What Is True

Balhae (渤海, 698–926) ruled most of what is now north-east China, northern Korea and the Russian Maritime Province for more than two hundred years. It sent more than thirty embassies across the sea to Japan. In the first month of 926 the Khitan took its capital, and within a few months it was gone. The Khitan renamed its lands Dongdan, the Eastern Khitan, and set the old emperor’s eldest son, Yelü Bei, over it as the Human King.

Real people. Bae Gu (裴璆) was real. He went to Japan as Balhae’s envoy in 908 and 919. In the twelfth month of 929 he came ashore in Tango as the envoy of Dongdan. Japanese records say that his answers contradicted each other, that he spoke at length of the Khitan king’s crimes, and that he was made to submit a written statement of fault. He was never allowed to enter the capital and was sent home the following year. Nobody knows why he changed his testimony. This book is one guess.

Yelü Bei (耶律倍) was real too. He painted horses (some of his paintings ended up in the Song imperial collection), wrote in both Khitan and Chinese, and owned a famous library. He was passed over in favour of his younger brother, and in the eleventh month of 930 he fled by sea to the Later Tang with Lady Gao, his books and, by one account, forty followers. Before he left he set up a wooden post on the shore and carved the poem in Chapter 11 into it. In the Tang he was given the name Li Zanhua. The histories also record his cruelty there. He was killed in Luoyang in 937.

His son Ruan, the boy left behind, became the Khitan emperor Shizong in 947. Ruan’s mother, Lady Xiao, was also real, though the record says little about her. Yelü Yuzhi, one of Dongdan’s chief ministers, was real. So were Fujiwara no Masakazu, Bae Gu’s examiner in Tango, and the empress who cut off her own hand at her husband’s funeral.

Invented. Bae Ryeon, Hulan, Choe Ung and Lady Talan are invented. So are the riddle in the poem, the list, the forgeries, the water reunion, the bargain at the end, and every word anyone says. The record does not say when Bae Gu reached Dongping after Japan sent him home; this book holds him at the coast until the winter of the prince’s flight. The riddle in Chapter 11 is real and old (山上復有山, “mountain upon mountain”, is 出, “gone out”), but reading it into the first line of the shore poem is this book’s invention, not a known interpretation. The motives given to Yuzhi and to Bei are guesses. Ruan, born in 918, is a year younger here than he really was.

Languages. Balhae left no writing in its own speech. Its records, inscriptions and letters to Japan were all in Literary Chinese. Its old families probably spoke a language descended from Goguryeo’s, which the story calls “the speech of the capital”. A Japanese source says most of its people were Malgal, who spoke something else. The Khitan had two scripts of their own, created in the 920s, and both are still only partly deciphered.

The empress. The History of Liao records that Shizong’s empress, surnamed Zhen (甄), had been a palace woman of the Later Tang. She was strict, intelligent and elegant, and she sat in on the emperor’s planning and argued for a great design that was not adopted. A later Song compilation says she was already forty-one when Shizong took her, but the same passage gets her children wrong. The History of Liao itself says nothing about how she came to the Tang palace, or how old she was, or what she was called before. What this series makes of her is invention.