Song narratives and the objectification of han 漢

The earliest and, in indirect ways, the most influential Song period accounts of Kitan Liao were included in Jiu wudai shi 舊五代史Footnote ¹³ and Xin Wudai shi 新五代史,Footnote ¹⁴ each of which narrated the founding of the Kitan state. The latter in particular was one of the sources of Qidan guozhi 契丹國志, the best known Song period record of Kitan Liao, attributed to Ye Yongli 葉隆禮 (fl. 1247–1260)Footnote ¹⁵ who wrote it at the instruction of the Song emperor Lizong 理宗 (Zhao Yun 趙昀, reigned 1224–1264). Qidan guozhi was composed about a century-and-a-half after the death of Han Derang, and incorporated passages from several significant Song state documents as well as evident summaries of commentary from Song records, supplemented by reports of travellers between Song and Kitan Liao. Han Derang is mentioned over 30 times (frequently posthumously), with his career described in detail and his character in some vivid ways. A century after Ye Longli, the Yuan imperial court in China commissioned Liao shi. Footnote ¹⁶ It is conventionally attributed to the editorship of Toqtogha (Tuotuo 脱脱, 1314–1356), who was a sort of series manager for Liao shi, Jin shi 金史, and Song shi 宋史.Footnote ¹⁷ Like most of the compilations in the series, the production was expeditious; Liao shi was compiled over the period 1343–1344.

The term hanren 漢人 is richly attested and deeply investigated in medieval Chinese histories;Footnote ¹⁸ in Liao shi, hanmin 漢民 is also commonly used.Footnote ¹⁹ Most often, it referred to persons abducted, captured, conquered, or enticed from China to border regimes. Qidan guozhi recounts a dialogue between the Kitan ruler Yelü Deguang 耶律德光 (902–927, Emperor Taizong) and his mother, in which she asks whether a hanren can ever rule over the hu 胡 (here, the Kitans), which the emperor rejects as impossible.Footnote ²⁰ Later the text moves to Han Derang, who appears to Song readers to be, in fact, a han ruling over the hu, and Ye Longli comments: ‘He managed national affairs with wisdom and far-sightedness, and it was his habit to guard the imperial fortunes 智略决国事, 雅重隆运.’Footnote ²¹ Ye also claims that Derang’s brothers and their sons eventually rose to numerous prominent positions on account of Derang’s merit. But Ye’s admiration for Derang was grudging. Song literati referred to the Kitan people as ‘northern slaves’ (beilu 北虜) and to Chinese civil servant populations in Kitan Liao—hanren—both as traitors to Song and as the explanation for the success and relative longevity of the Kitan Liao empire.Footnote ²² Song commentary on Liao, certainly, brooked no ambiguities in the identities and proper affiliations of the population of men of Chinese descent filling various roles in the Kitan Liao regime.

As many authors have already demonstrated, han was particularly difficult to define before the eighteenth century, in the sense that what was signified could be fluid. But the evidence indicates that the term’s earlier connotations were primarily political, not ethnic in a twentieth-century sense. States forming in the third century and later, both in China and in northern Asia, were frequently eager to invoke the prestige of the defunct Han 漢 empire (203 bce–220 ce). That prestige had rested upon the radically innovative institution of emperorship—introduced as the means of unified rule in China by the Qin empire in 221 bce and subsequently adapted in the Han as the basic state scheme. Emperorship was explicitly opposed to the traditions of aristocratic and collegial rule that had been ubiquitous across Bronze Age Eurasia and codified in the political texts of Zhou period China (circa 1050–256 bce); the Han dynastic founders had devised a stable mix of Confucian rhetoric with imperial institutions, reducing aristocratic rule to an ethical abstraction. Later states attempting to invoke Han prestige by replicating the institutional terms of the Han empire—most important, ‘emperor’ (huangdi 皇帝)—frequently endured prolonged tension between rulers attempting to aggregate power in their own hands (or at least in the imperial persona they were attempting to construct) and aristocrats attempting to preserve their own power and privilege. One of the landmarks in this history of imperial counterweight to entrenched aristocracies was the Zhenguan Zhengyao 貞觀政要 compiled by Wu Jing 武競 (670–749).Footnote ²³ It contains a dialogue from a tumultuous early period of the Tang empire. Li Shimin 李世民 (598–649, Tang Taizong 太宗) is portrayed as eager to create a political utopia in which an emperor rules with the harmonious assistance of his aristocracy and uses ‘high ministers from the han families’ (han jia zaixiang 漢家宰相) who ‘know the political system’ (zhi zhengti 識政體) to consult the histories and the laws to legitimate the emperor’s policies.Footnote ²⁴ The work was translated into Kitan large characters in 1046–1047, which made it accessible later to Jurchen readers after the demise of the Kitan state. It was also well known in Korea and Japan.

This political contestation had several cultural dimensions. The Han imperial institution required a law code and the education of bureaucrats who would act on behalf of the emperor, and in both instances this generally meant extensive importation of the Han law code, in Chinese (since at the time none of the Eastern Eurasian societies had their own writing systems), which in turn entailed male elite education in Chinese history and philosophy. ‘Han’ is repeatedly attested in the Wei shu 魏書Footnote ²⁵ as a reference to the cultural space that the Han empire had once occupied, as well as to both individuals and populations (hanren) with a connection to it, though the same space and the populations were part of the Northern Wei (386–535) domain.Footnote ²⁶ But ‘decorum of the Han officials’ (hanguan weiyi 漢官威儀)Footnote ²⁷ entailed the dress, music, rituals, and processionals used by Han period officials that had been committed to writing in the Later Han period; the handbook (hanguan yi 漢官儀) survived in fragmentary form, and in Sui and Tang times was collated, together with substantial annotation, as a guide to proper court behaviour. The practice of attempting to replicate Han court behaviour and dress continued to be described in imperial records as hanguan weiyi (or hanguan zhi weiyi 漢官之威儀) and always referred to the legitimating effect of Han protocols, not to officials of any particular ancestral group. In this sense it appears in the records of the Xixia (1038–1227), Yuan (1271–1368), and Ming (1368–1644)—the last an unusual use by a Chinese dynasty, but a clear reference to the restoration of Han-style imperial civil rule after the interlude of Mongol domination.Footnote ²⁸ In several regimes, including Northern Wei, Tang (618–906), and Jurchen Jin (1121–1234), debates at court by champions of the aristocratic collegial traditions against the imperial institutions were persistent and occasionally overt, and in such environments it was common for officials acting as part of the imperial power structure to be denominated as han—a direct reference to their political associations, but most likely in their own time accompanied by use of Chinese script, familiarity with Chinese texts, wearing of Chinese official clothing, performance of Chinese palace and court rituals, and, most frequently but not universally actual, Chinese descent.Footnote ²⁹ In Liao shi, Han official dress, ranks, and ritual procession are referred to as hanfa 漢法.Footnote ³⁰ This has tempted modern scholars to assume that the cultural cleavages must somehow have been primary and the political secondary, but the documents through which we know these episodes suggest that political and cultural could not be distilled in these contexts, and that political concerns were the most direct and explicit.

