The Great Wall and Conceptualizations of the Border Under the Northern Song

Since the publication of the seminal work of Arthur Waldron, it has been widely assumed that the location of the Great Wall of China was not fixed over time, that the Wall as it exists today is a Ming dynasty construction situated far to the south of the original wall of the Qin dynasty. Moreover, according to Waldron, it was not until relatively recently that the Great Wall came to represent a timeless cultural and ecological border between China and the "barbarians" to the north. In his view, the location of the ancient Great Wall of the Warring States and early imperial periods had long been forgotten by the Northern Song. If it survived in Chinese consciousness, it was only as a symbol of the tyranny and excesses of the Qin First Emperor.¹

The appearance of new archaeological and cartographic evidence over the past decade and a half makes it possible to revise certain aspects of Waldron's otherwise incisive scholarship. It is now clear that remnants of older border fortifications survived into the Song and that the Great Wall was intimately tied to novel Song conceptions of the Chinese oikumene. Maps of China drawn up during the Song period are usually very general in nature—indicating only the most important rivers and the names of administrative prefectures. Yet the Great Wall is often prominently depicted, sometimes even anachronistically, as on one set of twelfth-century maps, where it appears for periods long before the first border walls were ever erected (see Figure 1).² In fact, by Song times, the Wall was already seen as a timeless natural boundary between the Chinese and the northern barbarians.³ In this sense, the view popularized by Owen Lattimore—that the Great Wall was constructed within an ecological transition zone between the Eurasian steppe and the cultivated lands of China Proper—may have been first conceived under the Song dynasty.⁴ An important goal of this paper is to explore Song encounters with physical wall remains, the use of the Great Wall to demarcate the border between Song China and its northern neighbors, and the reasons why the Ming Great Wall followed a course remarkably similar to that of the much older Northern Qi fortifications. A future study will examine how notions of the Wall were integrated into classical models of the cosmos, contributing to the development of a medieval Chinese sense of identity.⁵

A second goal of the present paper is to contribute to the critique of the old "tributary model" of Chinese foreign policy. According to this model, developed notably in the work of John King Fairbank, the Chinese emperor sat at the apex of a universal moral social order. Non-Chinese regimes could interact with China only on China's terms, by accepting their own subordination and presenting tribute to the Chinese ruler.⁶ Although many if not most Chinese did subscribe to this sinocentric world view, Wang Gungwu, Tao

Figure 1.

Map of Shang-dynasty China, with anachronistic depiction of the Great Wall along the northern border. From Song ben Lidai dili zhizhangtu, 18–19.

Jing-shen, Morris Rossabi, Christian Lamouroux, Irene Leung, and others have demonstrated that the landmark Treaty of Shanyuan (Chanyuan) of 1005 ushered in a period in which relations with the Khitan Liao (907–1125) were marked by particular pragmatism and innovation. These scholars have emphasized diplomatic parity as the foundation of nearly 120 years of peace between Northern Song (960–1127) China and its neighbor to the north; the regularized use of diplomacy in place of military action to resolve disputes; and the unprecedented attempts at a comprehensive, ethnographic understanding of foreign lands and their people.⁷ However, Song relations with its western neighbor, the Tangut Xia, have not received the same attention. To be sure, Song officials never acknowledged the equal diplomatic status of the Xi Xia state (c.982–1227) and often explicitly differentiated the Tangut Xia from the Liao regime.⁸ Nevertheless, I will argue that, at least...