and ruthless, good at horse archery.”^19 She became leader of the bandit
army when her brother was killed and no competent male heir was avail-
able. There appears to have been no difficulty with her becoming leader,
though she did marry Li Quan and hand over control soon afterward.
Yang Miaozhen nevertheless remained important in the control and
advancement of this force, though it was her husband who led in thefield.
The Song government both needed and distrusted Li Quan as they tried to
run a clandestine war against the Jin by supplying Li with supplies and
official titles. As he was Chinese, some seemed to think that he should by
definition be loyal to the Song, and he used that to convince them of his
reliability. The Jin saw Li as a disloyal subject and a bandit manipulated
by the Song. In all of this, Li and his wife demonstrated the martial culture
and skills of local northern Chinese power holders. Shandong had been
under Jurchen rule since the early twelfth century, and the Chinese living
there had no particular reason to be loyal to the Song. Their martial arts
resembled those of the steppe more than those of the Song, yet they were
unequivocally Chinese in self-identification.
The Mongols had no difficulty in incorporating Li Quan and his power
base in Shandong into their system of government. Nor did they have any
problem accommodating his wife’s control over that same territory after his
death. These northern Chinese warriors, husband and wife, built up their
power base through their martial arts skills and political acumen. Even the
rebellion of their sonfit within Mongol norms. Mongol aristocrats con-
stantly fought with each other over power, usually with contending armies.
Of course, Li and his wife would be discussed and represented in the world
of Chinese history andfiction. In that realm, they were bandits, or rough
figures of low comedy.
Conclusion
Later Chinese rejected the Mongol Yuan Dynasty’s separation of Chinese
people into northerners and southerners, insisting that the division was
perverse and inaccurate. Although regional identities were deeply imbedded
in the Chinese consciousness, so was some sense of a shared larger culture.
Some modern Chinese, fueled by late twentieth-century political concerns,
go further still and insist that the Mongols, Jurchen, Tanguts, Kitan,
and other steppe and minority groups are andwereall part of a unified
“Chinese”political body.^20 From the late twentieth- and early twenty-first-
century Chinese perspective, a unified, nominally Chinese (in whatever
sense) polity in the thirteenth century is an important proto-national entity
154 The Yuan Dynasty