An analytic method is proposed to compute the surface energy and elementary excitations of the XXZ spin chain with generic non-diagonal boundary fields. For the gapped case, in some boundary parameter regimes the contributions of the two boundary fields to the surface energy are non-additive. Such a correlation effect between the two boundaries also depends on the parity of the site number $N$ even in the thermodynamic limit $Ntoinfty$. For the gapless case, contributions of the two boundary fields to the surface energy are additive due to the absence of long-range correlation in the bulk. Although the $U(1)$ symmetry of the system is broken, exact spinon-like excitations, which obviously do not carry spin-$frac12$, are observed. The present method provides an universal procedure to deal with quantum integrable systems either with or without $U(1)$ symmetry.
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