taizu of the Song took the southwest over the AD 960s.
The Tang, it seems, had tried and failed to take the Nanzhao. The Song figured that, once it had taken a decent heartland, it could let the outlying regions be. The Tanggut "western Xia" were a problem but, for whatever reason, Dali chose to be the opposite of a problem. It would be as if Australia was taken over by anime fan "weeabooes" and kept pestering Tokyo.
As to why the Song didn't take the [literal] cash, I wonder about the strings attached. Dali and the Duan seem to have faced trouble with the Viets and with internal discontents, respectively. If the Song had taken the money, they might be obliged to send an army over there to quell nobles and/or Viets. The Iranians had the Romans to worry about. The Chinese had... what exactly, beyond Yunnan? Angkor? those darn Viets?
If the Duans could just keep the traderoutes open (with a reasonable markup), the Song didn't see a problem with keeping them there and themselves OUT of there.
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