The History of China - #155 - S. Song: Yue Fei, Pt. 1-The Flying Fury

Episode Date: December 8, 2018

In this first of a two-part look into the life and legend of this epic Chinese hero, we chronicle Yue Fei's early life and education, his induction into the military to serve his nation with utmost loyalty, his meteoric rise through the ranks, and his stalwart resolve in facing the greatest crisis his country his known in centuries, all while garnering a cult-like following of soldiers, and the panicked attention of the imperial court. Time Period Covered: 1103-1137 CE Major Works Cited: Foster, Robert W. The Human Condition in Premodern China. Jenne, Jeremiah. “The Execution of Yue Fei: 875 Years of Patriotic Myth” from radiichina.com Li, Xiaobi. China at War. Lorge, Peter. War, Politics and Society in Early Modern China, 900-1795. Mote, Fredrick W. “Ch. 13: The Southern Song and Chinese Survival” in Imperial China 900-1800. Tao, Jing-shen. “The Move to the South and the Reign of Kao-tsung” in The Cambridge History of China, Vol. 05: The Sung Dynasty and Its Precursors, 907-1279. Wills, Jr., John E. E. Mountain of Fame: Portraits in Chinese History. Zhou, Zuoren, trans. Tim Cronen. “A View of the Hero Yue Fei and the Traitor Qin Hui” in The China Heritage Quarterly No. 28, December 2011. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to an Airwave Media Podcast. Four hundred years ago, a trio of tiny kingdoms were perched on some damp islands off the coast of Europe. Within three short centuries, these islands would become the centre of an empire which ruled a quarter of the globe and on which the sun never set. I'm Samuel Hume, a historian of the British Empire, and my podcast Pax Britannica follows the people and events that built that empire into a global superpower. Learn the History of China. Episode 155, The Flying Fury My hair bristles with wrath within my helmet. Leaning on the railing as the gusting rain ceases, I gaze upward, looking to heaven, and let loose a passionate roar.

Thirty years' accomplishments like dust and dirt. I gaze upward, looking to heaven, and let loose a passionate roar. Thirty years' accomplishments like dust and dirt. I traveled eight thousand li with the clouds and the moon. Never waiting, never resting has whitened this young head. My vain despair is complete. The shame of the Jingkang period has not yet been wiped away. When will this subject's anger be erased? Let us charge through Hulon Pass to trample them with our war chariots,

where we shall feast on barbarian flesh when hungry, and with light conversation drink the blood of the Xiongnu. Let us begin anew to recover our ancestral lands, then pay tribute to the Emperor once again in our courts of old. From the poem River of Red, 1134 In the center of the city of Hangzhou, located on the northern bank of the famous West Lake, sits an ancient temple, dated in its construction to the year 1211. Though it has been meticulously reconstructed several times after the various ravages and disasters of the intervening 800 years, it sits today much as it did in 1211, as the place of honor and remembrance for one of China's

greatest heroes, who served it in one of the nation's darkest hours when all seemed lost. Yet there's more to this temple, known as Yuewang Miao, or the Temple of Prince Yue, than first meets the eye. Just opposite of the entrance to Yuewang Miao kneel four statues, three men and one woman. One at all, they kneel on the ground below a low metal partition, heads downcast in an unmistakable pose of regret, shame, and penitence. These statues are not well maintained. They're almost always abjectly filthy, a stark contrast indeed to the polished upkeep of the temple they kneel before. In fact, for centuries, visitors have been permitted, and even encouraged, to shout curses at, spit on, and hurl items at these four prostrate figures of stone.

And the statues all bear the literal stains and blemishes of such abuse. This is because the four statues represent the four people most responsible for laying the man for whom the temple they kneeled before low, resulting in him, even at the height of his power, glory, and service to his nation, being stripped of his rank, title, position, and in the end, imprisoned, tortured, and executed. The statues are of the Song chancellor, Qin Hui, his wife, and his two closest advisors and lackeys, and the man who they killed, and whom these four now kneel in front of in eternal apology, bearing the brand of national traitors literally carved into stone upon them for all time, is a general Yue Fei.

It's not typical in the course of this show for us to outright pause the narrative in order to push a single figure's personal biography. By my count, I've done it precisely once so far, and that was for the mathematician of heaven Zhu Chongzhi, more than three years ago. Still, I owe this particular historical figure his due, since he's been the literal face of the History of China podcast since its very inception. I mean, of course, the heroic general of Southern Song, Yue Fei, seated as he's been on our cover photo, atop his gallant steed, in shimmering armor and spear in hand.

