Beating the Grass Valley

Beating the Grass Valley is the Liao army’s practice of raiding neighboring territories to obtain military provisions, including goods and people. The novel presents it not as ordinary supply gathering but as organized plunder, answered by retaliatory Song raids and endured most harshly by civilians near the border. Xiao Feng’s encounter with captives forces the policy’s human cost into view and sharpens his conflict between imperial service and a wider sense of shared humanity.

Definition and Border Economy

The Liao Empire does not provide its troops with rations or salaries; soldiers are expected to meet their needs by taking resources from the enemy. They raid Great Song, Western Xia, Jurchen, Korea, and other neighboring countries, a practice termed Beating the Grass Valley. The name does not soften the action: the account explicitly compares it to common robbery. Military provisioning thus depends on transferring the costs of warfare to communities beyond Liao’s borders.

The practice is reciprocal. Song forces raid Liao territory in retaliation, calling their incursions Beating the Standing Valley. The exchange creates a recurring cycle rather than a stable boundary: each side’s raids furnish grounds for the other’s, while border residents live in daily fear of capture and may not know whether they will see the next morning. The novel distinguishes imperial and military rivalry from the experience of people whose homes lie where those rivalries are enacted.

Xiao Feng at the Frontier

Xiao Feng has already seen Song soldiers capture Khitan civilians at Yanmen Gate. Later, as Lord of the Southern Chancellery, he encounters the reverse: Liao troops return from a raid near Zhuozhou with hundreds of Song captives, mostly young women and some boys. The troop includes about eight hundred soldiers and brings away roughly seven hundred to eight hundred captives. Its captain presents the raid as a successful operation and offers captives and valuables to Xiao Feng, treating such spoils as appropriate to his rank.

The captain says that, since Xiao Feng’s arrival, his troops have avoided raiding nearby areas for provisions. That remark makes clear that the practice predates Xiao Feng’s authority there and that his presence has already affected where the soldiers operate. A Song maiden kneels and asks to be released so she can return to her parents. Hundreds of captives follow her in pleading, while one youth remains standing and says he has a secret to disclose. Xiao Feng’s attention is drawn to him, but the larger scene has already made the captives’ predicament impossible to mistake for an abstract matter of military policy.

Refusal and Consequences

The captain describes a former Prince of Chu using Song captives as live targets. Xiao Feng imagines the cruelty implied by the practice and sees the captives as people rather than spoils. He reflects that, had his parentage not been exposed, he would still have regarded himself as a citizen of Song; he and the captives speak the same language and eat the same food. His question is not which side has the right to raid, but why people insist on dividing themselves into peoples who answer one raid with another.

Xiao Feng releases the captives and tells them to run, warning them to move away from the border because he may not be able to protect them another time. At first they hesitate, fearing that he is making them flee only to shoot them. Once convinced, they leave in relief and express gratitude. Their poverty makes the release especially consequential: unlike wealthy families, who might redeem captives with gold and silk, these people have no means to buy their freedom and expect capture to end in death or permanent disappearance.

Political and Ethical Significance

The raids expose the gap between the language of national loyalty and the shared lives of people divided by war. Xiao Feng belongs to the Khitan-led Liao state and holds a Liao office, yet he was raised in the south and recognizes himself in the Song captives. His decision to free them does not end the raiding system, and he warns that he cannot guarantee their future safety. It does, however, mark a limit to what imperial position can demand of him: he will not treat civilian suffering as an acceptable source of military supply.

The account also sets frontier plunder against the broader political machinery of Liao and Song conflict. The Liao–Song military balance is connected to strategic territory acquired through earlier concessions, while the costs of continued conflict reach ordinary people through raids and captivity. Beating the Grass Valley is therefore both a method of sustaining troops and a recurring expression of a war whose burdens are unevenly imposed. Xiao Feng’s response gives that system a human measure, without pretending that one act of mercy can break its cycle.