The Native Origins of Song Jiang's Liangshan Military Group

I. When the Yellow River Captured the Ji

In medieval China, the state maintained ritual sacrifices to the Five Sacred Peaks, the Five Sacred Strongholds, and the Four Waterways. The Four Waterways were the Yangzi, the Yellow River, the Huai, and the Ji.

Among them, the Yellow River was always the most troublesome, for obvious geographic reasons. Seasonal flood zones had already begun to appear before the Five Dynasties. One hydrological danger of a Yellow River breach was that it could seize the channel of another river. In the Northern Song, the court, still able to control parts of the upper Yellow River basin, was constantly preoccupied with preventing the Yellow River from capturing the Huai and emptying into the sea by that route.

During the Five Dynasties, the Wen River, a branch in the middle and lower Yellow River region, burst its banks at Huazhou, drowned the five prefectures of Bian, Cao, Shan, Pu, and Yun, and finally joined the Ji River north of Liangshan. Lakes then formed across the region. This became the Liangshan Marsh of the Northern Song. The lakes north of today’s Jining are its remnants.

The process by which the Wen captured the Ji continued until the late Qing, when the Ji River’s course was completely occupied by the Yellow River and the Ji disappeared for good.

From its formation to its surrender, the Song Jiang rebel band in Water Margin remained active within the Liangshan Marsh region and therefore ought to count as a local Shandong insurgent force. Yet a closer look at the origins of the 108 Liangshan commanders shows that native Shandong men account for only 37.9 percent. In a Song dynasty world with strict household registration, where did the other sixty-plus percent of these migrant fighters come from?

II. Da Song Xuanhe Yishi

The exact date of composition of the Ming vernacular novel Water Margin remains uncertain, but we can say with confidence that one of its source texts was the Southern Song storytelling work Da Song Xuanhe Yishi. That text already featured the Thirty-Six Heavenly Spirits, though its greatest difference is that it did not yet have Song Jiang.

A second source was the historical Song Jiang band itself. To call it a righteous army is less accurate than to call it Song Jiang and his thirty-six fierce bandits. They plundered ten prefectures and ranged across Shandong, Hebei, and the Huai region, making them masters of Song-dynasty guerrilla warfare. The clearest feature of this group, aside from its small size, is that Song Jiang never possessed a fixed base.

A third source was the great uprising of Zhong Xiang and Yang Yao at Dongting Lake. Its geography, its armed membership, and even the scale of its forces at their peak were strikingly close to Liangshan Marsh at the height of Water Margin, with its hundred thousand followers. As an aside, the Dongting Lake rebels were later crushed by Yue Fei.

In other words, over the course of several centuries Water Margin continually absorbed materials from all three sources, among others, before arriving at the version we know. That also helps explain why a local force occupying one corner of the map ends up with such a complicated human composition.

III. Where the Liangshan Leaders Came From

As a canonical text, Water Margin has inspired no shortage of studies on the question of native place. My own learning is limited, so I will not linger over evidentiary disputes. But some common mistakes concerning medieval geography appear often enough in related articles that they are worth pointing out.

The first is the need to distinguish places that share the same name. No fewer than five commanders in the novel are said to come from Beijing Daming Prefecture, but this does not refer to today’s Beijing. It refers to the area of present-day Handan in Hebei. “The Timely Rain of Shandong” and “the Jade Qilin of Hebei” do not become “the Jade Qilin of Beijing.” The only actual Beijinger in the book is Huangfu Duan, the Purple-Bearded Earl, ranked fifty-seventh among the Earthly Fiends, a proper man of Youzhou.

Another common mistake concerns the naval commanders of Liangshan Marsh. Aside from the Ruan brothers, who are locals, nearly all of them come from Jieyang in Jiangzhou. This Jieyang is not today’s Jieyang in Guangdong, but an older place-name in the Jiangzhou region. This whole group should be counted as Jiangxi men.

Liangshan has no commanders from Guangdong, but it does have two from faraway Hainan Island: the brothers Sun Li and Sun Xin. They were able to integrate into Liangshan because they had joined the Dengzhou faction early on.

A second problem arises when the text is vague about a character’s native place. Take Lu Zhishen, the Tattooed Monk. Many readers file him under Weizhou in Gansu. Yet the received text of Water Margin contains no definitive statement to that effect. What we do have is Lu the Constable calling himself a man of Yan’an Prefecture in Guanxi. Traditionally, “Guanxi” means the Guanzhong basin west of Tong Pass. Whether Lu was from today’s Gansu or Shaanxi, what is beyond doubt is that he was a northwesterner.

A third problem is the complete absence of any native-place information. Most of the Thirty-Six Heavenly Spirits can be traced to some place of origin; a disputed case like Lu Da is already exceptional. Among the Seventy-Two Earthly Fiends, however, roughly ten figures are introduced without any birthplace at all, such as Gong Wang the Flower-Necked Tiger and Ding Desun the Arrow-Struck Tiger. For such men, the only thing one can do is assign them to the sphere of the faction through which they enter the story.

IV. Three Regional Blocs

Looking at the distribution of Liangshan native places, I divide the roster into four tiers and three major regional blocs.

The first tier, naturally monopolized by Shandong, is the local power base. Thirteen of its men belong to the Heavenly Spirits, and they span every social stratum from scholars and farmers to artisans and merchants, though the real governing core consists of lower-level clerks and functionaries. Within the Shandong bloc there are again three factions: the indigenous Liangshan men, who later filled the lower officer ranks and the intelligence network; the founding Liangshan group; and, largest of all, Song Jiang’s own faction, which formed his real inner circle.

The second tier is made up of Henan, Hebei, Jiangsu, and Jiangxi. Quite clearly, this is the eastern main theater of war of the Northern Song, centered on the Jingdong circuits, with Shandong at its core.

Defined by the Yellow River and the Huai as two hard geographic boundaries, this bloc can in turn be divided into three camps: Hebei, the Central Plain, and the Huai region. Yet among these thirty-five men, native place is not the primary bond. On the contrary, civil officials, military officers, and lower clerks are sharply distinguished from one another; status identity comes first.

The third tier has the fewest men, but they are all capable of holding their own or possessed of extraordinary skills. They came from the Shaanxi circuits, where warfare was more intense and conditions harsher: the frontier between Song, Liao, and Western Xia. Throughout the Northern Song, the fighting strength of the western armies was widely acknowledged. Commanders from western-army territory were often proud, unruly, and far more independent than men from elsewhere.

The fourth tier consists of eleven men from eight provinces. They are so scattered across the map that no separate power bloc could have formed from native-place ties alone. Their birthplaces are not meaningfully related to either their abilities or their role in the plot; they function as background information, nothing more.

Appendix