Laying all my cards on the table, when I chose General Yue, as this show's cover art, I had no real idea who it was I was picking. He just looked like a really heroic painting, and I thought, then and now, that he'd make a great emblem for the show. But today, we're finally going to take the time and give him the overview he deserves, as he is even to this day considered one of the paragons of Chinese virtue and heroism in one of its darkest hours. Initially, I conceived this as a one-off, much as I did Zhu Chongzhi, but the story grew

in the telling. I wrote out the whole thing as a single story, only to realize that I'd created a monstrously long single episode that would likely run more than an hour and a half, which is unlike anything I usually put out. So I've opted to split it roughly in half, and you'll likely find that the second installment runs a little shorter than the first, just because that's where the breakpoint seemed more natural. I've done my best to try to shore things up in terms of that decision, narrative-wise, but like as not, there may still be some instances of me seeming to leave loose

threads untied in this first installment, and I'll do my best to make sure that they are all properly trimmed up and tied off in the second. Because that is how it was initially created, so please bear with me. I hope you'll agree with my analysis that it's totally worth the journey. There is, as with pretty much every culture hero, from Cyrus of Persia to Joan of Arc to George Washington, more than a little myth-making that has been built up around the story of UFA. It's not for nothing that he is called a legendary hero, after all. But we're going to do our best to parse those details, such as we can, to see the full story. The man, the myth, the legend, and the tattoo. Okay, so let's get going.

In terms of our more mainline narrative, Yue Fei existed in his lifetime as more of a peripheral character than a prime mover and shaker of empire-wide events. This is unsurprising, he was a military commander in the Song Dynasty era, and indeed, by all accounts, a brilliant one. But only one, and in a time of extreme social and political upheaval, what can really one man hope to accomplish? It would be his untimely death and the perceived injustice and ingratitude of the imperial officials who oversaw it that would ultimately immortalize him and his story into the Chinese compendium of heroes alongside, and likewise partially fictionalized in the process, like the likes of Liu Bu,

the three brothers of the Peach Garden Oath, Zhuge Liang, Song Zhang, and the like. As with many of these others, his is a tale that derives its heroism less from its ultimate success than his commitment to unflinching virtue even unto death, and even in the face of overwhelming odds at outright betrayal. Yue Fei was born in or around the 24th of March, 1103. His story is recorded in two main works, a biography written by his grandson, Yue Ke, some 60 years after his death at the beginning of the 13th century, called the Eguo Jintuo Zubian, or Record of the Jin in Hubei. This would be incorporated by the Yuan-era historian Tok Toa in his landmark work of 1346, The History of Jin. Given that this was written by his own grandson, and at a time when the idea of a hero rising to fight off invading barbarians from the north, against all odds, would have totally been in vogue, modern historians tend to view Yue Ke's biography of his ancestor with

more than a little suspicion. Even so, it's about the closest thing we have to a real, actual historical record, since the other quote-unquote source is a work of outright fiction, the Wuxia novel Shuo Ye Chuan Juan, or The Telling of the Complete Biography of Yue Fei, as written by Qing Dynasty novelist Qian Cai between the late 17th and early 18th centuries. This is a story that was specifically re-edited between 1964 and 1995 in order to weed out most of the more overtly fantastical elements, and is today available in English as the General UFA. But it is still, like Water Margin and The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, entirely a work of fanciful historical fiction,

written more than half a millennium after the fact. Yet even taking these flights of fancy into account, UFA's story still reads like something more out of a fiction, or even a comic book, than a normal biography. His life has a storybook quality to it, and it can often be difficult to well discern which details are factual, which are fictional, and which are some blend of the both. Still, it's a fun and epic tale, so let's crack this story open. Yue Fei was born to a poor peasant family on a moisture evaporator farm in the Jundland wastes of Tatooine. Um, I mean in Tangyin County, Anyang Prefecture, Henan.