As Zhenguan zhengyao had prescribed, han were valued for their usefulness.Footnote ³¹ Across a swathe of eastern Mongolia and Manchuria before the sixteenth century, han was also a term for a servant or a dependent, and a series of verbs related to the Tungusic cognate (or loan) of han meant to support, to wait on, to be attendant upon.Footnote ³² Wang Zhonghan has noted that late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century Jurchen and Manchu usage tended to occur in the context of the menial tasks performed by the Sinophone workers in medicine and food preparation, agriculture, horse care, and estate management.Footnote ³³ This was evidently echoed in the modern period and accords with Lattimore’s comment that ‘both Khitat, the Mongol name for the Chinese, and Nikan, the Manchu name, have the vernacular connotation of “slave”’.Footnote ³⁴ This history of pejoratively associating terms for people migrating or abducted from China as servile can be dated at least as early as the Kitan; they can be assumed to go much earlier.Footnote ³⁵ Such folk connotations were reflected in the administrative terminology of the early Kitan state period. Han’er Footnote ³⁶—with the diminutive er 兒 appended—was the term for dependent Sinophone doctors, secretaries, interpreters, cartographers, architects, engineers, farmers, animal raisers and renderers, miners, fireworks experts, and others, most but not all of them impressed during the Kitan acquisition of the Sixteen Counties area of modern Tianjin and Beijing. In a passage from the Qidan guozhi previously cited here, the empress dowager asks why Yelü Deguang would himself wish to rule over han (literally as a ‘Han emperor’ handi 漢帝, in the style described above) and he responds to assembled courtiers, ‘Why do I provide the han’er with food and shelter? Because since ancient times I have heard of han assimilating (he 和) fan (foreigners), not of fan assimilating han. Because they will remember this, and know that I too am able to cherish them and assimilate them. 漢兒何得一餉眠 ? 自古但聞漢和番, 不聞番和漢。漢兒果能回意, 我亦何惜與和’.Footnote ³⁷

In Chinese society: Liao, the Han lineage of Jizhou is acknowledged as a distinct subset of han. As a group, the family presented to Wittfogel and Feng the idea of a hybrid ‘third culture’Footnote ³⁸ of han with knowledge of Kitan culture and the trust of the Kitan court. In print Wittfogel noted this difference first in the Han lineage’s lack of connection with the Kitan Liao examination system, which was regularly administered from 988 onwards; bureaucratic function and scholarly qualification were definitive of han who were not domestic or agricultural servants, but the Han of Jizhou were largely not participating.Footnote ³⁹ The Han lineage from Jizhou contrasted with someone such as the high official who had been Ye Longli’s original model han, Han Yanhui 韓延徽 (882–959), or to Shi Fang 室昉 (920–964), a Sixteen CountiesFootnote ⁴⁰ native (and author of an early Liao annalistic work) who was perfectly familiar with Kitan state practices and culture, while remaining recognizably Chinese in the records.Footnote ⁴¹ This ‘third culture’ idea of hybridity would prove extremely influential in English-language historiography of China and Inner Asia.Footnote ⁴²

Historicization of Liao and Jin imperial nativism

The question of whether or not consciousness of and personal commitment to an enduring cultural identity was a primary cause of institutional and political change in the medieval period is complex. Subordinate but distinct is the question of whether preservation of a native identity was a policy issue in Kitan Liao. An imposition of ethnicity upon Liao-period identities has a respectable pedigree in Xin Wudai shi, Qidan guozhi, and Liao shi, whose authors had a particular view from the Song documents of han serving in enemy regimes, and were not receptive to the idea that Chinese cultural identity could prove ephemeral against the charms of another civilization’s power, wealth, status, companionship, and comforts.Footnote ⁴³ Ouyang Xiu (1007–1072), who argued that hu were unlikely to respect or assimilate to Chinese civilization, provided one of the most vivid illustrations of Abaoji’s nativism: ‘I know Chinese, but I never speak it among the tribes, because I fear they will imitate the Chinese and become cowardly.’Footnote ⁴⁴

The question extends to Jurchen Jin because of the way that Jin imperial history was used by historians to establish a case for nativisim in both the Kitan Liao and Jurchen Jin courts. Wittfogel and Feng interpreted the apparent change of dynastic name from Da Liao back to Da Qidan as a nativist reaction to the prospect of Chinese surnames, dress, and customs.Footnote ⁴⁵ They (more importantly, Feng) reinforced the practice of reading Kitan Liao history through the lens of Jin history, particularly the Jin emperor Shizong 世宗 (Wanyan Yong, 完顔雍, or Ulu 烏祿, 1123–1189), whom they portrayed as fomenting a ‘nativist’ movement himself. Before Chinese Society this idea was firmly embedded in Japanese historiography in the 1930s through the work of Mikami Tsugio 三上次男 (1907—1987), and had become part of Chinese historiographical lore thanks to its amplification by Mikami’s student Jin (Aisingioro) Qicong 金啟孮 (1918–2004), as well as Yao Congwu 姚從吾 (1894–1970) and Feng Chia-sheng himself. Since the 1930s, Chinese historiography seems to have taken for granted that there is some evidence in the Jin shi that Jin Shizong imposed revivalist policies upon the language, religion, professions, marriage prescriptions, or local habitation of Jurchens in China.Footnote ⁴⁶ After Chinese Society, the idea of Liao and Jin culturalism was developed more extensively in English-language historiography with the 1976 publication of Jing-shen Tao’s The Jurchen in Twelfth-Century China.Footnote ⁴⁷

The frailties of this chain of associations lay in its recursivity: the documents only read as evidence of ethnic sentiment or revivalist enthusiasm if the reader wants them to. The Kitan and Jurchen emperors were dependent upon a coherent conquest class to allow them to govern such densely populated tracts of northern China as they controlled. Insisting that conquest forces refrain from identifying with the conquered is not ethnic in itself, but strategic. With respect to Kitan founder Abaoji, there is no corroboration in Liao shi or in known epigraphy of the words Ouyang Xiu attributed to him, no matter how often the passage is quoted. If he did not speak Chinese to his Kitan followers, it was probably because they, unlike Abaoji himself, were unlikely to understand it.Footnote ⁴⁸ With respect to Jin Shizong, Jin shi quotes him as twice referring to a ban (‘in the early period’) on Jurchens wearing Chinese clothes or taking Chinese surnames.Footnote ⁴⁹ But these policies did not apply in Shizong’s own time, and he did not forbid Jurchens from speaking Chinese, although he lamented that Jurchen soldiers spoke Chinese exclusively.Footnote ⁵⁰ Instances of him praising individuals who were fluent in multiple languages—especially foreigners who had learnt Jurchen—are unequivocal.Footnote ⁵¹ Most telling, his pronouncements did not provide later historians with any terminology for Jurchen culture or tradition. Jiufeng 舊風 is used six times, not merely as a nostalgic reference to life in the Jurchen homeland, Huining 會寧, but as a specific byword for qualities of hardiness, simplicity, honesty, and martial preparedness; in only one instance is it specifically contrasted to ‘customs of the Chinese’ (hanren fengsu 漢人風俗).Footnote ⁵² Jin Shizong’s lament was that people did not, as a result of common descent, necessarily have common cultural qualities; consequently martial hardiness and an awareness of Jurchen cultural traditions had to be deliberately inculcated—that is, the specifics of his pronouncements deny essentialism and focus consistently on the strategic retention of conquest class characteristics. In his admonition that Jurchen descendants in China should not forget their roots (wang ben 忘本),Footnote ⁵³ there is a sense of futurity that sounds a bit like an ethnic notion. But ‘roots’ can mean anything—parents, language, landscape, pastimes, religion, ancestry, profession, personal experience—and Shizong is not reported specifying any of them in these passages.

