What If They Had a War, and Nobody Came? (Author's Note)
The Chinese title of this story, and the individual titles for each part, are taken and/or adapted from the titles of chapters 16 to 20 of Jin Yong’s Demi-Gods and Semi-Devils, for reasons that will be obvious to people familiar with that work (NB: I know the title of Part 3 very much Does Not Scan, which is why I’ve never had any pretensions towards being a poet). The Empires of Zhuo and Yi are very loosely based on the Han-dominated Song Dynasty and the Khitan-dominated Liao Dynasty respectively. I found the book Women of the Conquest Dynasties: Gender and Identity in Liao and Jin China by Linda Cooke Johnson to be a useful resource.
I would like to thank Caribou for suggesting the tangyuan incident, and also for generally enabling me in my nonsense.
Last but definitely not least, Yelü Ning’s undercut is only mostly historically inaccurate, rather than wholly historically inaccurate. I read that Khitan men and unmarried Khitan women partially shaved their heads, so I took that and ran with it.
Chinese names for notable characters and places are as follows:
- Gu Qing: 顧清 | 顾清
- Yelü Ning: 耶律寧 | 耶律宁
- Yi: 毅
- Zhuo: 卓
- Feihua Pavilion: 飛花閣 | 飞花阁 (literally: Pavilion of the Flying Flowers)
- Lei: 雷
- Bai: 白
- Xiao: 萧
- Shi Yi: 史義 | 史义 (this is different from the 'Yi' in Yi Empire)
- Qian Sangu: 錢三姑 | 钱三姑
- Moshan: 魔山 (literally: Demon Mountain)
- Tianshan: 天山 (literally: Sky Mountain)