Journal of Song-Yuan Studies

Until the excavations of the huge tomb complex at Baiyinwulasumu,¹ our narratives of the group of people usually thought of as the Han 韓 lineage of Jizhou were governed by the view taken of them by their contemporaries in Song and the historians employed by Yuan to write the Liao history. Today our knowledge of the group is not only larger by several orders of magnitude, but profoundly different in character. The tomb complex at Baiyinwulasumu allows us better to see this group as they saw themselves, and as their own Kitan contemporaries placed them in the Kitan/Liao hierarchy. Baiyinwulasumu is not merely a tomb city but a space circumscribed by Kitan aristocratic status, where inclusion and exclusion are verdicts on identity.

Han Derang 韓德讓 (940–1011), known at the end of his life and ever afterward in Liao sources as Yelü Longyun 耶律隆運, is the single best-known individual of the Kitan/Liao² period, and his life may be outstanding among tenth-century lives worldwide. Anecdotes illustrating his honor and sagacity pepper the biographies of other Liao luminaries. His intriguing but elusive relationship with Chengtian 承天皇太后, the empress of Emperor Jingzong 景宗, caught the fancy not only of the Liao historians and their Yuan editors, [End Page 51] but also Song scholars such as Ye Longli 葉隆禮, who wrote of the character and accomplishments of Han Derang with great relish in Qidan guozhi 契丹國志.³ Song officials and writers had a special interest in Yelü Longyun because he had been their most formidable enemy in their wars against the Kitan state in the late tenth and very early eleventh century. But they also considered him the epitome of a class of Kitan subjects with whom they felt a special, though not altogether happy, tie. He was the leading han’er 漢兒, a Chinese serving the Kitan. Han Derang was also the central figure of the translated materials and the commentaries of Wittfogel and Feng’s “History of Chinese Society: Liao (907–1125” (1946), and even today his reflected or pilfered glamour is able to raise the visibility and the price of certain recovered treasures.⁴

Historians have taken Derang’s life as an index of distinct and sometimes contradictory developments in the cultural and political development of the Kitans. Many, outstanding among them Jin Yufu 金毓黻, saw Derang and his lineage (variously designated as of Yutian 玉田 or of Jizhou 薊州)⁵ as emblems of the reliance of northern empires on the accomplishments, education, and loyalty of Chinese scholar-bureaucrats; these were the “useful” [End Page 52] Chinese who were visible in virtually every northern empire.⁶ For Wittfogel and Feng, Derang and his lineage were representative of a “third culture” under the Liao empire, neither Kitan nor Chinese. To others, Derang represents the cosmopolitan nature of Liao court culture and the flexibility of Liao administration.⁷ Liu Pujiang and others have taken the lineage of Derang as an example of “Kitanization” of Chinese or han 漢⁸ under Liao rule.⁹ The differing interpretations of this lineage nevertheless depend largely upon our assuming that Derang himself and his lineage were Chinese or han in some significant way. But this characterization is based upon some very weak foundations.

In the past thirty years, archaeological work has revealed that information in the Liaoshi 遼史 is even more fragmentary than previously suspected.¹⁰ [End Page 53] In some cases we cannot discover the parentage of emperors; in some cases we cannot be absolutely certain how many different individuals had the same name; in others we cannot determine how many names a single individual may have had.¹¹ Now, with the epigraphic work such as that done on the tombs at Baiyinwulasumu, we can clarify a few things. This enormous tomb complex of Han Kuangsi 韓匡嗣 and his descendants, sixteen square kilometers in size, is unique in scale among non-imperial tomb complexes anywhere and provides many clues to the historical significance of this lineage and their identity. Perhaps most importantly, it suggests that it may be best to conceive of Kitan/Liao society and culture not as a field pulled between the cultural or racial poles of “Chinese” or “Kitan...