In fact, Shizong followed his father in completing the transfer of the Jin capital southwards to what is now Beijing, a move that accelerated the displacement of the power and prestige of the Jurchen aristocracy and appeared to privilege the Chinese population, among whom the Jurchens would now be a tiny minority. Shizong also continued his father’s centralizing policies, in many instances following the precedents of the Tang emperorship. Invocations of the traditional culture and language (without promising a return to traditional political forms) were patently political, intended to mollify Jurchen elites, and were contradicted by Shizong’s actual policies. Bans on Chinese clothing and surnames—before Zhizong’s time, and not restored by him—were typical of requirements intended to preserve status distinctions within a population. This is similar to his pronouncements about visiting Huining, and his wish that Jurchens would return there for periodic sojourns to experience ancestral life.Footnote ⁵⁴ He explicitly associates this in most instances with military preparedness, and never connects it to ancestors or primal loyalties to the Jurchen homeland. There is no point at which Jin shi describes Shizong as a Jurchen revivalist, or even suggests that ‘revivalism’ would have had any meaning at the time.

But the Mikami interpretation of Jin Shizong was not invented from nothing. It came from Qing (1636–1912)—that is, early modern—interpretations of Jin Shizong in court historiography. This interpretation itself evolved from the seventeenth- to eighteenth-century Qing emperors, and it was the eighteenth-century characterization of ShizongFootnote ⁵⁵ that impressed Mikami, who was himself heavily reliant upon eighteenth-century Chinese scholarship on the records of the Liao and Jin periods, particularly the annalistic and linguistic interpolations by Wan Sitong 萬斯同 (1638–1702) and Huang Dahua 黃大華 (ff. circa 1889).Footnote ⁵⁶ It is possible that the early Qing rulers did indeed invoke Jin Shizong, but this will always remain uncertain because of the frequent emendations of the records, which became more frequent in the Qianlong period (1736–1796), when an ideological imprint was also more insistent.Footnote ⁵⁷ Nurgaci (Taizu 太祖, 1559–1626) is reported to have looked to the Jin emperors, especially the first four (that is, ending with Shizong), as the great state builders in Manchuria. Hung Taiji (1592–1643, Taizong 太宗)Footnote ⁵⁸ certainly read the Jin shi with interest, and commissioned the translation of it (along with Liao shi and Yuan shi 元史) into Manchu in the 1630s. The Shunzhi (r. 1644–1661), Kangxi (r. 1662–1722), and Yongzheng (r. 1723–1735) emperors all mentioned Shizong as among the most important of their imperial predecessors in China (perhaps second in importance after Li Shimin of the Tang period),Footnote ⁵⁹ and the personal point of direct transmission of the Mandate of Heaven to Yuan, Ming, and on to Qing.Footnote ⁶⁰ They paid to augment his tomb, made multiple journeys there to worship, and drew repeated parallels between Shizong’s use of Beijing as a capital and their own. But what gets most attention is the quote by Hung Taiji in the Qing annals in which he lectured his sons and military commanders of 1636—as he was transforming the Aisin khanate into the Qing empire—on the importance of cultural conservatism: ‘From the moment Shizong took the throne, he planned diligently to follow the example of his ancestors, worked exhaustively to seek righteous governance, fearing only that his sons and grandsons would in practice use the customs of Han.’ Hung Taiji continued, ‘In clothing and language, Shizong adhered to the old system (jiuzhi 舊制), continually practicing riding and shooting, to perfect the martial arts. Despite this regimen, the rulers coming after him became ineffectual. They forgot about riding and shooting, then in the time of emperor Jin Aizong 哀宗 (1198–1234), there came a flood of crises, and the dynasty was destroyed.’Footnote ⁶¹

Hung Taiji is described here (in amended Qing records) reifying Jurchen tradition and ascribing that reification to Jin Shizong, something for which there is no foundation in Jin shi. His insertion of the term jiuzhi 舊制, which occurs frequently in Jin shi but never with the meaning Hung Taiji ascribes to it here, is striking.Footnote ⁶² In Hung Taiji’s pronouncement jiuzhi glosses to Manchu fe doro, which does mean ‘tradition’, and in Qing imperial edicts of the eighteenth century (not in Hung Taiji’s own time), it was used along with other catch phrases to contrast ostensibly Manchu values of simplicity, frugality, frankness, and loyalty to ostensibly Chinese values of extravagance, duplicity, hedonism, and unreliability.Footnote ⁶³ In Manzhou yuanliu kao 滿洲源流考 (1743)Footnote ⁶⁴ there are four references to Jin Shizong, and they reproduce the content and much of the wording of the comments attributed to Hung Taiji in 1636: Shizong is described as revering and preserving the customs of the ancestors, forbidding Jurchens to dress or speak like the Chinese, and requiring them to retain martial customs, lest the dynasty be lost.Footnote ⁶⁵ This is not what the Jin shi says, though the relationship of military preparedness to the fate of the empire is consistently stressed. Hung Taiji’s actual reverence for Shizong as a model of centralizing, innovative, effective rule is perhaps best preserved in his epithet for Shizong: ‘Little Yao and Shun 小堯舜’,Footnote ⁶⁶ not the most likely description for a Jurchen cultural revivalist or champion of ethnic identity. But the eighteenth-century retrojection of ethnic assumptions was characteristic not only of the legal and historiographical interventions of the Qianlong court, but of early modern imperial courts elsewhere; it became a primary conceptual source for twentieth-century understanding of not only Jurchen Jin history, but Kitan Liao before it.Footnote ⁶⁷

