Han–Khitan Identity

Han–Khitan Identity is the conflict between ancestry and belonging that shapes Xiao Feng’s understanding of himself and his responsibilities. His discovery that his father was Xiao Yuanshan and that his birth surname was Xiao gives his Khitan descent a name and history, but his upbringing under Qiao Sanhuai and his life in the Central Plains remain part of him. The novel develops this tension beyond personal identity: amid Liao–Song warfare, it asks what ethnic labels can justify when people on either side endure the same losses and fear.

Identity, Descent, and Upbringing

Zhiguang tells Xiao Feng that his father left a message on the stone wall outside Yanmen Pass, identifying himself as Xiao Yuanshan and addressing his son as Feng’er. The name Xiao had been withheld from him because he was entrusted to Qiao Sanhuai and therefore grew up with Qiao’s surname. The revelation distinguishes biological descent from the family name and upbringing that formed his social identity; the two histories coexist rather than cancel one another.

The name also locates Xiao Feng within the Liao Empire’s ruling order. Its imperial surname is Yelu, while successive empresses came from the Xiao clan. That clan had accumulated considerable influence through generations of imperial marriages and service, and Xiao Feng’s newly disclosed surname connects him to an eminent Khitan family. For a long time he is overwhelmed by what this means. He tells A'Zhu that from then on he is Xiao Feng rather than Qiao Feng, giving the disclosure the force of a change in self-designation as well as a fact about ancestry.

A'Zhu and the Possibility of Shared Belonging

The identity question becomes intimate in Xiao Feng’s conversation with A'Zhu after their visit to Zhiguang. A'Zhu recalls the principle that Han or Khitan identity is both reality and illusion, while kindness, enmity, honor, and disgrace are ultimately as dust. She suggests that Xiao Feng leave the martial world’s continuing struggles and live beyond Yanmen Pass, where he could hunt and raise livestock. Her proposal turns an abstract refusal of ethnic division into a possible shared life.

Xiao Feng admits that he is tired of surviving amid violence and imagines riding, hunting, and living without such anxieties. A'Zhu makes clear that she means to stay with him: he would tend the horses and hunt, while she would pasture the cattle and sheep. He understands that she is offering lifelong companionship, and asks whether his Khitan origin makes him unacceptable to her. A'Zhu rejects the premise that one people is higher or lower than another and says that her wish to be Khitan is freely chosen. Their exchange presents belonging not only as inherited classification but as an affiliation a person may embrace in solidarity with someone they love.

Political Inheritance and the Liao Crisis

The novel places private questions of descent against the Liao court’s own tangled inheritance. Xiao Feng’s account of the imperial family explains how succession decisions and the influence of an empress dowager shaped political power across generations. When the Holy Emperor designated ZongZhen as heir, the empress favored her second son, ZhongYuan, but the brothers’ conduct prevented her plan from succeeding. ZongZhen later made ZhongYuan next in line, yet after ZongZhen died, the throne passed instead to his son HongJi.

HongJi compensated ZhongYuan with exceptional rank, military command, and privileges, while giving ZhongYuan’s son NieLuGu control of the Southern Chancellery and the title Prince of Chu. These arrangements left a formidable political and military inheritance in the hands of the very family implicated in the rebellion against HongJi. The crisis therefore grows from more than personal antagonism: previous succession decisions and the concentration of authority shape the choices available to the emperor and his opponents. Xiao Feng, whose own identity crosses the Han–Khitan divide, is drawn into the conflict through his sworn brotherhood with HongJi.

Frontier Conflict and Civilian Consequences

The frontier makes ethnic identity a matter of immediate danger. When a group of Khitan riders attacks Jurchen people, Xiao Feng recognizes the attackers as his own people by descent, while the Jurchen chief AguDa and his companions are his hosts. He first tries not to harm the Khitans, but as the fighting escalates and Jurchen hunters are killed, he intervenes against the attack without killing the Khitan riders he brings down. His hesitation and limited use of force make visible the competing affiliations that a simple division into sides would conceal.

The later account of the border economy sharpens the stakes. Liao troops are not supplied with regular rations or salaries, and are expected to obtain what they need through raids on neighboring peoples. The practice called Beating the Grass Valley is described as robbery; Song retaliation, called Beating the Standing Valley, returns the violence across the frontier. Civilians living near the border bear the cost of this cycle. Xiao Feng had already seen Song soldiers capture Khitan civilians near Yanmen Pass; in Nanjing, he encounters the reverse, as Liao soldiers bring hundreds of Song captives, mostly women, from a raid near Zhuozhou.

The captives are presented as offerings to Xiao Feng in his official capacity as Lord of the Southern Chancellery. Their condition recalls what he witnessed on the other side of the border, and he questions where they were taken before speaking to them in Chinese. A young Song captive asks to speak with him privately, while hundreds of others kneel and plead for release. The encounter makes the state’s treatment of civilians impossible to reduce to an abstract dispute between peoples: the same border policy turns ordinary people into captives whichever army is raiding.

Moral Consequence and Significance

Xiao Feng’s reflections in Nanjing bring the identity conflict to its clearest moral statement. He remembers that, before his parentage was revealed, he would have considered himself a citizen of Great Song. He recognizes that he speaks the same language and eats the same food as the captives, then questions the logic by which people distinguish Khitan, Song, Jurchen, and Korean communities in order to raid and condemn one another. The labels are real in their political consequences, but they do not establish that one group’s suffering matters less than another’s.

He releases the Song captives and urges them to move away from the border, warning that he may not be able to save them again. Their initial hesitation reflects their expectation that captives might be driven out only to be attacked; once they believe him, they respond with gratitude and return home. The act does not resolve the Liao–Song conflict or free Xiao Feng from his official position, but it converts his divided identity into a concrete ethical choice. Han–Khitan Identity thus links personal inheritance to political structures and frontier violence, while showing Xiao Feng judging people by shared vulnerability rather than by the category under which an army has placed them.