The background of the popular Spring Festival movie "Man Jianghong" is set at the beginning of the Southern Song Dynasty, and the filming location of this film was chosen in the ancient city of Jinyang in Taiyuan.
If you put it into history, Taiyuan and the entire Shanxi area at that time had already been included in the Jin Dynasty. The performance of the army's death battle to the end delayed the fate of the Northern Song Dynasty's decline.
Tortured by the plight of lack of food and grass inside and no reinforcements outside, Taiyuan, which had stood firm for nine months, finally fell in the autumn of the first year of Jingkang. The two emperors of Huiqin, whose wealth was favored by the invaders, and the people of Taiyuan, who fought bloody to defend their homeland, will forever write a strong and colorful stroke in Chinese history.
The commander escaped and was ordered in danger
In 1125 AD, the Liao Dynasty, which was originally adjacent to the Northern Song Dynasty, was destroyed by the rising Jurchen regime Jin.
In the process of the Liao and Jin Dynasties, the monarchs and ministers of the Northern Song Dynasty actively participated in it, trying to join forces with the military forces under the leadership of the Wanyan family to carve up the land of the Liao Dynasty.
However, the irony is that the army of the Northern Song Dynasty was not ready to join hands with Jin to destroy the Liao Dynasty. Tong Guangang, the commander-in-chief of the Northern Song Dynasty who conquered the Liao Dynasty, had just assembled his troops, but he missed the opportunity to attack the Liao Kingdom with the Jin because of the suppression of the Fangla uprising in the south. , Waiting until Tong Guan finished dealing with the "fire in the backyard" problem, he dragged his army closer to Yanjing City, trying to wipe out the remnants of the Liao Dynasty, which was gone.
As a result, the Song Army in the Northern Expedition not only failed to take Yanjing quickly, but was easily defeated by the remnants of the Liao Dynasty in Baigou.
The clumsy performance of Tong Guan's imperial guards stimulated the desire of the top leaders of the Jin Dynasty to expand the results of the war. Therefore, shortly after the Jin Dynasty destroyed the Liao Dynasty, the Jin Dynasty used the guise of inviting Tong Guan to negotiate, so that Nianhan and Wuli could not be divided into two soldiers. Two roads go south, straight into the heart of the Northern Song Dynasty.
Among them, tens of thousands of left army led by Jin Jiang Nianhan (ie Wanyan Zonghan) set off from today's Datong area of Shanxi to plunder Shanxi.
Nianhan's early march was quite smooth, and the Song army was invincible in the areas he passed. Even Nianhan himself was quite surprised that the "Southern Dynasty" did not use the easy-to-defend and difficult-to-attack mountains to stop him.
Nianhan's army soon approached Taiyuan.
As a celebrity in front of the emperor and a "great hero who conquered Yanyun", Tong Guan was in Taiyuan, but his heart flew back to Tokyo early, because he had completely lost confidence in the previous battle with the Liao army. How can I resist the arrival of the Yuwei who destroyed the Liao Dynasty?
Therefore, Tong Guan ignored the ridicule and obstruction of Taiyuan magistrate Zhang Xiaochun, and insisted on slipping away, while the burden of defending the city fell on the shoulders of Taiyuan magistrate Zhang Xiaochun and Xuanfu Division commander Wang Tian who followed Tong Guan.
Zhang Xiaochun, as the Xuanfu envoy of Hedong and the magistrate of Taiyuan, belongs to the civil service system, and he is not familiar with the military. Now that the Taiwei Tongguan is abandoning the city, and the Jin army is besieging the isolated city, he will naturally look at Wang, the governor of the Xuanfu Division from the central military system. For their only savior.
With the enemy at hand, Wang Teng did not give in, but resolutely led his 3,000 troops into intense defensive work.
Victory in the first battle, the dark tide is raging
Apart from the city walls, Taiyuan lacked usable defensive barriers.