Axiomatic ethnicity and grand models of the Kitan polity

At the time that Chinese society: Liao was published, Carrington Goodrich hailed it as one of the seminal works of historiography of the 1940s and noted that it catapulted the relatively obscure Liao dynasty to the forefront of English-language knowledge of Asia. He also noted that the work exploded ‘the old idea that the Chinese absorb all their conquerors’.Footnote ⁶⁸ Though Wittfogel had not yet published his most famous book, Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power, his thesis was well known from his lectures. He emphasized the importance of large-scale irrigation systems, river management, and other public works in early agricultural societies, which required centralized, hierarchical, professional, and comparatively large government. He saw the suppression of conflict between aristocrats and commoners as the simplest explanation for the absence of historical transformation—on a European model—in ancient societies of Asia, the Middle East, and pre-contact Americas; this was commonly characterized as ‘Oriental despotism’, despite the fact that his model was never limited to Asian societies.Footnote ⁶⁹ In such scenarios, he suggested, political tensions most frequently arose between, on the one side, the rulers who used bureaucracies and civil law as their primary tools of power, and on the other side, aristocrats who tended to try to resist loss of power through the assertion of traditional codes of privilege and deference. The result was repeated transfers of power to aristocratic challengers who then pursued ruling dynastic power in their own right, rather than fundamentally transforming state and society. The reason, Wittfogel suggested, why even these border regimes with stronger aristocracies and weaker emperorships did not evince European-style progression lay in the role of ‘Chinese’ bureaucrats and advisers who persistently transmitted Han-style imperial bureaucratic influences to border states.

Similar arguments have also been made for Northern Wei, Jurchen Jin, and Qing—and by historical inference Tang—as stable political regimes in which military castes were not uniformly assimilated to Chinese culture and society, but civil servants were sufficiently Chinese—either by birth or by acculturation—to provide fiscal and administrative stability.Footnote ⁷⁰ These interpretations have also been applied to the survival of minority cultures, including Islam, settled in China not by ‘Sinicizing’,Footnote ⁷¹ but by hybridizing.Footnote ⁷² But there have also been instances of dynasties that were, for some time, ruling territories of cultural China—perhaps most prominently Northern Wei, Jurchen Jin, and Qing—based upon a conquest class with long connection to agricultural economies apart from China, and consequently larger populations compared to the nomadically derived conquest class of, as an example, the Mongols. Mark Elliott considers this a model of ‘limited assimilation’, which is the idea that ‘to the degree these regimes maintained their ethnic integrity they could expect to retain power in their own hands. The idea here is that alien conquest produced a situation whereby greater distance and fear obtained between ruler and ruled than was the case with Han imperial families.’Footnote ⁷³ Liao shi and Jin shi say nothing about maintaining ethnic integrity, but they do refer often to maintaining military preparedness through the preservation of familiar and long-honed skills at riding and shooting. Most likely through the influence of Owen Lattimore, Wittfogel seems to have been attracted to the border regimes of imperial China as case studies of Asian societies with relatively weak civil governments and therefore largely without the ability to dampen transformative forces in the way that Wittfogel attributed to China, Egypt, and other early centralized regimes. Exactly why his gaze fell upon Kitan Liao is unstated, but the easiest answer is that Chia-sheng Feng, upon whom Wittfogel was dependent for his translation, was a specialist on Liao history who had done undergraduate, master’s, and doctoral work on the sources of Liao shi and the hermeneutics of Kitan and Jurchen names.Footnote ⁷⁴ The confluence of Wittfogel’s theoretical orientation, Feng’s scholarly specialization, and the probable assumption on both their parts that Liao-period documents were limited enough in number that an authoritative volume could be completed in a suitable period of time seems to have determined the subject of their study.

In English- and Japanese-language historiography built from Liao shi and Qidan guozhi, imputations of ‘ethnicity’ to eleventh- and twelfth-century Inner Asians became part of the narrative of causes and effects in the Kitan Liao imperial period, especially in the seminal work of Shimada Masao (島田正郎, 1915–2009), one of the most important scholars who afterwards elaborated the idea that ‘dynasties of conquest’ (seifuku ōchō or zhengchao) was an objective (that is, existing independently of historical construction) phenomenon.Footnote ⁷⁵ This model of Chinese bureaucracy, which was used by some regimes originating at China’s borders and eventually conquering some or all of its territories, had a strong impact on Japanese historiography, particularly on Jitsuzō Tamura (田村實造, 1904–1999) in his Chūgoku seifuku ōchō no kenkyū 中国征服王朝の硏究.Footnote ⁷⁶ After 1949 it was strongly reflected in the seifuku ōchō premise of ethnic tension in these conquest elites, as they were pulled between their traditional martial cultures and the attraction of settled life in China. While this was understood to have destabilized the ruling castes (often resulting in short dynastic histories), state longevity was conversely attributable to the relative power of Chinese or Chinese-educated civil officials. Other Japanese scholars argued that Kitan Liao had followed the Northern Wei example in attempting to resolve these tensions by creating dual government, one nomadic and the other based on the Chinese bureaucracy, each to rule over distinct people.

Out of this model came dichotomies—Kitan and Han, sedentary and nomadic, civil and military—framing not only discussions of Liao history but of a much larger arc from Xiongnu to Qing. The influence of the dichotomous, diarchic model is strong enough that scholars who write of the plasticity and ephemerality of specific cultural identities under Liao—led perhaps in a general way by Fei Xiaotong (费孝通, 1910–2005)Footnote ⁷⁷ but in English-language historiography of Liao led by Nancy SteinhardtFootnote ⁷⁸ and Naomi StandenFootnote ⁷⁹—can even be criticized by other scholars, as in the case of Steinhardt, for tolerating ambiguities in, or inferring the insignificance of, the question of what might have been ‘Kitan’ or ‘Chinese’.Footnote ⁸⁰ In this interpretation of serial diarchy as a way of dealing with intractable ethnic power contests, the pattern continued in Manchurian history until the Qing period, with the implication that dual government was a patently ‘Man-Sen’ (‘Manchurian-Korean’) political pattern, marking North Asian states rising in opposition to China. In such cases, stability was achieved not by elevating Chinese civil officials but by limiting their administration to agricultural and commercial sectors and protecting nomadic or native sectors through direct administration from the court. Shimada placed Kitan Liao firmly on an arc from Xiongnu to Yuan. To him this helped to explain what he saw as the Kitan court wavering over time between, on the one hand, sponsoring Chinese-style reforms in naming, ritual, and dress and, on the other, becoming reactively protective of Kitan language and nomadic identity.Footnote ⁸¹

As is well known, Kitan Liao had a bifurcated government superficially consistent with the Man-Sen model, and in this case featuring a ‘Northern administration’ 北面 and a ‘Southern administration’ 南面Footnote ⁸² rather than a Kitan administration and Chinese administration. The Northern administration was clearly designed to administer the nomadic or semi-agricultural plantation areas of Mongolia and Manchuria, and the Southern administration was designed to administer the densely populated agricultural and urban areas of the former Sixteen Counties. Kitan may have been the normal language used in Northern business, and Chinese was certainly the language used in the South, yet the lack of surviving Kitan documentation raises insoluble questions over whether a significant amount of administrative communication in the Northern administration was really in Kitan, or if it was deliberately destroyed by later regimes. The structure of government in the Southern territories was a continuation of the pattern already used in the area for centuries, most recently by the Tang (618–905) and Later Jin (936–947) regimes. The Chinese population of the Sixteen Counties probably constituted more than half of the entire population of the empire, and together with the populous Bohai region of Dan gur in southern Manchuria very far outweighed the empire’s nomadic and semi-nomadic populations.Footnote ⁸³ The han’er administration and the Southern administration generally was for this reason important and its directors were men in whom the highest trust was placed.

