In 1234, in the first year of the reign of Emperor Lizong of Song, the Southern Song Dynasty and the Mongol army joined forces to conquer Caizhou, the last place of residence of the Jin Emperor. Rising from the White Mountains and Black Water, the Jin Kingdom, which had occupied the Central Plains for more than a hundred years, perished.
Soon, the Southern Song and Mongol soldiers, who had lost their common enemy, met each other, and in 1235, Wokoutai sent two armies south to attack the Southern Song On the grounds that the Song had violated its alliance. One route led by Emperor Kuochu attacked the Jingxiang region, and the other route led by Prince Kuoduan attacked Sichuan. Under the continuous blows of the Mongol army, the Song army was forced to make a strategic retreat.
Song Lizong ordered the Lianghuai, Yanjiang, and Jinghu Systems Divisions to organize Tuntian in Jiangbei and Huaixi, set up baojia, and set up guerrilla armies in the lianghuai and along the river. Under the leadership of the famous generals Meng Jue and Yu Jiu, relying on rivers, mountains and other terrain that is not conducive to the galloping of warhorses, castle fortifications were built for defense, and at the same time, ditches and ditches were dug in areas close to the border to establish a defense system in depth.
Until the death of Wo Kuotai in 1241, the Mongol army was unable to form an absolute military superiority over the Southern Song Dynasty, and even Wo Kuotai's favorite son, Kuo Chu, died in the Song War. Since then, the Mongols and the Southern Song Dynasty have their own gains and losses in the offensive and defensive battles on the border, the eastern front is on the Huai River line, the central line is stable in the Dabie Mountains, and the western front is in the northern and western parts of Sichuan, and the stalemate lasted for nearly 20 years.
In 1251, Möngke from the Tore family succeeded to the throne as the fourth Great Khan of the Mongol Empire. A month later, he appointed his younger brother, Kublai Khan, to lead the military service of the Southern Han Dynasty. The south of the desert, that is, the south of the Gobi Desert, refers to the Central Plains Han Dynasty seized from the Hands of the Jin Dynasty, and there is no explanation as to where the south went. The Mongols grew up living in vast steppes, the field of vision has always been broad, when Genghis Khan gave the eldest son Shuchi the fiefdom is west of the Irtysh River, where the Mongolian horseshoe goes, which means that it can hit wherever it can be.
Kublai Khan was appointed as the prime minister of the Southern Han Dynasty, and his first task was to continue to prepare for the military conquest of the Southern Song Dynasty. Since 1234, the Mongols have waged wars against the Southern Song Dynasty for more than ten consecutive years, successively serving as the three great khans of Wokoutai, Guiyou and Möngke, but they have not made much progress, which makes Möngke, who has just ascended to the Khanate, very depressed.
He said, "
My fathers and brothers, the Great Khans of the past, each of them has established a cause, conquered a certain region, and raised his reputation. ”
He sent another younger brother, Hulagu, to launch an expedition against Persia, and ordered Kublai Khan to actively prepare for an attack on the Southern Song Dynasty.
Yao Shu, a Han Chinese strategist at Kublai Khan's side, analyzed the various mistakes of the Mongol army since 1235 and pointed out that in the conquests of the past years,
"The army will be killed by the only profit, and the children will return to their homes"
The plundered people were not private slaves. This not only led to the people of the Southern Song Dynasty swearing to resist to the death, but also to the land they went down
"The city has no inhabitants, and the wild are all reckless"
The military achievements cannot be consolidated at all, and this is by no means a strategy for an security state to fix the country.
He suggested that Kublai Khan should change the military operations of spring to autumn and specialize in captivity as a key area for dividing up the key areas of tun tun, focusing on defending and cultivating long-term combat readiness, and reclaiming the border in the junction of Mongolia and Song, and waiting until the border preparations are full, can we make great achievements.
Kublai Khan felt that Yao Shu's words were very reasonable, so he stationed heavy troops in the west from Yongdeng (present-day Dengzhou, Henan), formed a horn with Xiangyang (present-day Xiangyang, Hubei), and connected Chen Prefecture (present-day Huaiyang County, Henan), Bozhou (present-day Bozhou, Anhui), Qingkou, and Taoyuan (present-day Siyang, Jiangsu) to form a defensive barrier and wait for an opportunity to attack the Southern Song Dynasty.
In order to solve the logistical supply problem of this defensive line, he also set up a transshipment department in Weizhou (衛州, in modern Weihui, Henan) to transport grain through the Yellow River to the Huai River front.
