Gazing Toward Yanyun: The Unfought Pact Between Later Zhou and Liao

In Bianliang, in the seventh year of Xiande, the wind carried winter’s final chill.

Chai Rong’s coffin had just passed through Zhuque Gate, and the young emperor Chai Zongxun had barely warmed the dragon throne. According to the official histories, Later Zhou should have crumbled beneath the weapons of powerful ministers like the four short-lived dynasties before it. The walls of the Sixteen Prefectures of Yanyun would have groaned for three hundred years beneath the Khitan cavalry.

But that year, some things were different.

When Han Tong held up the newly revised Statute for Assessing Official Performance and dragged corrupt grain officials to the execution ground, grain prices in Bianliang fell instead of rising. The winter wheat planted by Wang Yansheng and his frontier troops at Waqiao Pass sprouted, startling Khitan scouts from their camp. Even the old woman selling flatbread outside Zhuque Gate could smile and say, “What I earned this month is enough to buy my grandson a new padded coat.”

The brokers at the border market counted bales of silk and realized the Khitan merchants had taken away three times as much tea as the year before. They didn’t know that Great Zhou’s looms were already producing twenty percent more than Southern Tang’s.

The dispatches delivered at a gallop by couriers from the northern frontier no longer carried desperate requests for grain, but good news that “the Khitan army has not dared cross the border in three months.” They had not seen how the armor Chai Rong left behind now protected even fiercer border troops.

Some said this was defying fate and changing destiny. But standing at the Bian River docks, watching the grain ships come and go, Lin Axia merely fingered the newly collected tax receipts.

“What nonsense, saying the fall of a dynasty is predetermined? We’re just finishing what Chai Rong couldn’t.”

The clouds over Yanyun at last drifted toward the cities of the Han. The Zhou of Later Zhou finally became a beam holding up a world in chaos.

This is no fantasy tale of transmigration. It is a golden age that should have emerged from the cracks between the pages of history