By establishing the ‘Hancheng’, or ‘Chinese city/town’, the first Liao emperor Abaoji (872-926CE) rose to power among the Kitan tribes through the use of captive Chinese labour. Later, the newly constructed Upper and Eastern Capitals both had districts called ‘Hancheng’. And yet beyond these two totemic accounts of ‘Hancheng’ in the early tenth century, the term does not appear again for the rest of the Liao period (907-1125). Given that these ‘Hancheng’ were not paradigmatic but specific and time-limited phenomenon, can we justifiably envision them as ‘Chinese’ towns? By splitting up the collocation and delving into the respective semantic histories of the terms ‘Han 漢” and “Cheng 城’, one a purported ethnonym, the other a synecdoche of settlement, Dr Pursey reveals the contingency and elasticity of both ‘Han’ and ‘Cheng’ in medieval China, and re-evaluate the purported ethnic segregation between the Kitan and Han (i.e. Chinese) in the Liao.

Dr Lance Pursey starts a postdoctoral research fellowship at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (HUJI) in late 2024 to 2025, joining the European Research Council project ‘The Wall: People and Ecology in Medieval Mongolia and China’. He has previously held postdoctoral research fellowships at the University of Birmingham (UK) and University of Aberdeen (UK) as part of the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) project ‘Understanding cities in the premodern history of Northeast China, c. 200-1200’; and at Waseda University (Japan) with a project funded by the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS).