Johannes Lotze and Zhidong Zhang
Extended abstract
for the conference “Walls, Borders, and Frontier Zones
in the Ancient and the Contemporary World”
to be held in Jerusalem, 18-22 December 2022
Historians often assume that nomads do not build walls. While this is certainly true for those nomad
leaders who ruled mainly through control of manpower and trade routes, the assumption becomes
questionable, at least for East Asia, once we look at the creation of hybrid empires across steppe and
sown, such as the Kitan Liao 遼 (907–1125) and Jurchen Jin ⾦ (1115–1234). Historical sources and
archaeological surveys show that the Liao and Jin built walls—but possibly with different outlooks
and different purposes.
The Liaoshi 遼史, or Liao History, barely mentions wall-building. Archaeological evidence
suggests that the northern (Liao) frontier was probably not a heavily fortified border to defend
against armies, but rather an instrument to control the movement of people. This kind of frontier
may be seen as an expression of the Liao’s continued active involvement in the Mongolian steppe.
In contrast, the Jinshi, ⾦史, or Jin History, boasts detailed comments on walls (or at least some
major fortification structures) embedded in a wider political and military context. Certain patterns of
the southern (Jin) wall point to a more defensive positioning and more explicitly military functions.
In comparison to the Han and Ming walls, the Jin walls are relatively under-researched. This paper
studies the Jin walls, and especially their guardians. Sources are most illuminating about the
Önggüd who developed a particularly intimate relation to imperial wall systems. The Önggüd,
therefore, serve as a case study to shed light on the Jin walls’ guardians more broadly.
The first part of this paper examines crucial passages and terms related to the Jin walls both in
court-commissioned historiography and in travel reports. How can we be sure that they really talk
about long-walls and not about something else (e.g., forts that were not necessarily connected
through a walled line)? Do geographical names resonate with walls that are confirmed
archaeologically? What are the nuances of crucial terms, such as bianbao 邊堡 (border forts),
bianfang 邊防 (frontier), changcheng 長城 (long-wall), jie 界 (boundary, demarcation), jing 境
(border), or zhang 障 (obstruction, border town)? How, if at all, do sources justify the building of
walls? How likely is it that some Jin walls were built against the rising Mongols? Did earlier Jin
walls have other purposes?
In a second step, we move from the Jin wall itself to the people maintaining it. Following
Chinggis Khan’s purported bon mot that the defensive efficacy of walls is proportional to the
courage of those defending them, we ask: who guarded the Jin walls? Guardians often appear as
jüyin in the sources, a word that perhaps originated in Kitan nomadic culture. But who were they?
Evidence suggests that jüyin referred to a diversity of (Mongolic, Turkic, Tibeto-Burman, Kitan,
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Tangut) nomads and semi-nomads occupying the frontier regions. One jüyin group, the Önggüd,
was found to the north of the Yin Mountains as early as 1120s, when the Liao empire was toppled
by the Jin empire. The term “Önggüd” possibly derives from an obscure Mongolian word öngü for
“wall,” as reported by the Ilkhanate historian Rashid al-Din—but even if it is simply a later folk
etymology, it proves that walls and Önggüd people were closely related for contemporaries.
In a third part, we first attempt to shed light on the construction process and defence system of
the Jin walls that the Önggüd were guarding and then approach the following questions. How
credible are the claims in the sources about the Önggüd as the walls’ guardians? Where, how and
when did the Önggüd guard the Jin walls? Did the Önggüd guard the walls because of their status as
“submissive tribes” of the Jin? How did the Önggüd themselves perceive the imperial walls? And
how should we, as historians, approach terms like “Önggüd”? There is a tendency in scholarship to
treat them in an overly “ethnic” sense, as if the populations behind such labels were more or less
fixed and culturally rigid—thereby overlooking ongoing transformations of such “superdiverse”
entities that were kept together by loyalty, not ethnicity.
A brief comparison to a modern example is illuminating. Frontier tribes inhabiting the Indo-
Myanmar border, for example, are today at the fringe of nation-states. Westphalian-style fenceconstruction
acts as a “distortion of tribal land and territory” and “amounts to the denial of a tribe’s
agency,” as one scholar argued (Ziipao 2020). This, however, marks exactly the point where the
comparison ceases to work. Certainly, both borders were built by “states” through “tribal” territory.
However, in contrast to modern governments:
1. the Jin imperial government kept intimate relations with nomadic groups inside and outside;
2. the Jurchen Jin empire founders were themselves of semi-nomadic origin.
3. In contrast to present-day “tribes” across the Indo-Myanmar border who “remain outside the
radar of connectivity and development” (Ziipao 2020), the Jin-era “tribes” were powerful global
players across the steppe-sedentary world. This is evidenced by the fact that the very wallguarding
Önggüd, by deciding to join the Mongols, contributed to a dynamic that, in 1234,
made one of the last great pre-Mongol empires fall. The changing loyalties of tribal/nomadic
groups frustrated imperial administrations. In a notorious example, the Jin, in 1196, rewarded
even Mongol leader Temüjin with the frontier-guarding title zhaotao 招討, or “Pacification
Commissioner.” Ten years later, Temüjin became Chinggis Khan and created a “borderless
empire” (Michal Biran) in which the old Jin walls lost all significance.
Finally, are the Önggüd a special case? Or is there a typology of “frontier tribes” and “borderguarding
entities” across time and cultures?