Historically, the local rulers of Shanxi mostly chose to use the Taihang Mountains or the mountains in northern Saibei to build defensive positions, "defending the enemy from the land of Jin." Even during the Anti-Japanese War, the Kuomintang would still choose Xinkou and Niangziguan Such Shanxi peripheral pass invested heavy troops to stop the enemy, instead of focusing the defense on the inside and outside of Taiyuan city wall.
Because they all know that Taiyuan City alone cannot be defended.
Nianhan and Wang Zhi may not be clear about this truth, but Nianhan underestimated the determination of the Song army to defend Taiyuan City. Another Jin general joined the main force that he could not lead, forming a pincer attack on Kaifeng, Tokyo.
However, Nianhan felt that he had rarely lost a battle since he joined the Jin Taizu army, and now he was trapped in the isolated city of Taiyuan, and he couldn't face it. Therefore, he decided to build various siege machines to cover the infantry forcibly attacking the city.
In the face of the menacing Nianhan army, Wang Ting also took the initiative to assume the important task of commanding. While recruiting young and middle-aged men in Taiyuan City to cooperate with the defense of the city, he also paid close attention to the enemy's movements.
When Nianhan's siege equipment approached the city wall, he ordered people to throw the noose that bound the huge boulder out of the opponent's machine, and then forcefully pulled it down.
The Jin army used wooden chariots "covered with raw cowhide and wrapped in iron leaves" to withstand the rain of arrows from the Song army, and carried bundles of firewood to the city, trying to fill up the trenches and reduce obstacles for subsequent attacking troops.
Unexpectedly, Wang Ting had taken precautions long ago. He ordered people to dig out a tunnel leading to the trench, then fill it with water, and float in with lights. In this way, the firewood thrown by the Jin army into the trench was instantly ignited. submerged in water.
The golden man was busy for a long time, but he still couldn't break through the city defense.
Seeing that the two moves failed, Nianhan ordered his men to use a trebuchet to throw a huge boulder to destroy the city wall, but Wang Ting sent someone to fill the gap with a cloth bag full of chaff in time to prevent further damage to the city defense fortifications.
After the Jin army's offensive weakened, Wang Tie, regardless of his physical fatigue, brandished a knife to lead the death squad out of the city to counterattack the Jin army's position, which greatly boosted the morale of the Song army.
There are many methods used by the Jin people to attack the city, but Wang Teng and his subordinates can always see the tricks. What we have listed does not cover the whole picture of the war. (For details, see Li Huarui's "Review of the Deeds of Wang Zhi, a famous general who resisted the Jin Dynasty in the Northern Song Dynasty").
It can be seen from this that the offensive and defensive battles in Taiyuan were fierce.
Ceding the front and ceding the rear
The battle in Taiyuan showed a stalemate, and the Wulibuzhi Right Army from Baozhou had already arrived at the city of Tokyo ahead of schedule.
Although the Jin army led by Wulibu failed to capture Bianjing quickly, it always maintained military pressure on the city, and even thwarted the night attack launched by nearly ten thousand elite Northwest Song Army led by Yao Pingzhong.
However, Nianhan's delay in meeting him still made him feel anxious.
Seeing that more and more Song troops rushed to aid the Kaifeng battlefield, Wuli was not worried that his unit would fall into the embarrassing situation of being surrounded by the opponent, so he secretly arranged for a retreat. Contribute a large amount of gold and silver plus cut land to compensate for its "loss".
Among the ceded land was the city of Taiyuan, which Nianhan could not conquer for a long time.
At this time, Song Qinzong in Kaifeng City had long been frightened by the blackmail of the Jin people and lost his mind. Li Gang, who had commanded the defense of the city, was also dismissed by him. When he got the conditions of the Jin people to cede land, he immediately agreed.
Wulibu sent someone to inform Nianhan of this news, and asked him to convey the order of the Song court to cede the land.
However, Wang Teng didn't believe that this was the intention of the court at all, but suspected that it was a trick of the Jin people, so he sternly refused.
