Dali

Dali, ruled by the House of Duan, is a sovereign kingdom whose political survival depends on more than its own borders. The account presents it as a state linked to the Northern Song by strategic necessity, governed through inherited dynastic authority, and implicated in conflicts that reach from the Central Plains to the northern frontier. Its rulers’ actions also reveal how personal honor, family ties, and state interest can converge—or pull against one another.

Monarchy and Regional Security

Dali’s ruler is the Duan family’s emperor, while other members of the royal clan travel beyond the kingdom and take part in affairs elsewhere. Duan Zhengchun, the emperor’s younger full brother and the South-Stabilizing Prince, is described as both a powerful prince and an accomplished martial artist. His status does not isolate him from the wider political world: Madam Ma explains that he entered a conflict involving the Central Plains because the fate of the Northern Song mattered to Dali’s continued security.

The reasoning is explicitly strategic. The Northern Song is described as Dali’s northern protective barrier: should the Liao Empire destroy it, the next step could be the absorption of Dali. The kingdoms are therefore likened to lips and teeth, mutually dependent despite their separate sovereignty. Duan Zhengchun’s intervention against Khitan warriors at Yanmen Pass is represented as publicly undertaken for the Northern Song but, in underlying purpose, also for Dali. The distinction makes his action both an act of honor and a defense of his own country’s interests.

This connection between the two states is not merely a retrospective explanation. When Duan Zhengchun is later confronted by Duan Yanqing in the Central Plains, his attendants urge him to withdraw to Dali and emphasize the importance of the country and the emperor’s concern for his safety. Their deference marks him as a member of the ruling house whose personal danger carries political consequences. Yet he does not simply abandon the people with him: aware that he is the strongest among the Dali party, he remains despite the threat.

Dynastic Authority and Family Ties

The House of Duan’s rule is presented as resting partly on accommodation with the Baiyi, a major people in Yunnan. Dao Baifeng, Duan Zhengchun’s first wife, is the daughter of a powerful Baiyi headman; the marriage strengthens the dynasty’s political position because, as the account explains, the Duan throne would be insecure without Baiyi support. The Baiyi practice monogamy, and Dao Baifeng’s opposition to her husband taking another wife is connected to that custom as well as to her own standing. Angered by his continuing romantic attachments, she enters religious life as a Taoist priestess.

Duan Zhengchun’s family relationships extend beyond his marriage. The narrative identifies Qin Hongmian as Mu Wanqing’s mother, Gan Baobao as Zhong Wanchou’s wife, and Ruan Xingzhu as A'Zi’s mother, each connected to Duan Zhengchun through an earlier love affair. These ties place the prince’s private history across several households and help explain why his travels and investigations in the Central Plains are also entangled with personal relationships.

Royal authority does not mean that every Duan prince remains at court. During an investigation into the killing of Venerable Xuan Bei, Duan Zhengchun travels from Dali with three senior officers—Fan Hua, Hua Hegen, and Ba Tianshi—and four imperial bodyguards. He follows doubtful evidence that challenges the suspicion against the Murong family of Gusu, while the absence of senior Shaolin monks for more than half a month leaves the inquiry unresolved. His journey thus combines a state-connected investigation with a visit to Ruan Xingzhu, with whom he spends the ensuing days.

Inherited Institutions and Strategic Geography

The political history of Liao provides a contrast to Dali’s dynastic setting and helps frame the kingdom’s exposure to regional power. Under the Liao succession tradition described in the narrative, an empress dowager could exert decisive influence over who inherited the throne. When the Holy Emperor favored his elder son, YeLu ZongZhen, the empress sought to raise her younger son, YeLu ZhongYuan, instead. ZhongYuan disclosed the scheme to his brother, who succeeded and later rewarded him with the status of royal emperor brother and the next place in the succession.

That earlier settlement shaped the later crisis. After YeLu ZongZhen’s death, the throne passed not to ZhongYuan but to his son, YeLu HongJi. HongJi granted his uncle exceptional honors, made him supreme commander of the army, and placed ZhongYuan’s son YeLu NieLuGu in command of the Southern Chancellery as Prince of Chu. The resulting concentration of military and dynastic power made the rebellion especially dangerous: when the Southern Chancellery proclaimed ZhongYuan emperor and denounced HongJi as a false ruler, the claim drew force from an unsettled succession history, not simply from a battlefield challenge. This account of Liao underscores the instability that a neighboring kingdom such as Dali must navigate.

Geography likewise shapes the region’s balance of power. The Liao capital Nanjing, also called Yanjing, stood within the strategically important Sixteen Prefectures ceded to Liao by Shi JingTang. Their position gave Liao a substantial military advantage in attacks southward, while the Northern Song struggled to recover the territory despite fighting for generations. The narrative connects this inherited territorial arrangement to the persistent vulnerability of the Song frontier—and, by extension, to the security concern that Duan Zhengchun invokes on Dali’s behalf.

Frontier Raiding and the Human Cost of Policy

The northern frontier is not depicted as a simple dividing line between states. The Jurchen and Khitan are at war, yet the tribespeople are said to admire heroic ability; when Xiao Feng, himself Khitan, arrives among the Jurchen, the chief HeLiBu and his son AguDa welcome him as an honored guest. The Jurchen’s response shows how personal recognition can cross political hostility, even as armed encounters remain close at hand.

That conflict becomes immediate when Khitan riders attack a Jurchen group without first clarifying the situation. An old Jurchen hunter is killed, and AguDa’s people are forced to retreat under a heavier Khitan force. Xiao Feng does not want to harm his own people, but he intervenes to protect the Jurchen: he dismounts two Khitan riders without killing them, then uses a bow to wound four more in the shoulder or foot. The episode presents affiliation as a lived conflict rather than a settled choice; Xiao Feng’s Khitan identity does not prevent him from responding to the danger facing his Jurchen hosts.

The same frontier logic governs raids on civilians. The Liao army is described as receiving neither rations nor salaries, leaving troops to seize necessities from neighboring lands. Such raids, called “Beating the Grass Valley,” are answered by retaliatory Song incursions known as “Beating the Standing Valley.” Civilians living near the borders bear the consequences, uncertain whether they will survive the next raid. The terms give these actions an official or customary label, but the narrative insists that they amount to robbery and expose ordinary households to continuing danger.

Xiao Feng encounters that system directly when Liao soldiers return with hundreds of Song captives, mostly young women and some boys, along with goods taken in a raid near Zhuozhou. A captain presents captives and valuables to Xiao Feng in expectation that he will choose from them. The sight recalls the reverse situation he once witnessed at Yanmen Pass, where Song soldiers had captured Khitan civilians. He recognizes the repeated pattern: one side raids, the other retaliates, and people taken from either community suffer alike.

When the captives plead for release, Xiao Feng frees them and warns them to move away from the border because he may not be able to protect them again. His decision gives concrete form to his growing refusal to treat ethnic identity as a measure of human worth. He wonders why people who speak and eat alike insist on dividing themselves into Khitan, Song, Jurchen, and Korean, only to answer raids with further killing and arson. Dali’s strategic dependence on the Northern Song and the wider region’s cycle of reprisal thus meet in one moral problem: state security may be pursued through military force, but the costs fall on people whose lives do not conform to the boundaries that governments defend.