Qiao Feng’s Khitan identity and conflict of belonging

Qiao Feng’s Khitan identity and conflict of belonging shape his passage from expulsion in the Central Plains to life among the Jurchens and service in the Liao court. His ancestry does not settle where he belongs: the Central Plains condemn him as an enemy, the Jurchens welcome him despite their war with the Khitans, and his own actions repeatedly challenge the violence carried out in the name of those affiliations. The resulting conflict is both personal and political, rooted in a frontier where communities meet through trade, warfare, and the capture of civilians.

Identity and Expulsion

Qiao Feng’s Khitan background becomes inseparable from the public story told about him after his expulsion from the Beggar Clan. People in the martial world say he is Khitan and accuse him of killing his parents, his martial teacher, and his friends. The charges collapse his complicated past into a single hostile account: his ancestry is presented as further proof that he is contemptible and dangerous. Hidden nearby, he hears the accusations and feels the weight of being despised across the Central Plains.

That rejection clarifies the immediate cost of his divided identity. He says he cannot remain in the Central Plains or seek revenge for his parents’ deaths, and resolves to go north, beginning at Yanmen Pass. The decision is not a return to secure belonging. It is a departure from a place that has made his identity grounds for exclusion, undertaken while the unresolved losses that bind him to that place remain with him.

A Welcome Across the Frontier

Among the Jurchens, Qiao Feng encounters a different response. He meets Wanyan Aguda after a hunt, and the two exchange their names and ethnic identities: Qiao Feng identifies himself as Khitan, while Wanyan Aguda identifies himself as Jurchen. Their language differs, but the encounter establishes a personal recognition that does not depend on speaking the same tongue.

The welcome matters because the Jurchens and Khitans are at war. The Jurchen chief, Helibu, is Wanyan Aguda’s father, and Wanyan Aguda’s standing among his father and fellow tribesmen helps secure Qiao Feng’s reception as an honored guest. He gives up his own tent for Qiao Feng and A’Zi, and the tribe holds a feast for their guest. The Jurchens’ admiration for a capable hero outweighs resentment toward a Khitan in this encounter; communal hospitality interrupts, without erasing, the political hostility between their peoples.

The Cost of Choosing a Side

That hospitality is tested when Qiao Feng and Wanyan Aguda encounter a Khitan force attacking Jurchens. The Khitans call for the Jurchens to be shot, and arrows kill an old Jurchen hunter. Wanyan Aguda rallies his people as the two sides exchange fire. Qiao Feng, who feels an intimate connection to the Khitans as his own people, initially does not know which side to help.

He refuses to turn that uncertainty into a choice between killing Jurchens and abandoning them. Rather than harm his own tribesmen, he disarms two Khitan riders and throws them clear of their horses. When the Khitan force presses its attack and Wanyan Aguda’s people are outnumbered, Qiao Feng joins their defense, shooting four Khitans from their horses but ensuring that none is killed. His intervention protects the Jurchens while limiting the harm to the Khitans. The scene makes belonging an ethical problem in action: kinship pulls one way, gratitude and immediate danger another, and he tries to honor both by stopping the assault without taking lives.

His recognition as Khitan becomes more explicit when he later meets Yelu Ji. Qiao Feng reveals the green wolf-head tattoo on his chest, and Yelu Ji rejoices that he has found a man descended from their Khitan people. Yelu Ji invites him to return to the Liao capital and share in its wealth. Qiao Feng declines, saying that wealth does not suit him and that he is content to live among the Jurchens, hunting and drinking. He promises to visit his sworn brother in Liao if he misses him. His answer separates ethnic recognition from political allegiance: he accepts the bond Yelu Ji offers without agreeing to relocate or abandon his chosen life.

Affiliation, Duty, and the Liao Court

The conflict becomes more complicated when the Liao succession crisis draws Qiao Feng into imperial affairs. The account of that crisis reaches back to the reign of his grandfather, Yelu Longxu. When Longxu chose his eldest son, Yelu Zongzhen, as successor, the empress favored her second son, Yelu Zhongyuan, and sought to place him on the throne. Zongzhen disclosed the scheme to his brother, who supported him rather than taking power. Zongzhen later honored Zhongyuan and placed him next in succession, but after Zongzhen’s death the throne passed instead to his son, Yelu Hongji.

Once emperor, Yelu Hongji compensated his uncle with the title of royal emperor uncle and supreme command of the army, while granting Zhongyuan’s son Yelu Nielugu the title of Prince of Chu and control of the Southern Chancellery. These inheritances and appointments leave Hongji dependent on a powerful uncle and cousin. When Nielugu’s rebellion begins, a forged political account declares Hongji illegitimate and Zhongyuan the rightful emperor, putting the emperor’s authority—and Qiao Feng’s sworn-brother relationship with him—under pressure.

Qiao Feng is reluctant to serve as a Liao official because he grew up in the southern Song world and does not wish to conquer Song. Yet he cannot simply leave while his sworn brother faces rebellion. Later, after Hongji makes him Lord of the Southern Chancellery, he decides to go to Nanjing with A’Zi, remain for a time, and seek resignation rather than immediately reject the appointment. The choice does not resolve his divided affiliations; it shows how obligations to a sworn brother can draw him into a state whose military aims conflict with the society in which he was raised.

Border Raids and a Chosen Allegiance to People

In Nanjing, Qiao Feng encounters the consequences of that conflict in a column of Liao soldiers returning from a raid. About eight hundred troops bring captured goods and hundreds of Song civilians, most of them young women. The captain presents the raid as a successful operation and offers captives and valuables to Qiao Feng. For him, the scene recalls the reciprocal pattern he has seen at Yanmen Pass: Song soldiers capture Khitan civilians, and Liao soldiers capture Song civilians.

The raids are described as a system of military provisioning. The Liao government does not supply rations or pay its troops, so soldiers take what they need from neighboring peoples in campaigns called “Beating the Grass Valley.” Song forces retaliate with raids known as “Beating the Standing Valley.” The labels make the violence sound like a settled practice, but people near the borders bear its costs repeatedly, living with the threat of capture. Qiao Feng regards the practice as cruel and immoral, and his reluctance to serve long as an official is sharpened by the sight of its human consequences.

When a Song girl begs to return to her parents, hundreds of captives kneel with her. One young man alone remains standing and claims to have a secret he must tell Qiao Feng privately. The moment places an individual appeal for mercy beside the political logic of intelligence and warfare: Qiao Feng considers whether the boy may have military information, but the prisoners’ presence soon makes the larger question unavoidable. He recalls that, had his parentage not been exposed, he would still have considered himself a citizen of Song. Shared language and food make the distinction between him and the captives difficult to justify, while the cycle of raids turns each side’s civilians into the other’s targets.

After the soldiers have left, Qiao Feng releases the captives and urges them to return home and move away from the border, warning that he may not be able to protect them another time. They hesitate at first, uncertain whether the order is a trap, then accept his mercy and depart in gratitude. This act gives practical force to his refusal to equate ancestry with moral duty. He remains Khitan, has accepted a Liao office, and has ties among the Jurchens; nevertheless, when state violence places civilians before him, he chooses their lives over the demands of military allegiance. The conflict of belonging therefore remains unresolved, but his conduct establishes a principle within it: political boundaries do not make the people caught between them less human.