The practice of continuing with the structure of local government of conquered territories under new command is a typical conquest technique, from Northern Wei to Qing; it is found in many other regions, and in many forms pervades the histories of European colonialism in South Asia and Africa. What Shimada, Wittfogel, Feng, and others added was the idea that ‘ethnic’ coherence controlled not only the form but the substance of the Kitan Liao Northern and Southern bifurcation. The fact that the early han’er directory (han’er 漢兒四) was the seed of (and remained appended to) what became the Southern administration seems to have encouraged the idea that ‘Southern’ was not a reference to a territory, political tradition, or economic pattern, but primarily to the people living there. Kitan Liao founder Abaoji (872–926) himself had prescribed that the two administrations would be divided by ‘custom’ (su 俗, which presumably means language, dress, and ritual), but from the middle levels upwards the personnel associated with the two administrations did not evince consistency in their origins, and whether Abaoji expected the system to be permanent is unclear. Liao shi does not show the functions of the Northern and Southern administrations of Kitan Liao to be exclusively derived from culture, nor could they in practice have been discrete. The Northern administration functions pertained to the nomadic economic zone and dependent peoples within it (whether Turkic, Xi, Bohai, or han), as well as the finances of the imperial household. The Southern administration oversaw taxation, rent, and criminal adjudication in the Sixteen Counties, and administered the acquisition and care of military horses.Footnote ⁸⁴ Men from powerful lineages (including the Han of Jizhou) often held the Southern Chancellery, more often held the Northern, and sometimes held both.Footnote ⁸⁵ Among the classes of dependent farmers, soldiers, labourers, and civil functionaries, han, hanren, and hanmin were terms that were of practical use in the Liao law code (in relationship to which the Liao shi suggests no need to define them) as markers of inferior status; for many violations, han were punished more severely than Kitans. Chinese descendants who remained in servile positions, even as functionaries of the civil government, remained han’er, and under the jurisdiction of the Southern administration unless they were registered in nomadic estates.Footnote ⁸⁶ The apparent key criteria for appointment to both the Southern and Northern chancellorships were demonstrated loyalty and competence. Cultural or lineage origins were of no demonstrated significance, despite the fictive association of ‘Kitan’ with the North and ‘Chinese’ with the South.

Han Zhigu, Han Kuangsi, and Han Derang on the ground

Documents and historians have a self-referential relationship. Historians of one era preserve documents according to their priorities, and historians of a future era read the surviving documents according to theirs. Archaeology has tended to disrupt this circularity, tossing up material evidence that was possibly not intended to be seen by those of the future and that perhaps does not fit the paradigms that historians have imposed on the past. Archaeology relating to Central and Inner Asia has consistently undermined modern construction of monolithic or essentialized identities, especially those embedded in a dichotomous framework that has been built up over a thousand years of historiography, and a hundred years of social science derived from it.Footnote ⁸⁷ For both Ye Longli and the later compilers of Liao shi (partly because both relied upon Song imperial documents), Kitan Liao history was largely the story of the geographical interface between Liao and Song, and the dichotomy between han and kitan. But this was a tiny portion of the real Liao imperial expanse, and there is no mention at all of the long wall (sometimes erroneously attributed to Jin, which built a different wall)Footnote ⁸⁸ constructed by the Kitan Liao government to manage the nomadic peoples on the borders of what is now northern Mongolia and southern Siberia. As a consequence, a fragment of historical Kitan Liao activities are reflected in the Liao shi (compare the maps in Figures 1 and 2). Only in the interstices does Liao shi suggest that Kitans were not alone at the centre of Liao government, aristocracy, and army, as they were closely

Figure 1.

Map showing Kitan Liao space as suggested by Liao shi. Source: The author.

Figure 2.

Map showing Kitan Liao space as suggested by Arabic, Persian, and Turkic sources. Source: The author.

associated in all matters with the Xi 奚 (Kai/Qai),Footnote ⁸⁹ and with Uighurs who were not external to the empire. This contrasts with Persian and Arabic sources, backed by occasional Turkic epigraphy, outlining very active trade and communications between Kitan Liao and the sultanates of Central Asia, and providing particulars not available in Chinese records.Footnote ⁹⁰ Tombs excavated in Inner Mongolia have long supplied objects showing the true extent of Kitan imperial engagement with all of North Asia, Central Asia, and Northeast Asia extending as far as the peoples of the Amur River, Sakhalin, Korea, and Japan.Footnote ⁹¹ In many ways the most dramatic archaeological developments have been the sites related to the Han of Jizhou—the necropolis near Baiyinwulasumu 白音勿拉苏木 village, north of the site of the Kitan capital at Shangjing,Footnote ⁹² and the tomb of Han Derang himself in Beizhen 北鎮, Liaoning province.

Han Zhigu (d. 936)Footnote ⁹³ is conventionally mentioned with Kang Moji 康默記 (d. 920?)Footnote ⁹⁴ and Han Yanhui 韓延徽 (882–959) as one of the original Chinese literati employed by Kitan founder Abaoji (Taizu 太祖, 872–926). Zhigu was abducted in the first decade of the tenth century at a very young age, long before the Sixteen Counties were surrendered in 938. Because he was literate he entered the service of the imperial family soon after he was taken, and married a woman of high rank. He was the first director of the han’er administrative department and his descendants were frequently appointed as its director. Zhigu was the founder—within the Kitan Liao territories—of the Han lineage of Jizhou, and he is best known to historians as the father of Han Kuangsi (917–982) and grandfather of Han Derang. He was also the progenitor of major lines of han civil bureaucrats of the Kitan Liao period who were not descendants of Han Kuangsi but of Zhigu’s many other sons; they lived in several political centres, and perhaps best known among them was Han Qixian 韓企先 (1081–1146) a noted late Liao and early Jin official.Footnote ⁹⁵ Such han were the numerical majority of Zhigu’s descendants, and appear to have been typical han or han’er functionaries. Both Chinese- and English-language historiography tends to ignore this majority, however, in favour of highlighting Kuangsi and Derang.