To the farmer, Yue Huo, also called Yue He, and his wife. Supposedly, his given name, Fei, meaning to fly, was chosen because at the time of his birth, quote, a large swan-like bird landed on the roof of the Yue family's house, end quote. This bird, known as a Dapeng, was a great mythological beast of immense power and good fortune. From Wushu master Liang Shouyu, quote, legend has it that Dapeng was the guardian and stayed above the head of Gautama Buddha. Dapeng could get rid of all evil in any area. Even the monkey king was no match for it, end quote. Okay, so pretty good sign that. Also legendarily, the Taoist immortal Chen Tuan, disguised as an itinerant priest, warned his

father that should the infant begin to cry, he must immediately be placed and sealed within a clay pot. Sure enough, one day, some child squeezed the baby fey's hand too hard, and as babies will do, he started crying. Almost immediately, the sky darkened and it began to rain, and kept raining, and kept raining, until the Yellow River flooded, wiping out the village entirely. Yue's father, remembering the mysterious priest's warning, put his infant son into a clay pot, fastened the lid, and then held onto it for dear life as they were together swept down the river. Now this certainly does seem fantastical,

but there might have been some elements of truth to it. Certainly, the Yue family's village lay within the floodplain of the ever-mercurial Huanghe, and Yue Ke's 13th century biography does include reports of a flood, albeit without the supernatural immortal's warning. In any event, Yue Fei would survive the flood, though he'd be the only one of his family's sons to be so lucky. From the earliest of ages, young Yue Fei showed an uncommon level of dutifulness and piety, which like any Chinese family, they praised him for and urged him onward.

When offering sacrifices at the tomb of his then-recently-deceased teacher, for instance, his father stated to the boy, When the time comes, you will also have to make the ultimate sacrifice for the empire and lay down your life as a martyr for your country. And yeah, I guess that was supposed to be, Good job, kiddo, I'm proud of you. Thanks, Dad, I guess. The face father would be his first primary instructor, and he was a vociferous reader and writer, often doing so even by candlelight well into the night, including such treatises as the Confucian Classics, the Dual Commentary,

the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and of course, the Art of War. His adult writing shows the marks of such aptitude, marked out as a well-educated man with a real talent for literary expression. The poem at the beginning of the episode, for instance, is pretty darn good if I do say so myself, and it was written by Yue Fei. My day, the boy was a diligent worker on his farm. As the flood of his infancy had wiped out his family's savings, they were forced from whatever precipice of security they might have accrued back to abject subsistence.

All that grueling physical labor resulted in Yue Fei growing into a strapping young man of above-average height, immensely strong, and stoic and laconic in nature. When ready, his father, unable to even conceive of affording the education necessary to ready the boy for imperial examinations, instead began preparing him for the other out from a life of farmwork drudgery, a military career. To that end, Yue was enrolled under the instruction of the highly respected village elder, Duotong, at whose tomb he would later make the sacrifice I mentioned earlier. Under Master Zhuo's tutelage, Yue Fei

excelled, learning from John E. E. Wills Jr., quote, archer and other military arts. Yue grew to be prodigiously strong and an excellent archer, splitting with his arrows the arrows his teacher had just shot into the bullseye, end quote. He likewise mastered the 18 weapons of Wushu, including staple weapons like swords, axes, hammers, spears, quarter staves, and halberds, as well as more esoteric weaponry like the trident, chain whip, hook sword, and the epically named meteor hammer, which is in essence two weighted flail heads attached via a long chain to be swung around. If you're looking for a visual, look no further than Tarantino's Kill Bill Volume 1 and Gogo Yubari's Weapon of Choice. Legendarily, he was possessed of not just great, but outright superhuman strength.

From the biography of Yue Fei, quote, He possessed supernatural power before his adulthood. He was able to draw a bow of 300 caddies, which is about 400 pounds or 180 kilograms, and a crossbow of eight stone, 1,280 pounds or 580 kilograms. He learned everything and could shoot with his left and right hands, end quote. And while it's pretty safe to chalk that up to a good myth-making, it is true that he became so renowned across his homeland that he actually spent a period of several years serving as a bodyguard for a prominent local family known as the Han clan. All of this would be the ideal 80s training montage for what was to come. As we've already well established in the

main narrative, foreign affairs were in something of a rough we've already well established in the main narrative, foreign affairs were in something of a rough patch for the Song Dynasty in the 12th century, with them in a two-century-long staring contest with the Khitan Liao dynasty of the north. That, of course, would come to a head in 1122, when one of the Khitan vassal peoples, the Jurchen, rose up in rebellion, and the Song Dynasty sent out a general call to arms to all loyal subjects of the realm to participate in either the attack against Liao to recover their long-lost territories against the northern border, the 16 prefectures, or to help defend the border against assault and root out rebel forces hiding in the woods, mountains, and marshes across the empire.

