Tents, Towns and Topography: How Chinese-Language Liao Epitaphs Depicted the Moving Court

In the summer of 1075, the Song statesman and polymath Shen Kuo 沈 括 (1033–1097) was sent on a diplomatic mission north to the Liao 遼 realm.¹ His audience with the Liao Emperor Daozong 道宗 (r. 1055–1101) occurred not in the confines of an imperial palace in the capital, not in any of the five capitals of Liao,² not even in an urban setting at all, but in an encampment in the grasslands, where the offices of the government were tents marked by signs. He recorded his observations in a report on his return:

Duncheng ["temporary-camp"] tent station lay sixty li (34.1 km)³ northwest from Xintian ["newly-added"] tent station. Another twenty li (11.4 km) northwest of Duncheng tent station lay the court of the Chanyu.⁴ There were three buildings in total, two of which were the [two separate] residences of the Chanyu and Empress Xiao. The rest were felt tents, several tens of them, all facing east.

頓程帳東南距新添帳六十里。帳西北又二十里至單于庭。有屋，單于 之朝寢、蕭后之朝寢凡三。其余皆氈廬，不過數十，悉東向。

Pillars of pine marked the front of the court, and a man holding a placard reading "gemen" stood between the pillars.⁵ East of them were six or seven tents that housed the Secretariat, the Bureau of Military Affairs, and Visitors Bureau.⁶ Further east was a single felt tent, and next to it were parked six felt covered wagons. There was a big banner in front of them that read: "Ancestral Temple." All of this was in the wild grasslands.

庭以松幹表其前，一人持牌立松幹之間，曰閤門，其東向六、七帳， 曰中書、樞密院、客省。又東氈廬一，旁駐氈車六，前植纛，曰太 廟，皆草莽之中。

Several li (no more than 2.5 km) east of there was a flooded brook. East of the brook was marshland for ten or so li (approximately 5 km). There were mountains to the west and north. The northern mountain, to which the court was closest, was called Du'er. Ten or so li (approximately 5 km) farther north of Du'er, was a market where common folk would gather and trade, and carts came from there through the mountains.⁷

東數里有潦澗。澗東原隰十餘里，其西與北，皆山也。其北山，庭 之所依者，曰犢兒。過犢兒北十餘里，曰市場，小民之為市者，以 車從之于山間。

The location and scale of the Liao moving court fluctuated over the 200 years of the dynasty, and Shen Kuo observed it at just one moment in its long evolution.⁸ Indeed, other envoys' accounts present varying locations of this moving court.⁹ Thus, it is well-established that the Liao emperors practiced a pattern of imperial itinerance.¹⁰

The moving court consisted of the offices of the central government that moved around in tents and carts, following a pattern of seasonal movement to—and from—different locations. This custom, as well as the locations at which the court set up temporary camps, were both referred to in Chinese sources as nabo 捺缽.¹¹ Much like its location, the size and population of the moving court were also not consistent; over the course of the dynasty, and likely from month to month, its density and size would fluctuate as tents arrived and departed or were stationed closer or further from the imperial tent at its center.

However, while Shen Kuo's account is an example of what the moving court looked like to an outsider, where can we find examples of what it may have looked like to those who moved with and within it? And how might the landscape and the imperial space of the Liao dynasty have appeared when they were observed looking outward from the moving court? Did living and moving around in tents entail a perception of geography and landscape that was markedly different from the way the world was understood by those who lived in towns? If so, how would these tent-based or town-centered perspectives have been expressed or articulated? There are limits to how envoy reports and other transmitted historical sources can be used to explore the above questions. The ever-growing corpus of epigraphic sources for the Liao, on the other hand, offers multiple examples of how people in the Liao presented themselves to other people in the Liao. Moreover, these epigraphic materials can also be used to explore the implications of a mobile political center to conceptual understandings of center, periphery, and...