Han Kuangsi was fluent in Kitan from a young age, and it may even have been his first language. He was raised in the palace under the eye of the empress. He performed very few functions characteristic of a han official, and evinced none of the merit required from them. Kuangsi and his sons were, however adept navigators of aristocratic politics, and in 969 were leaders of a successful plot to depose Emperor Muzong 穆宗 (Yelü Jing 耶律璟, 931–969) and replace him with Emperor Jingzong 景宗 (Yelü Xian 耶律賢, 948–982). Titles and lucrative appointments flowed to Kuangsi and his sons. During the Jingzong reign Kuangsi was known for his charming personality, observance of ‘national customs’ (guosu), medical knowledge, bad strategic advice, and a disgraceful defeat by Song armies at Mancheng in 980, after which he received a public scolding from the emperor but no charges and no punishment.Footnote ⁹⁶ As I have pointed out before, Kuangsi’s life was not that of a han. It was that of a Kitan aristocrat and in fact most resembles that of his close friend and collaborator, Yelü Sha (耶律沙, d. 988).Footnote ⁹⁷ Not only was Kuangsi raised in the most privileged precincts of the empire and showered with titles, he was also repeatedly enfeoffed (that is, given revenue-producing prefectures, touxia 投下).Footnote ⁹⁸ These enfeoffed territories were generally endowed with plentiful dependent labourers (a lot of them drawn from China), who worked the farms and animal pens, or manufactured ceramics, textiles, or weapons.

For at least the last decade of his life Kuangsi was aided or in fact represented by his favoured son, Derang, in many official duties. Derang’s first, extremely youthful, appointment was in the han-staffed segments of the bureaucracy (dongtou 東頭), which remained close to his administration for the remainder of his life.Footnote ⁹⁹ After Kuangsi’s death in 982 Derang formed a political partnership with the empress dowager Chengtian 承天皇太后 (Xiao Chuo 蕭綽 or Yanyan 燕燕, 953–1009) that endured until her death in 1009.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Derang became a legendary military commander in the war against Song, was known as an effective and compassionate administrator, and was so trusted by the highest-ranking councillors that he filled their positions when they were ill. This ultimately resulted in him simultaneously running both the Northern and the Southern administrations. Like his father he was awarded not only a number of enfeoffed counties but also his own estate (fu 府) in the last year of his life. He basically owned the region that is encompassed today by the city of Beizhen, Liaoning; among his possessions were about 5,000 unspecified (most likely Kitan) households, and another 8,000 households that included both han and fan. In the last years of his life Derang was given the imperial surname Yelü and the personal name Longyun, the two characters—‘imperial’ (or ‘dragon’) and ‘fortune’—later used by Ye Longli to describe Han Derang’s career.

In death, the discontinuity between Han Zhigu and his descendants who became Kitan aristocrats is stark. Despite the fact Han Zhigu is not known to be buried at the Baiyinwulasumu complex, many historians and archaeologists persist in referring to the necropolis as ‘centred on the family of Han Zhigu’.Footnote ¹⁰¹ The site of Han Zhigu’s tomb, if it survives, is unknown at present, but is very likely located in the Liaoxi valley (the site of the capital city of Shangjing in which the majority of the family spent their careers),Footnote ¹⁰² where many of his descendants who remained han and served as bureaucrats are buried. The centre of the Baiyinwulasumu necropolis is manifestly not Zhigu, but his son, Han Kuangsi: the tomb complex is near a town that was awarded to Kuangsi’s descendants in 991, Kuangsi is buried there, and familial relationship to him appears the clearest criterion for inclusion.Footnote ¹⁰³ At both Baiyinwulasumu and Beizhen, some of the important tombs, including those of Kuangsi and Derang, are in the rounded pattern long noted in the archaeology of Goguryeo and Balhae sites, and common for Chinese tombs of the Tang period, but not Song.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

The Baiyinwulasumu tombs have epitaphs, many of them long, in Kitan, and in many cases the texts can be correlated to biographical entries in Liao shi.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ But the necropolis solves some puzzles left by Liao shi. In the history, Han Zhigu appears to have only one son, making it easy for much later readers to see him as founder of a ‘third culture’. But the epitaphs at Baiyinwulasumu cumulatively make it clear that he had 11 sons, some of them full brothers of Kuangsi born of a consort-class wife, and others born of a concubine or second wife.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ All the sons seem to have gone on to achieve high ranks. Ye Longli noted the ubiquity of Han of Jizhou descendants at the highest levels of the military and the bureaucracy; he attributed this to Han Derang, who had no sons himself, but after whose death honours flowed to his nephews and grand-nephews. But the necropolis makes clear that the rise of the family dated much earlier. The prominence of the Han of Jizhou dates virtually to the founding of the Kitan state. By the time that Kuangsi was a young man, his brothers had already become influential at court and in the military hierarchy, and were visible in the civil government to a lesser degree. Kuangsi and his brothers may already have been aristocrats, or were very close to that status; Kuangsi’s own sons were aristocrats in full, and it was he more than Han Derang who accounted for the status of his descendants. This is what is physically commemorated by the Baiyinwulasumu necropolis.

In Han Derang’s tomb at Beizhen, the epitaphs in Chinese and in Kitan celebrate Han Derang (both under that name and as Yelü Longyun) as the owner of Changli 昌黎 (a name derived from a third-century military district).Footnote ¹⁰⁷ While Liao shi connects Han Derang to Shangjing (the most frequently mentioned locality in connection with the descendants of Kuangsi) and Nanjing (where he was based for a time as dual director of the North and South administrations), archaeology, in contrast, focuses his presence in Liaoning province. His mission there is suggested by a few remarks in his Liao shi biography and clarified by the extensive archaeology at this site. After the conclusion of war with Song in 1005, Kitan Liao strategic attention shifted east to the populous area of Dan gur, once the political centre of the Bohai polity, and still the residence of Bohai who had not been transferred to servile work in Mongolia. Kitan rule over the region had proved difficult, partly because of the attempts of Abaoji’s eldest son Yelü Bei (Tuyu 突欲, 899–937) to create a secessionist regime there in the early tenth century, and partly because of the long history of distinct political traditions there.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Han Derang moved to the region to reinforce Kitan control, and ran his personal estate there with well over 10,000 households, most or all of whom were captives from the Sixteen Counties or from Dan gur. Having been, uniquely, the prime minister (zaixiang) of the Kitan Liao bureaucracy, Han Derang ended his days as its greatest military authority, occupying its most volatile sector.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

The break in status between Han Zhigu, a han servitor of the Kitan imperial family, and Han Kuangsi, a privileged Kitan speaker, virtual adoptee of the imperial lineage, and mover behind the coup of 969 that put Jingzong in power, was already clear enough in the narratives in Qidan guozhi and Liao shi, but had become overlaid by a much later narrative of a ‘third culture’, giving the Kitan Liao empire a peculiar profile. But on the ground that break is incontrovertible. Epitaphs acknowledge descent from Han Zhigu, as they acknowledge descent from other lineages, but their spacing from Han Zhigu’s burial place, wherever it is, speaks of the true disparity between his status and theirs. By descent, Kuangsi was at most half Chinese (the case with all of Han Zhigu’s children) and his sons had a Chinese grandfather but no other known Chinese ancestral lines. Liao shi makes it obvious that, from Kuangsi on, the family, who remained part of the powerful political clique, were native Kitan speakers. But the point on which Liao shi is silent—whether ancestry (apart from its political implications) had much to with the identity of any of these men—is eloquently expressed in the archaeology. Han Derang himself is not buried anywhere near his father, who is not buried anywhere near his father. Han Kuangsi’s necropolis is most likely located near his landholdings in life, and Derang’s tomb is carefully located in the middle of his lands far to the east of the Baiyinwulasumu complex. The arrangement suggests that Kuangsi’s and Derang’s identities were each represented in relation to their respective estates. Each man in this generational sequence from Zhigu to Derang was ascribed a distinct identity, dependent not on ancestry, or language, or a sense of common descent, but upon rank and relationship to sources of wealth and military power in real time. Rank was an absolute, and could be unambiguously expressed in space as well as time.