Uncle Huizong wants you to join the imperial army. Unsurprisingly, Yue Fei needed no prompting, and he hurried down to his local military headquarters to enlist at 19 years old as a simple private. Yet his stature and clear aptitude for all affairs martial made an excellent impression on the recruiters, and he was immediately given command of a three-man combat squadron before being shipped off into action. His first combat experience would not, however, be against the Liao or any foreign threat, but against the rebel bandits that had sapped the empire's strength from within. Quote,

He sent men to infiltrate the bandits' camp, lured them into ambush, and shot an arrow down the throat of one bandit leader. End quote. Shortly after arriving at the front, however, Yue received his first bout of terrible news. His father had passed away in his absence. Ever filial son that he was, Yue Fei resigned his commission at once, which I should note was not at all unusual and in fact socially expected, and headed home to conduct the prescribed period of mourning, which was typically between one and three years.

It's uncertain precisely how much time he spent in mourning at his family home, but it is definitely certain that in the interim, relations between the Song Dynasty and the Jurchen rebels, now styling themselves as the Jin Dynasty and having quickly supplanted the Gitan as absolute overlords of the Northeast, had broken down. As we've discussed at length in previous episodes, the Jin quickly realized that 1. the Song were too weak to be of much use in conquering the North,

and 2. they didn't need any such help anyway. That had culminated in the opening of hostilities between the brief allies in 1125 and 1126, culminating in yet further humiliation for the Song and the sacking of its capital, Kaifeng. This was topped off with the hauling off in chains of almost the entire imperial family and the cession of the entire north of China to the Jin occupiers. It was into this ongoing catastrophe that Ufa re-enlisted into the imperial army. Now we don't know when exactly it happened, but it seems that it may well have been in these gap years between 1123 and 1126 that Ufa would acquire his famous tattoo. Legendarily at least, it came at the behest and perhaps even the very hand of his mother, as a lifelong lesson of duty and fidelity to the nation.

Again, we're dealing with multiple, often conflicting legends here, so the dates get rather muddy. But from the fictional Shuo Ye Chuan Zhan, Yue's mother praises her son after he declines the chance to become a general in a pirate warlord's army, instead remaining

loyal to the Song. She says, quote, I, your mother, saw that you did not accept recruitment of the rebellious traitor, and that you willingly endure poverty and are not tempted by wealth or status. But I fear that after my death there may be some unworthy creature who will entice you. For this reason, I want to tattoo on your back the four characters. With utmost loyalty, serve the nation. The lady picked up the brush and wrote out on his spine the four characters. Then she bit her teeth and started pricking. Having finished, she painted the characters with ink mixed with vinegar so that the color would never fade.

End quote. It was a mark that Yuefei would not only wear and embody for the rest of his life, but one that he'd proudly put on display in order to shame anyone, anywhere, who ever doubted his credentials or his loyalty to the realm. His return to the Song military could scarcely have come at a darker hour for the Chinese empire, and he threw himself with full zeal into the defense of the nation against the Jin invasion. He was first stationed in the Tai Yuan region, serving under one of the leading opponents of appeasement of the Jurchen emperor, and earning himself valor and the notice of his officers for leading cavalry charges into the

very thick of battle, and for successfully leading espionage missions into enemy camps. When the capital Kaifeng was surrendered, sacked, and then abandoned later that year, it became obvious to all loyal defenders of the Song that its last great hope now lay solely with the prince that got away, Zhao Gou, the Prince of Kang. Thus, Yue Fei traveled to the capital region following the Jin's retreat north back into their own territories, and was among those who met with Prince Kang personally and attempted to organize forces to defend him. Zhao Go made the determination, and wisely so, that he could not remain in the north, and thus retreated to the southeast where he proclaimed himself Emperor Gao Zong the following year, thus triggering a third wave of Jin invasion. Yue Fei would remain behind in the emptied and abandoned capital city,

intent on fortifying and holding it against the storm, once again bearing down on the north. There he would remain for the next two years, before at last being forced by his own lackluster commander to withdraw south of the Yangtze in what would prove to be a largely unsuccessful rearguard defense against further Jian incursion. Wills tells us of the uneasy sort of relationship the likes of Emperor Gaozong and much of the imperial court had with a man like Yue Fei from the outset. They viewed him, as much as he might profess his undying loyalty, much like they did most of the military. Like most Chinese aristocracy had come to view its own military as something of a caged tiger. Useful, at times necessary,

but never to be trusted too closely. Such had more than once been the perilous consequences of the drifting apart of the once closely knitted Chinese virtues of Wen and Wu, that of culture and civil, and that of the marshal. From Wills, quote, Yue Fei was just the kind of northern military man on whom Gaozong's court was so uneasily dependent. In one incident, Yue rode straight into a bandit camp, made a rousing speech condemning the Jin as rebels and offering the bandits a chance to

