Ethnic identity and border warfare

Ethnic identity and border warfare are intertwined in the novel as political allegiance, inherited identity, and personal judgment pull against one another. Xiao Feng’s encounters with Jurchen and Khitan fighters, his service in Liao, and his release of Song captives show how warfare crosses a frontier repeatedly, while ordinary people bear its costs. His decisive refusal to treat every person as an enemy by ethnicity makes the cycle of raids and retaliation visible as a human calamity rather than an abstract contest between states.

Overlapping Affiliations

The frontier does not divide the novel’s characters into simple, mutually exclusive camps. Xiao Feng is of Khitan origin but was raised in the south and speaks the language of the Central Plains; his own changing understanding of belonging is sharpened by his contact with people on both sides of the Liao–Song conflict. At the Jurchen chief’s tent, he learns that the tribes are at war with the Khitans, yet the Jurchen admire courage. Chief Helibu’s son AguDa praises Xiao Feng, and the tribe welcomes him as an honored guest despite his Khitan identity. Respect between individuals can cross a line that armies enforce.

That welcome is not a sign that the border has become peaceful. When Khitan riders confront AguDa and the Jurchen party, they shoot without first clarifying who is present. Xiao Feng recognizes the Khitans as his own people by descent, but the attack leaves him caught between that affiliation and the Jurchen companions beside him. He disarms two Khitan riders without killing them, and later shoots arrows that bring four more down without causing their deaths. The restraint matters: he neither denies his ancestry nor accepts it as a command to harm the people the Khitans are attacking.

War, Rule, and Inherited Conflict

The novel also sets individual loyalties against the political machinery of the Liao Empire. Its account of imperial succession explains how present authority carries the weight of earlier decisions. The Holy Emperor designated his elder son ZongZhen as successor, but the Empress Dowager favored her younger son ZhongYuan. ZhongYuan did not take the throne; instead, he supported his brother and was rewarded with the status of royal emperor brother and a place in the succession. When ZongZhen’s son HongJi later inherited the throne, he compensated ZhongYuan with extraordinary rank and power, including command over the army, while ZhongYuan’s son NieLuGu received the title Prince of Chu and control of the Southern Chancellery.

These honors leave the state vulnerable to a rebellion that cannot be explained simply as a clash of personal ambition. HongJi’s hunting party hears an urgent bugle signal, and the news is that the capital is in revolt. The Southern Chancellery’s commander, NieLuGu, has made his father emperor and issued a decree declaring HongJi illegitimate. Because ZhongYuan is commander of the army and the rebellion’s proclamation invokes a disputed succession, the crisis places military command and the public claim to rightful rule in direct conflict. The history of the Liao court thus forms part of the frontier’s violence: war between states and conflict within a state both arise from political arrangements inherited from the past.

Territory likewise shapes the balance between Liao and Great Song. The narrative describes the strategic importance of the sixteen prefectures ceded to Liao after Shi Jingtang sought its support. Their position allows Liao forces to press southward, while Great Song lacks equivalent defensive ground; the account presents this advantage as a reason the long conflict has favored Liao. The frontier is therefore not merely a cultural boundary. Its geography, military deployments, and political history determine where armies can move and which communities are exposed.

The Captive Economy and Its Civilian Cost

The violence of the frontier is sustained by a system in which armies take resources from the populations they cross. In Liao, the troops are not supplied with provisions or paid a salary, and the narrative describes raids into neighboring territories as a means of meeting military needs. Liao’s incursions into Great Song and other neighboring lands are called “Beating The Grass Valley”; retaliatory Song raids into Liao are called “Beating The Standing Valley.” The different names mark opposing sides’ accounts of the practice, but the civilians caught in it experience the same insecurity.

Xiao Feng encounters that cost directly after becoming a Liao official. A returning force brings hundreds of Song captives, most of them young women, along with goods taken in a raid near Zhuozhou. The soldiers expect their commander to select captives and valuables. The scene recalls the opposite direction of the same violence: at Yanmen Gate, Xiao Feng had seen Song soldiers capturing Khitan civilians. He now sees Song people in Liao hands, their circumstances resembling those of prisoners, and understands that border communities can be exposed to either army’s raids.

The captives’ vulnerability is sharpened by their poverty. The narrative explains that wealthy families have long since fled the frontier, while poor people cannot pay for their release with gold or silk. For them, capture can mean disappearance rather than a negotiable ransom. A young woman from Zhang village kneels and asks Xiao Feng to let her return to her parents; the hundreds of captives join her in pleading. Xiao Feng tells them to go home and move away from the border, warning that he may not be able to protect them if they are captured again. Their gratitude is sincere, but his own reflection refuses to mistake a temporary reprieve for a remedy: they still face a difficult journey home, and the system that exposed them remains in place.

Refusal and the Meaning of Belonging

Xiao Feng’s response to the captives grows from a challenge to the categories that make reciprocal violence seem inevitable. He considers that, had his parentage not been revealed, he would still have regarded himself as a citizen of Great Song. He shares language and food with the Song captives and asks what separates them from him. His questions turn from personal identity to the logic of the conflict: one side raids, the other retaliates; each curses the other as an animal. Rather than accepting those insults as truths about whole peoples, he sees how each community’s violence helps sustain the next.

That recognition gives his release of the captives a significance beyond an act of mercy toward individuals. He orders them freed even though they belong to the people his own empire has been raiding, and then doubts that he has shown them kindness, since their return still entails hardship. The gesture interrupts one moment of the cycle without pretending to end it. It also contrasts with the military economy that treats captured people and goods as provisions for an army.

The public reception of Xiao Feng in Liao further complicates any simple opposition between personal virtue and ethnic loyalty. After his role in quelling the rebellion, citizens of the capital thank him for saving lives; many have relatives serving in the army. Xiao Feng recognizes that an act taken in a moment of bravery has consequences for people far beyond the battlefield. Yet he also remembers that in the Central Plains his efforts brought resentment and slander, while in Liao his intervention earns gratitude. The contrast does not settle his identity. It demonstrates how judgments of the same person shift with political circumstance and the lives affected by his actions.

Narrative Significance

Through these linked scenes, border warfare appears as a repeated passage of armed groups, captives, and reprisals, not as a clean division between peoples. Jurchen hospitality to a Khitan guest, Khitan attacks on Jurchen hunters, Song and Liao raids on one another’s civilians, and Xiao Feng’s intervention among the captives all resist a fixed equation between ancestry and conduct. The account gives political institutions and military geography their due, while keeping the consequences of their operation in view: families live near danger, poor captives have little means to secure release, and soldiers’ supplies are obtained through raids.

Xiao Feng’s divided affiliation is therefore not resolved by choosing one people against another. His actions instead expose the inadequacy of that choice as a moral rule. He can recognize the Khitans as his own people and still prevent their deaths; he can serve Liao and still free Song civilians. The frontier conflict persists, but his conduct makes visible the distinction between belonging to a political community and endorsing every violence carried out in its name.