There is nothing remarkable in the fact that a hundred years on, some descendants of tenth-century Chinese bureaucrats serving the Kitan Liao were still recognizable as han bureaucrats (despite, in this case, obvious Kitan ancestry), while their distant relatives were Kitan aristocrats. The Han of Jizhou descended from Han Kuangsi are not the only population whose character has been obscured by an ideology of twentieth-century historiography that equates lineage (in most cases a single lineage among innumerable ancestral lines) with ethnicity. The ‘Xiao’ lineage that is depicted in Qidan guozhi and Liao shi as intermarrying, over and over again, with men named Yelü was probably not a lineage, but a consort status distributed to a range of lineages eligible to marry Yelü; what the Kitan term for this status might have been is unclear, since ‘Xiao’ or its cognate has not yet been recognized in Kitan epigraphs.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Indeed, the idea that Yelü itself was a lineage or clan is not supported by Kitan epigraphy. The ‘national name’ appears to have been applied to an amalgamation of genealogical Abaoji descendants together with other lineages given factitious kinship to it by way of universalizing their aristocratic status. We know something of the deep ancestral diversity of Yelü, because at least three Chinese lineages attested in Liao shi—the Li ancestors of Yelü Zhongxi (Li Zhongxi 李仲禧, f. 1058–1080), the Zhang ancestors of Yelü Xiaojie (Zhang Xiaojie, 張孝傑, f. 1055–1080), and the Chen ancestors of Yelü WangjiuFootnote ¹¹¹—were all inducted into the aristocracy when given the ‘national surname’ (guoxing 國興). Many more are revealed through the necropolis epitaphs. Aristocrats of Bohai origin were also evident, including the last acting king of Bohai, Da Yinzhuan (Dae Inseon, 大諲 譔, r. 907–926), as early as the first decades of Kitan Liao statehood.Footnote ¹¹² These aristocrats were the ‘Kitan’ of the Kitan Liao empire. The genealogical reforms proposed (and later rejected by the emperor) in 1074 would have fictionalized ‘Yelü’ and ‘Xiao’ as lineage surnames 姓 instead of status signifiers, and condemned the constant marriages between people of the same surname as improper. There is no need to characterize rejection of this proposal as nativist or revivalist. Such legislation might have been superfluous because Kitan naming provided lineage specificity that did not remain legible in Chinese. In any event, it would have dismantled the aristocracy by vaporizing the labels that identified it.

Rank, dependency, and identity in medieval northeast Asia

Han and han’er, similar to the more generic fan, were labels of subordination in the Kitan Liao order—the labels themselves were the history of these populations’ dependency and the gifting of them to Kitan aristocrats. When captured or gifted, these populations were brought into group registries that were part of the patrimonial systems that persisted in a basic form from at least Xiongnu times to Qing. These patrimonies and the dependent populations within them were defined by the variable and, in some ways, elusive institution that here, for convenience, can be called the ‘ordo’, best known in Chinese as the word that was used by the Kitans (ordo, in the Liao shi, woluduo 斡耳朵); this includes the ‘estate’ (fu) granted to Yelü Longyun after his transfer to Liaoning.Footnote ¹¹³ Its meaning for the Uighur empire and other medieval Turkic regimes was clearly that of a fixed installation, originally military, but eventually taking on the meaning of ‘estate’ or ‘palace’ (able to be passed as patrimony, as the space and population under the control of a specific owner, who could be anyone from the khan down to a designated local magnate). Through the Turkic regimes of the middle period the term ordo/ordu virtually always required some kind of central palace or fortification, thus Ordu-Balikh was the palace-town of the Uighur khaghans. In Liao shi, ordo appears more administrative than strictly territorial, and constitutes a grant (or recognized proprietorship) of people, herds, weapons, and other assets. It is also reflected throughout Liao shi as the registers (zhang 帐), which were originally lists of household goods attached to nomadic camps. Cultural labels were used for populations grouped under patrimonial registries (as households, hu), while in Liao shi non-aristocratic populations who had not been distinguished by a history of servility and gifting—that is, people we would today refer to as ‘Kitan’—were zhenghu (正戶, ‘standard households’).Footnote ¹¹⁴ This general framework, as a political organization encompassing populations, is important in understanding the differentiated histories of the descendants of Han Zhigu and Han Guangsi in the Kitan regime. These generations were not united by ethnicity, but separated by institutions of collective dependency and aristocratic ownership. The descendants of Han Kuangsi were released from the ordo (presumably the imperial ordo), but returned to it sometime in Derang’s maturity because of an offence committed by some member of the lineage (a punishment visited upon aristocrats regardless of ancestry). Derang himself was given the imperial name, released from the palace ordo, inducted into the patriarchal chamber of the ‘horizontal tents’ (hengzheng jifufang 橫帳季父房), permitted to change his personal name, invested as a prince, and given his own land, residence, and tomb site, all of which either could have happened in quick succession after 1005, or could have been multiple aspects of a single event.Footnote ¹¹⁵ More of his relatives were released at the request of a later Kuangsi descendant.Footnote ¹¹⁶

It is unclear how many terms accepted today as ethnonyms functioned before the early modern period more as indicators of rank or status.Footnote ¹¹⁷ The casualness with which identifying terms, or names (they can be difficult to unravel), for royals and aristocrats is consistent with a looseness in the ways that North Asian regimes generally approached questions of what would now be called autonyms.Footnote ¹¹⁸ What they called themselves, or what others called them, could be fungible to a degree that has puzzled modern historians, who live in an era of reified ethnicity and fastidiousness in group naming. As early as the Xiongnu it was evident that in communication with other regimes, especially China, there was a lack of consistency in distinguishing the names of ruling lineages from the names of dynasties (if they existed), from the names of federations or lineages among the aristocratic or military populations.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Identities appear to have been appended only irregularly, if at all, to names construed today as ethnonyms. The records suggest that among nomadic or semi-nomadic peoples identities were drawn from the spirits through whom they mediated their concerns, the war leaders for whom they would sacrifice their lives, and the patrimonies—basically constituted by ordo—to which they may have been entitled by direct inheritance, none of which correspond to what modern social science considers ‘ethnicity’. They often referred to themselves corporately by whatever name would make sense to the readers at the other end of the correspondence—in the Chinese case, most likely to be hu of one category or another.