make good names for themselves, and recruited the whole bandit force into his army, end quote. His very charisma and ability to strike the cords of the hearts of men was what, in the eyes of many officials, made depending on soldiers like him rather like holding on to the tail of a tiger. In their estimation, it was as dangerous to keep holding on as to let go. This was made especially clear to Gao Zong and his court in 1129, when it was a group of traitorous military guardsmen that briefly unseated the monarch and took over the palace before loyalist forces had surrounded, captured, and then executed the small band. How could the court of Gaozong, now focused on consolidating his holds on the southlands,

keep such northmen too terribly close, when everyone knew that they would always be seeking to find ways of returning to reclaim their homelands from the barbarian occupiers, and would only ever half-support any other objective. But on the other hand, how could the Southern Song possibly survive without such dedicated and talented men of the North? History isn't black and white, yet too often it's presented as such. Grey History, The French Revolution is a long-form history podcast dedicated to exploring the ambiguities and nuances of the past. By contrasting both the experiences of contemporaries and the conclusions of historians,

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By the winter of 1129, Yuefe Fei was stationed within the briefly southern capital, Jian Kang, aka modern Nanjing, staring down the Jin army from across the Yangtze. His commanding officer, the same languid and listless general Du Chong, who had ordered the disastrous retreat from Kaifeng earlier that year, seemed little interested in the massive enemy army preparing to cross the river, and Yue Fei was furious. Tears in his eyes, he pleaded with the general, quote, A powerful army is nearby in Huainan, looking down upon the Yangtze with ample resources. There is no more critical time to be nursing our vengeance, but you sir spend all your days resting at ease and do not concern yourself with military matters. If the generals do not obey orders and Jinling is lost, will you be able to lie back on your high pillow here? Perhaps, in acceptance of Yue's not-at-all-veiled criticism,

but more likely in the hope that death would shut his mouth permanently, General Du had Yue stay behind with a force of 20,000 to defend the river crossing, while he and the bulk of the Song army retreated once more, this time to Hangzhou. From Kenneth J. Hammond, The defense of the southern bank held until one of the other subcommanders began to retreat unexpectedly. The move threw the defense into chaos. Force commander Chen Cui was killed, leaving Yue Fei to rally the remaining troops. The next day, he counterattacked, inflicting heavy casualties on the Jin troops,

but he could not force them back. By the end of the day, tired, bloody, and demoralized, the remaining Song troops were at their wits' end and on the verge of disintegration. Sensing that his army hung by the barest of threads, Yue Fei stepped forward, stood in front of the main gate of their army camp, and addressed them all. He stated, quote, We have been treated generously by the state. We ought to repay it with loyalty. If we achieve merit, our fame will be recorded so that even if we die, it will not be erased. But if we submit and are taken prisoner or flee and turn brigand merely to save our lives, when we die, our names

will be lost in oblivion. Is this what you want? Jian Kong is on the left side of the river on defensible terrain, and the Jurchen brigands occupied, what will be left to maintain the state? Today's issue permits no other course. Anyone who goes out of this gate will be beheaded. End quote. And it was super effective. Though there was still a smattering of troops that vanished from the tents and posts off into the wilds during the dark of night, those that remained would become the core of Yue Fei's loyal band. They would fight the Jin armies crossing at Jinling to a standstill, and at least for a moment, it might have seemed like they could stave off the southern invasion altogether. Ultimately, however, a secondary Jin force crossing the river further upstream outflanked

the defenders of Jin Kang. Their defense now moot, Yue would at last order his own withdrawal of the army to rejoin the larger imperial army downriver and decide what to do next. That would become clear when Emperor Gaozong finally slipped through the fingers of his Jurchen pursuers after sailing south to Wenzhou and then Fuzhou, effectively beyond their reach. Forced to turn back and return north, but now weighted down by the sheer amount of southern imperial treasure they'd looted, the Jin armies proved to be easy pickings for Yue Fei and his army, who would be chief among those harassing them all the way back across the Yangtze, inflicting tremendous casualties on the barbarian forces in the process.