Wang Ting resolutely defended the city, but Zhang Xiaochun, who was a civil servant, was pessimistic because he had been waiting for reinforcements from the imperial court for a long time. Now, combined with his years of experience as an official, he was more inclined to think that the ceding of Taiyuan was the original intention of the imperial court.
Therefore, Zhang Xiaochun "meet the supervisor's food for a day to seek surrender to the enemy", that is to say, Zhang Xiaochun took the opportunity of eating to gather his colleagues in the supervisor's department, and studied behind Wang's back how to "surrender to the Jinren without losing dignity" in the future.
However, there is no impenetrable wall in the world, and Wang Tian quickly noticed Zhang Xiaochun's change, and threatened with the words "those who dare to surrender will be killed", which temporarily deterred the surrender faction in the city.
At this time, undercurrents surged in the seemingly united city of Taiyuan.
After Wulibu retreated, Nianhan knew that his strategy of attacking Kaifeng had failed, so he had to withdraw to the north, but Nianhan left, and the Jin army's siege of Taiyuan was still not lifted, but was handed over to his subordinate Yin Keshu. .
Almost at the same time, Song Qinzong Fang learned that Taiyuan had not yet fallen, so under the persuasion of the ministers, he denied the previous cession of land.
In order to gain the initiative in the war against Jin in the future, Song Ting rushed to assist Shanxi with the Northwest Frontier Army led by Zhong Shizhong and Yao Gu.
As a result, Yao Gu was defeated and died in the battle.
After that, Song Ting used Li Gang to organize reinforcements.
However, Li Gang lacked confidence in the field battle with the Jin army. He took command to help, but he still had a negative attitude, staying in Huaizhou thousands of miles away and not entering.
During this period of time, the food shortage in Taiyuan City became more and more serious, and human tragedies of relatives cannibalizing each other continued to occur. "Eighteen or nineteen soldiers and civilians in the city starved to death."
In order to further isolate Taiyuan, Nianhan's troops plundered the southern Shanxi area, causing a large number of refugees to cross the river into Henan.
The Fall of Taiyuan
The fear of the Jin people going south continued to spread. In the same year when Nianhan returned to the north, Jin Ting launched an invasion of the Northern Song Dynasty.
This time, the soldiers and civilians in Taiyuan still strictly refused to surrender, but they themselves lost the basic physical strength needed to resist due to long-term lack of food.
In September of the first year of Jingkang, Jin Ren climbed up Taiyuan City, "like walking on flat ground".
Knowing that the city wall had been breached, Wang Ting gathered the remnants and tried to fight the Jin people, but it was difficult to stop the city from falling.
Seeing more and more enemies around him, Wang Ting was unwilling to be humiliated, and jumped into Fenshui to commit suicide with Song Taizong's "Yulong" in his arms.
The irony is that when the Song Dynasty destroyed the Northern Han Dynasty, it was Song Taizong who resented the difficulty of Taiyuan and ordered all the houses in the city to be burned down, and then flooded, bringing disaster to this historic city.
Compared to Wang Teng, who would rather die than submit, Zhang Xiaochun chose to bow his knees and surrender because the fall of the city was a fait accompli.
After entering the city, Nianhan slaughtered the city without saying anything, and forced Zhang Xiaochun to identify Wang Tien's body, then cursed at him, and stabbed his body with a knife and halberd to cover up his embarrassment of being blocked in Taiyuan for nine months.
After the fall of Taiyuan, Kaifeng, Tokyo, completely lost the only fortress that prevented the Jinren from going south, and had to face the enemy whose strength doubled alone.
A few months later, Kaifeng fell, and the Northern Song Dynasty, which lasted for more than a hundred years, declared its fall.
When the modern scholar Mr. Wang Guowei collected relevant information about Wang Zhi’s defense of the city, combined with the historical situation at that time, he couldn’t help but sigh with emotion—“Since the east of the river has fallen, Bianjing can’t be defended, but Jingkang’s situation, so those who have to support it for a year, Gongyanzhi also".
The Taiyuan defense battle also became the last strength of the Northern Song Dynasty against the Jin Dynasty.
Beijing Evening News Li Wenchang