Scholars of language history, perhaps foremost among them Juha Janhunen and Andrew Shimunek, have done a great deal to demonstrate the entangling of languages across Northeast Asia and Mongolia,Footnote ¹²⁰ which is inseparable from the entangling of rank designations. Christopher Beckwith suggested that Ashina—usually taken as the name of the ruling lineage of the Gokturk khaghanateFootnote ¹²¹—was originally a rank name for a royal or an aristocrat, misconstrued in Chinese records as a lineage or tribal name.Footnote ¹²² Indeed, looking at Ashina as an aristocratic class with origins among the Särbor perhaps as early as the Xiongnu—but continuously dominating or resurfacing in the political structures of the Avars, Gokturks, and Khazars, and probably linked to the aristocracies of the Shiwei (who lived under Kitan Liao domination), Xi, Tangguts, Shatuo Turks, and Kitans—provides a simple way of narrating a vector of cultural development that was in many ways independent of the very wide spectrum of genetic and linguistic diversity that is amply demonstrable for the broadly confederated populations historically designated ‘Xiongnu’, ‘Hun’, ‘Avar’, ‘Tabgach’, ‘Türk’, ‘Kitan’, and so on. For the Kitans, this continuity was a conviction expressed in epitaphs, where aristocrats asserted their descent from Tagbach/Särbi rulers of the Northern Wei period (corroborated by histories and archaeology of the Five Dynasties period).Footnote ¹²³ For them, aristocratic life combining literacy in Chinese, practice of Turkic shamanism, falconry and hunting from horseback,Footnote ¹²⁴ and belief in or at least patronage of Mahayana Buddhism was not a derivative cosmopolitanism but a stable culture linking Kitan-era aristocrats with their predecessors of three, four, or five centuries before.Footnote ¹²⁵ Kitan aristocrats exhibited their habitation of this stable milieu from a very early point, as they had inherited it from the Northern Wei period. Abaoji knew Chinese, and facility in multiple languages was often noted as a virtue of Yelü 耶律 men (consistent with Jin Shizong’s later praise of all men who were competent in more than one language).The Liao shi contains repeated praise for individuals proficient in both Kitan and Chinese.Footnote ¹²⁶ Praise for being good at shooting from horseback and also loving ritual and Chinese literature was standard fare for aristocratic biographies in the Liao shi.Footnote ¹²⁷ Emperor Xingzong (1016–1051) wrote poetry in Chinese. Abaoji’s eldest son Yelü Bei led a life which was on one side that of a Kitan crown prince, on another a talented scholar and champion of Confucianism, on another a renegade who tried to create his own kingdom in Dan gur, and on another a fugitive painter sheltered by the Shatuo Turks who, under the name Li Zanhua 李贊華, produced the exquisite images that have indelibly identified the Kitans in global history.Footnote ¹²⁸

The apparent superfluity of collective names in the case of aristocrats may been produced by the fact that aristocratic identity was already well defined not only by formal status (in the Kitan case, usually membership in the ‘horizontal tents’ and use of the Yelü surname) but also by a cultural style. In the case of Kitan aristocrats it was inseparable from their critical political function, which was to weave together patrimonies and aristocratic property holders who might otherwise be separated by historical enmity, economic rivalries, disparate spirit veneration, language, or dialects.Footnote ¹²⁹ It linked aristocrats of tenth- and eleventh-century Mongolia and Manchuria to the dynastic cultures of Northern Wei, Northern Zhou, Northern Qi, and Tang: with familiarity with Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism; with literacy in Chinese as well as local languages (if written); and with pastimes encompassing both hunting with falcons and reciting Chinese poetry.Footnote ¹³⁰ This was not a cultural pattern, whether ‘hybrid’ or ‘cosmopolitan’, that repeatedly and independently evolved in regimes bordering China. It may also not have been a continuing population (though elements may have had long histories). But it was a continuing tradition that was well exemplified in the Kitan aristocratic class, and in fact codified in obvious ways in the recorded utterances of Jin Shizong that have otherwise been interpreted as ethnic.

Possibly because reading and writing of Chinese, and knowledge of Chinese literature and arts, were so characteristic of these aristocratic classes who ruled some part of historical China, outside entities repeatedly identified these regimes as ‘China’. During and after Northern Wei, Tabgach (and many variants) was a widely used name for the territory of northern China.Footnote ¹³¹ Something very similar was evident after the Kitan period, when ‘Kitan’ in various forms became a term referring to China.Footnote ¹³² This amalgamated identification of North China with Kitan was not limited to aristocrats. A Korean glossary that probably originated in Kitan times uses qida 乞大 (as pronounced in modern standard Chinese; Korean goelda) as a reference to the style of spoken language in northern China that was basically Chinese but with grammatical and lexical elements incorporated from Turkic and Särbi language as well as Kitan.Footnote ¹³³ The same general phenomenon allowed the Jin and Yuan states, subsequently, to use han and khitai interchangeably.Footnote ¹³⁴ This became a staple of Jurchen Jin law and administrative use. In effect han during the Jin period meant non-Jurchen, non-nomadic populations.Footnote ¹³⁵ At least part of this merging of terms must have been inspired by the fact that the Kitan polity (the source of virtually all the epigraphy by which the language is known) developed limited vocabulary referring to itself. The language (as a noun more than a proper noun) was generally referred by Kitan words with the qid. root, but instances in which the term applies to people—as contrasted to a language or a state—remain ambiguous, at best. This does not mean people were never indicated, it means the designation of a people by this term was not a priority and, perhaps, was conceptually useless.

In the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries we may theorize ‘ethnicity’ as a durable and significant part of identity—perhaps even its whole—but in tenth- and eleventh-century Eurasia there is little evidence this was true. With respect to Kitan Liao, the evidence is that Yelü, Xiao, han, and fan were all status or rank terms, and subject to mutation as status itself changed. Their connection to patrilineal descent, and particularly to patrimonial rights, is clear, but this does not equate to racial or ethnic consciousness. The administrative dynamics of the Turkic and Kitan ordo, and the practice of linking histories of conquest, ownership, and exchange to cultural labelling of dependent populations provided elements that ultimately contributed to a modern social science of objectified ethnic identities. In the early modern period, the construction, enforcement, and historicization of selected cultural identifications were essential for the management of conquest and occupation, and became even more important in periods of transition from occupation to civil government; later, it fitted racial concepts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.Footnote ¹³⁶ By the nineteenth century, the result was the naturalization of concepts of ‘nationality’ and ‘ethnicity’ in academic discourse, and these interventions continue to animate retrospective projections onto societies before the early modern period. But the imposition of the concepts of ‘ethnicity,’ ‘hybridity’, and ‘cosmopolitanism’ on the medieval period and earlier is demonstrably done free of the evidence from epigraphy, archaeology, and written history.