Western scholars usually consider Hanpu's story legendary. Herbert Franke explains that this Jurchen "ancestral legend" probably indicates that the Wanyan clan absorbed immigrants from Goryeo and Balhae sometime in the tenth century. Frederick W. Mote, who calls this account of the founding of the Wanyan clan a "tribal legend", claims that Hanpu's two brothers (one who stayed in Goryeo and one in Balhae) might have represented "the tribe's memory of their ancestral links to these two peoples." One Western historian of Jurchens has even proposed that Hanpu was not even from the Korean peninsula, instead what really happened was that a power on the peninsula ruled the Jurchen tribe he came from, or that he was from the Eastern Jurchens (Changbai Mountain Jurchens) who did not live in the Korean peninsula.
