Since 1930s scholarship, the historiography of Kitan Liao has increasingly interpreted ethnicity as a factor in polity and policy, an interpretation that has depended upon retrospective constructions of Liao and Jin by, largely, the Qing imperial court of the eighteenth century. Archaeological evidence now demonstrates that the documentation itself was fragmentary and in all likelihood unrepresentative of the identity concepts that prevailed at various class strata of the Kitan Liao empire. On the ground, prominent aristocrats, including many from the lineage of Han Derang (or the Han of Jizhou), are shown to be derived from the status and wealth of each man in his own time. Identities drawn from ancestry, language, place of origin, or folk customs were characteristic of dependent populations, not of aristocrats. Stratified identities, by horizontal rank and not partitioned vertically by imputed ethnicity, appear to be evident in many histories of northeast Asian regimes from Northern Wei to the very early Qing. They were characterized by a continuous cultural tradition with complex elements, consistent among them reading and writing multiple languages and literatures, horse training and hunting pastimes, and shamanic religious and political practices. Because these elements are associated in modern discourse with distinct language and cultural traditions, this aristocratic culture tends to be seen as variegated and ‘cosmopolitan’ rather than as coherent and continuous.