Beating the Standing Valley

Beating the Standing Valley describes the retaliatory raids by Song troops into Liao territory, answering Liao’s practice of raiding neighboring lands for supplies. The cycle turns an imperial frontier into a zone where civilians are taken as captives and treated as the price of military provisioning. Xiao Feng’s encounter with captured Song people brings the policy’s consequences into view and forces him to reckon with loyalties that cannot be contained by a border or an ethnic label.

Definition and frontier economy

Liao does not provide its troops with rations or salaries; soldiers are expected to obtain what they need by raiding neighboring peoples, including the Song, Western Xia, the Jurchen, and Korea. These expeditions are called Beating the Grass Valley. Song forces retaliate with raids into Liao lands, known as Beating the Standing Valley. The names distinguish the opposing actions, but the account presents them as part of one recurring pattern of cross-border plunder rather than as unrelated incidents.

The burden falls especially heavily on people living near the frontier. Residents face the prospect of being seized without warning, while captured civilians may disappear or die if they cannot be ransomed. By the time Xiao Feng encounters a Liao raiding party, the wealthy have largely fled inland; the captives are poor people with no gold or silk to offer for their release. The frontier economy thus transfers the costs of supplying armies onto households least able to bear them.

A cycle of retaliation

The conflict appears not only in official policy but in armed encounters between communities. At the Jurchen chief HeLiBu’s camp, Xiao Feng learns that the Jurchen and Khitan are at war, although both respect formidable warriors. Later, Khitan riders and Jurchen hunters meet in the open and exchange arrows before clarifying what is happening. An old Jurchen hunter is killed, and the Jurchen force, outnumbered, must fight while retreating. Xiao Feng intervenes without killing: he knocks two Khitan riders from their horses and shoots four more in the shoulder or foot, bringing them down alive. The scene gives the wider frontier conflict a local form, where inherited hostility can erupt into violence before anyone has established the circumstances.

That local clash also complicates Xiao Feng’s position. He feels an intimate connection to the Khitan riders as his own people, yet he cannot ignore the Jurchen companions beside him. His attempt to restrain the Khitans without killing them contrasts with the raids’ broader logic, in which collective labels help make violence against neighboring civilians seem ordinary.

Captives and Xiao Feng’s decision

The consequences become immediate when a Liao troop returns from a raid near Zhuozhou with roughly 700 to 800 Song captives, mostly young women, alongside goods and valuables. The soldiers present captives and ornaments to Xiao Feng in his capacity as Lord of the Southern Chancellery. He recognizes the pattern from the other side: at Yanmen Pass, he had seen Song soldiers capture Khitan civilians; now Liao soldiers have taken Song civilians. The captives’ distress does not differ with the identity of the army that seized them.

A young woman from Zhang Village asks to be released so she can return to her parents. Hundreds of captives kneel, while a youth of about sixteen remains standing and asks to speak with Xiao Feng privately because he has an important secret. The encounter initially gives Xiao Feng reason to wonder whether the youth might know something about Song military movements, but the defining choice in the episode concerns the captives as people, not the possible value of information. After the raiding troops have left, Xiao Feng releases them and warns them to move away from the border, since he may not be able to protect them in the future. Their hesitation gives way to relief and gratitude; they understand that poor captives ordinarily have little chance of buying their freedom.

Identity and significance

The episode connects frontier violence to Xiao Feng’s divided sense of belonging. Raised in the Song, he had thought of himself as a Song subject before learning that his parentage was Khitan. As he looks south toward the Song lands, he reflects on shared language and food, and questions why people insist on dividing human beings into Khitan, Song, Jurchen, and Korean. His questioning does not erase the political conflict: the armies still raid one another, and civilians remain at risk. Instead, his decision to free the captives is a concrete refusal to let the cycle dictate his conduct in that moment.

Beating the Standing Valley is therefore presented not as an isolated military tactic but as the retaliatory counterpart to Beating the Grass Valley, sustained by the way armies obtain supplies through raids. Xiao Feng’s action exposes the distance between state practice and individual judgment. His office places him within Liao’s military order, while his experience of life in the Song and his recognition of the captives’ shared humanity make uncritical participation in that order impossible.