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149 CHAPTER 6 Drawing the Line Rede¤nitions of Loyalty The mayor of La Rochelle at that time was a very sharp-witted man, shrewd in all his undertakings, and a good Frenchman at heart, as he was to show. When he saw that the moment had come, he put his scheme into operation , having already consulted some of the citizens who were of the same mind. —Froissart, Chronicles n the half-century between the crossing of Li Huan in 947 and that of Wang Jizhong in 1003, the de¤nition of the frontier changed greatly and in several aspects. In mid-century, Li Huan could still work on the premise that persuading one of¤cial to transfer his loyalty would have geopolitical signi¤cance, but by 1003 individual choices of allegiance no longer had any impact on borderlines, whether at the level of localities or courts. Li Huan was among the Jin of¤cials selected by Wuyu in 947 to continue to Liao after most of the bureaucrats were left behind at Zhenzhou. Li had¤lled literary roles at court during Later Tang and Later Jin, and was reemployed in Liao for his literary talents. Whereas Li Huan would have known all three of our earlier subjects, he would never have met Wang Jizhong, a general who did not arrive in Liao until 1003, forty years after Li Huan’s death and the foundation of the Song. By then the world was much changed. The Southern generals had been coopted by the Song founders, who conquered regional regimes if they would not submit. There had been two smooth successions to the Song throne. Unlike his predecessors, Wang Jizhong knew no other regime and had never experienced a transfer of dynastic power. For the Song ruling elite there was no question of competition for control of the South; instead their focus was the struggle over the location and nature of the political border with the neighboring state of Liao. In this changed environment Wang Jizhong’s case was unusual, and 150 Drawing the Line indeed his was among the last permanent crossings before the treaty of Shanyuan effectively put a stop to them. Wang Jizhong is famous for helping to negotiate this treaty, but he was also the ¤rst to feel its concrete effects, since its provisions prevented him from returning home. He thus straddled the transition from one “world order” to the next. For the writers of our texts, looking through the prism of later understandings and expectations of loyalty, the ambiguities and uncertainties of these two cases presented great challenges of interpretation. Although Li Huan is not one of the earliest arrivals in Liao, information on him is scattered and confused.1 Unusually, the accounts we have (with one exception) do not derive clearly from any single predecessor, and close borrowings amount to only a few sentences, so we are less able to draw inferences about editorial input. The texts for Wang Jizhong suffer from the same problems of scattered ¤liation, but for him as for Li Huan, we also have an independent biography in the Song shi.2 Li Huan’s was probably compiled from materials supplied by his brother Li Tao, in the South, while Wang Jizhong’s is closely derived in places from two twelfth-century private histories .3 For both people we also have an unusual quantity of information absent from the standard histories, collected in the Liao shi jishi benmo (Qing period) and its antecedents. Li Huan’s own writings were collected into the Dingnian ji after his death, but unfortunately this does not survive. We do, however, have one poem, preserved in the Yuhu qinghua (1078).4 Loyalty unto death? Li Huan after the Liao conquest of 947 Li Huan was the great-grandson of Li Hui, a grand councilor under Tang Wuzong (840–846) and distantly related to the Li imperial house.5 Consequently , he probably had access to the best education available and needed no of¤cial position to move comfortably at the highest levels of society. His literary talent seems genuine, for his Song shi biography supplements convention by remarking that he imitated the Four Worthies of early Tang, whose pianwen style was the standard for court documents, and he is praised repeatedly in the independent sources.6 Li Huan’s most important characteristic was his literary talent. He was a jinshi of especial promise when he joined the staff of the Later Tang prince Li Congrong, but he...

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