In the end, they would harry the Jin army all the way north to Xiangyang City, which Yue led the way in recapturing for the Song. It was at this point that Yue Fei's star truly began to rise. He'd received fame and acclaim for his conduct in the defense of the Emperor's flight, and even more from the victories scored over the retreating Jin. He'd further mark himself out when bandit forces began to become more than a nu scored over the retreating Jin. He'd further mark himself out when bandit forces began to become more than a nuisance along the strategically important region around Lake Dongping, which served as a vital link to the Sichuan Basin of the west. And while these bandit warlords fought one another as much as they did anyone else, they yet plundered the region and

terrorized its inhabitants. At length, Yue Fei, as of the year 133 at age 30, was newly empowered as the overall commander of the Song army in the central Yangtze region, was dispatched to deal with them once and for all. Apparently, the issue had rather confounded the local and regional authorities when the bandit lead, Du Zhuo, a man named Yang Yao, fled with his forces into the marshes of Lake Dongting. This was problematic for the prefectural and provincial defense forces, not for battlefield reasons, but for administrative ones. Marshes, being bodies of water, were

technically under no administrative unit's jurisdiction, placing them more or less outside the law. This likewise helps to explain the late Song Jiang's choice of home base in the marshes of Mount Liang. Moreover, from Wills, quote, the state assumed, not without reason, that the imperial state could wait out the leaders of the rebellion, that leaders and followers eventually would prefer the rewards and full rice bowls of garrison life to the hardships of resistance in the mountains or marshes, and that the imperial bureaucracy would manage the rebels, move them around, and in the long run, tame them. Thus, it was only once the central government realized the threat Yang Yao and his bandits posed to the stability and security of the region as a

whole that direct action was taken against them at last. This occurred when it was learned that Yang Yao was in talks with another leader of the north, Li Cheng, a bandit who'd recently been upjumped to a general in the Jin puppet successor state of Chu known as Qi, which if completed, stood to become a truly formidable and dangerous force to even imperial armies. Thus it was that Yue Fei was given orders to root out and end once and for all the banditry of Yang Yao and his followers before they could cause further trouble for the realm, and to break the strength of the so-called General of Qi, Li Cheng. In the third month of 1134, Yue moved north to strike first at the Qi general before turning south to dispatch the bandit lord.

Outside the city of Xiangzhou, the forces of Song and Qi arrayed opposite of one another, prepared to do battle. It was then that Yue Fei noted the fatal flaw in General Li's configuration. He'd gotten them utterly backward. He said, quote, Infantry take advantage of difficult terrain, while cavalry have the advantage on flat open He said, The countermaneuver then was obvious, and Yue sent his pikemen against the enemy cavalry as they tried to negotiate the embankments and slopes of the left flank, all the while hemmed in by the river itself and unable to sweep around the Song infantry's flanks. Meanwhile, on the left flank, Song cavalry, unimpeded and free to roam and charge as they like on the flat, level terrain, broke and utterly routed the Qi infantry formation in short order, After a short series of further victories against the humiliated Li Chen, resulting in the general of Qi fleeing north,

Yue Fei sent a missive to Emperor Gaozong and the imperial court, requesting permission to pursue, annihilate, and then continue northward. He wrote, so that the people have never forgotten song. If we struck directly into the central plains with 200,000 crack troops, we could restore the old boundaries and make them truly strong. End quote. The court, however, rejected his plan, fearing Jin reprisals for such an action against its buffer state. Instead, they directed Yue Fei to continue on his plan

and to wipe out Yang Yao and his rebels. Even at this point, though, Yue Fei preferred negotiation and persuasion rather than naked force, which paid great returns in the voluntary surrender of many of the rebel holdfasts he entreated him with. This was greatly helped when, through persuasion and the kept promises of pardon, rich reward, and official titles, Yue Fei managed to flip one of Yang's top commanders, and then got him to successfully flip and lead out of the marshes more and more of Yang Yao's own soldiery. The final stronghold he and his men were forced to take by storm,

but he pleaded with the imperial court to offer amnesty to those regular folk among the rebels who had been, in his words, simply led astray. The court, at least to an extent, acquiesced. Of course, the leaders were executed with little delay, but from the ordinary fighting men, more than 50,000 were allowed to enroll in Yue's own family army, thus increasing his force to more than 100,000, rendering him one of the three or four most powerful forces in the Song Empire at this point, one and all of them at Yue Fei's beck and call. Even more striking is the fact that in spite of this enormous influx of formerly rebel bandits, which are no easy group to train

into upright soldiers, surely, Yue's army seemed to suffer very little long-term decline in cohesion or discipline. Even more, Yue managed to keep his army relatively popular with the local landowners and peasantry across the very lands on which it encamped, a feat virtually unheard of in most militaries across time, and a truly terrifying prospect for many members of the imperial court. Yue Fei had a massive army. He could seemingly expand it at will, and apparently with little more than the persuasive nature of his charisma. And he could simultaneously do so while keeping the people feeding and housing that force on his side.

What couldn't he do? What might someday stop him, some wondered, from placing a crown on his own head, or turning his sights and that of his army against the Song emperor himself? Nonetheless, with such a victory in hand, for the time being, as of late 1135, there was little the court could do but heap even greater rewards and titles upon Yue Fei. He was granted by his titles and offices wide latitude within the region of control along the middle Yangtze to even make official appointments of his own officers.

Yue Fei was riding high in the saddle. Early the following year, however, fate would deal him the cruelest blow yet, the death of his beloved mother. When news reached him, Yue, as with his father, quit his post and announced his intention to retire for the full duration of the mourning period in order to properly honor his mother's memory and spirit. Yet this time he would have little such opportunity. Such were the events of the realm that in short order, after only a few months, no less than Emperor Gaozong himself insisted that Yue Fei end his period of mourning and resume his post. The Song dynasty had urgent need of his talents. This time, he would get his wish, a northerly campaign to drive back the Jin force.

In 1136, Yue Fei would command his army in a strong push to reclaim the Song's mountains, valleys, and courts of old, as he'd put in his poem at the top of the episode. They pushed back the Zhechun and their Qi puppets almost all the way to the banks of the Yellow River. Here, though, he received a summons from the emperor himself to retire his force and report directly to court to attend his majesty. It was here that Yue Fei would come to meet Chancellor Qin Hui, a fateful meeting indeed, as the two would rapidly come to despise one another above all others. Qin Hui was born in Nanjing, then called Jiangning or Jiankang. He was born in 1090, but passed his imperial service examination in 1115 at the age of 25, and shortly thereafter entered into service at the imperial court at Kaifeng. Qin was present in the palace during the subsequent Jin invasion and capture of the city,

and was among the myriad officials led off in chains back to the northern Jurchen capital of Shangjing, like as not never to see his homeland again. This was not, however, to prove his fate. There is an air of doubt around just how he managed to escape captivity. Some tellings have it that he managed to convince his captors to allow both him and his wife to accompany a Jinn expeditionary army southward, while by his own rather unbelievable account, he simply managed to miraculously escape his captivity, along with his wife, and flee outright. Less forgiving Chinese accounts suggest that he might have been intentionally set loose by the Jurchen, not as a free man, but as a treacherous spy and agent provocateur amongst his own people. In any event, by 1129 or 1130, Qin had arrived back into Song-controlled territory, and in short order, found his way back into the service of the imperial court now at Hangzhou

as a Jin expert. Upon returning and receiving his first audience with Emperor Gao Zong, Qin Hui is written to have expounded upon what he viewed as the absolute necessity of an immediate peace with the Jurchen people. He stated, quote, If it is desired that the empire be without crisis, it is necessary for the south to stay in the south and the north to stay in the north. Then consultations to discuss peace can be set up, end quote. This rather conciliatory, some might say spineless, opinion certainly raised more than a few eyebrows at the Song court, but none arched near so high as those of Yue Fei himself, having recently returned from his latest successful foray into Jin-occupied territories north of the Yangtze. Suffice it to say that from the very outset, Yue and Qin were not fast friends,

a mutual antipathy that would quickly blossom into a full-blown hatred. For his part, Qin Hui believed that the military leadership needs must be curtailed. There's good historical precedent for this worry. One need look little further than the devastation wrought by the mad general, An Lushan, to understand why any and all Chinese might be justifiably fearful of a general amassing too much personal power. Moreover, he recognized the fact that such a restriction on their power was a virtual prerequisite to conducting further negotiations with the Jin. How faithful could peace talks be, after all, if there were renegade generals still afield more intent on vengeance than obeying imperial edicts? Yuefei's army was just one among several, after all, that had coalesced around the commander's cult of personality more than anything formalized. And while the throne had, out of sheer necessity, allowed for such slides and formality, the fact of the matter remained that such armies were intrinsically

dangerous to the regime. They were, after all, armies potentially more loyal to the general than to the realm. Recruits, criminals, and surrendered bandit units made up the bulk of their ranks. What loyalty could they possibly possess to the throne or its potentially unpopular decisions? Chancellor Qin argued vociferously about the need to curb the powers of the generals, which of course prompted a response from the selfsame military general, Yue Fei. He wrote, He's not trained in military affairs. I fear he will not be able to control the army. End quote. Only he, he argued, was capable of wrangling and directing the herd of cats he had amassed. And, to be sure, there was some merit to this assertion. In the whole of Southern Song's

military, Yue Fei stood apart as the most disciplined and able. This was not a period of peace to muck about with leadership, especially of units who had sworn oaths of allegiance specifically to the commander himself. It is folly. And when the chancellor, Zhang Jun, overruled him, appointed a civilian to the new commander of the armies, and then watched in horror as the other general rebelled and took more than 40,000 troops over to the Jin? What else could Yue Fei say but, I told you so. In the aftermath of this monumental screw-up and betrayal, General Yue was indeed returned to his position of command, but found himself once again hobbled by the emperor's

vacillating strategies regarding the Song Jin conflict and the changing situation in the buffer state between the two powers, the puppet state of Qi. Gaozong continued to saber-rattle at the Jurchen, but then hemmed and hawed over how much he was actually willing to do about it, which proved irksome to many men, such as Yue, who was like, well, obviously we can't stop until we've driven the barbarians off every square li of our homeland. The situation with Qi proves to be somewhat more cloudy. It is known that as of 1137, the Jin Emperor had opted to dissolve the state altogether after the crown prince, Wu Zhu. Yes, the same Wu Zhu from last episode who had chased Gaozong all the way south to Wenzhou,

he'd been tipped off about a supposed plan by the king of Qi, Liu Yu, to defect and surrender to the Song. It's widely speculated that it was Yue Fei himself who may have engineered this development by giving a letter to that effect and addressed it to the king of Qi, and then giving it to a known spy for the Jin. The spy traveled north and then dutifully showed the plan to his liege lord, and that was that. Though it's unconfirmed whether or not Yue's hand was the one that penned the letter that doomed the state of Qi, he certainly wasted little time in writing to the imperial court and requesting permission to attack and take advantage of the chaos the dissolution of the buffer state had wrought to the jian lines and communications. Yet Yue would receive no reply from Gao Zong, as the emperor was wrapped up in the news that

had reached him from the north, that his father, the retired emperor Huizong, had died in captivity, which the southern monarch apparently took very harshly and ordered an extended period of official mourning. Neither of these elements were particularly great news for either Gaozong or General Yue Fei's undiminished desires of reconquest. The death of Huizong was sad, sure, but it was also a reminder to the southern court that Gaozong's brother, Emperor Qinzong, was still very much alive in Jin captivity. And with the king of Qi dethroned, it might be possible that the Jurchen emperor, as of 1135 after the death of Wu Qimai slash Taizong, now his great-grand-nephew He La, or Emperor Xizong, might place Qinzong on the throne of the north in order to destabilize Gao Zong's own claim.

Whew, that was a mouthful. As Gao Zong still had no heir of his own, it was a point of worry for the Hangzhou court that a returned Qin Zong, even as a puppet of the Zhezhen, could create a rival center of power to their own. It was here that Yue opened his mouth and inserted his own foot. He's written to have stated of the emperor's cousin, quote, now the dynasty has a man. Isn't the basis for its revival right here? From Wills, quote, emperors had always tended to resent official interference in family matters, and this was a question that had to be handled with extreme tact by the most senior court officials, and certainly not by military men, but Yue brought it up in audience with Gaozong. He emerged ashen-faced, evidently realizing that

he had gone too far. Gaozong professed to admire Yue's frankness, but it seems that from this time on he was wary of any measure that would give still more power to this impetuous soldier who did not know his place. End quote. So, yeah. Whoops. UFA has raised the eyebrows of the whole nation, not only because of his undiplomatic bluntness to the throne, but even more because of his prodigious strategic and battlefield prowess against both the banditry of the South and the Jin armies to the North.

And so, next time, we'll be accompanying Yue Fei to the heights of his career, but at the same time, tracking the machinations of the Imperial Chancellor back in Hangzhou, Qin Hui, who will use every mechanism at his disposal to bring the mighty general low. Thanks for listening. The French Revolution set Europe ablaze. It was an age of enlightenment and progress, but also of tyranny and oppression. It was an age of glory and an age of tragedy. One man stood above it all. This was the Age of Napoleon.

I'm Everett Rummage, host of the Age of Napoleon podcast. Join me as I examine the life and times of one of the most fascinating and enigmatic characters in modern history. Look for the Age of Napoleon wherever you find your podcasts.