More importantly, in the case of the tenacious defense of the Southern Song Dynasty, the occupation of Dali could allow the Mongolian army to go around the two guangdong areas where the Southern Song Dynasty was weakly defended, and then return to the north and attack the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River from the southwest. In Mongolian, it is called "belly", and during the hunting process, it is necessary to hunt the prey by hunting on all sides. In combat, they also applied this encirclement tactic, and when hunting ferocious animals, they often attacked their soft abdomen, which was more effective.
Therefore, Kublai Khan went to Hala and Lin to see Möngke and asked him to allow him to conquer Dali first, forming a siege of the Southern Song Dynasty from the flank, thus destroying the Song in one fell swoop.
The territory of Dali covered present-day Yunnan, Guizhou, southwestern Sichuan, western Guangxi, and parts of Burma, Laos, and northern Vietnam. Its predecessor was the Nanzhao State established during the Tang Xuanzong period, and during the Five Dynasties period at the end of the Tang Dynasty, Nanzhao fell into chaos. Duan Siping, who was born into the Bai nobility, established the Dali State, twenty-three years before Zhao Kuangyin Chen Qiao mutinied and the yellow robe was added. After Zhao Kuangyin's yellow robe was added, he announced
"Outside the Dadu River is not my own also"
Dali was able to continue to exist.
In 1244, the Mongol Great Khan Gui was ordered by the Mongol army to participate in the conquest of Shu to draw elite troops and attempt to capture Dali. Duan Xiangxing, the king of Dali, fought fiercely with the Mongol army in the Jiuhe area of Lijiang, and the Mongol army eventually returned without success.
In the winter of 1248, the Mongol general Bald Wei once again led an army to attack Yanzhou (yanzhou) on the west bank of the Dadu River (north of present-day Luding County), trying to find a way south from the Qiang tribes to attack Dali, and the Sichuan system made Yu Jiu well aware of the disadvantages of the Mongolian army's strategic detour to the Song army, and sent two Song troops to the west, going abroad to intercept the Mongol army before and after crossing the Daxue Mountains. At the same time, The Pacification envoy Yang Wen (1248) of Bozhou (present-day Zunyi, Guizhou) led a three-thousand-horse horse from Diaomen (碉門, north of Tianquan County, Sichuan) out of the Snow Mountain, where the Song army fought three battles and three victories, and captured the Mongol general Bald, on the banks of the Dadu River.
Although there had been two lessons of failure, the Mongols were well aware of the various roads from western Sichuan to Dali, and knew that the attack on Dali was the last link in the siege of the Southern Song Dynasty, which was an important reason for Kublai Khan to once again propose to Möngke to conquer Dali.
In the spring of 1254, the Mongol army captured the last capital of the Dali state, Duan Xingzhi, and captured the Dali king Duan Xingzhi, and the 316-year-old Dali state was destroyed.
In 1255 (the third year of Song Baoyou), Duan Xingzhi was escorted to mobei and presented with a map of the Dali state to show his surrender to the Mongols. In order to stabilize the situation in Yunnan, Möngke adopted a policy of huairou and did not kill, but gave Duan Xingzhi a golden charm, re-named him "Mahabharata" (Sanskrit for "Great King", which was the original title of The King of Dali), ordered him to return to Yunnan, and in coordination with the officials appointed by the Mongols to appease and manage the various tribes in Yunnan, and continue to conquer the tribes that refused to submit to the valley and the fortress.
In order to appease the Dali nobles, Möngke then ordered the newly established military and political officials in Yunnan to accept The "moderation" of the Duan clan, so that the Dali Duan clan played an important role in the war to pacify the yunnan provinces and capture Annam (present-day Vietnam), helping the Mongols to expand their territory into today's Southeast Asia. After Kublai Khan's return to the north, Wuliang Hetai sent troops to attack Chi bald brother (present-day western Guizhou) and Luoluo (present-day Liangshan region, Sichuan). After two years since Kublai Khan's general army sent out to the south, the Mongolian army pacified the five cities, eight provinces, four counties of dali and thirty-seven tribes such as Wuman and Baiman. Wuliang Hetai set up 190,000 households in the old territory of Dali, and there were 1,000 households and 100 households below, which were in charge of their territory, laying the foundation for the establishment of Yunnan Province in the Later Yuan Dynasty.
Kublai Khan led tens of thousands of Mongol troops from Liupan Mountain to attack for two years, starting from the northern desert to China and arriving at the southwest frontier where the Mongol army had never set foot before, completing a miraculous march in military history.
More than 700 years later, from October 1934 to October 1935, the Chinese Workers' and Peasants' Red Army carried out the world-famous Long March, the most difficult of which was more than 5,000 kilometers between Kunming in Yunnan and Liupanshan in Ningxia, and the Jinsha River and Dadu River were also distributed in this area. The mongol army's march lines basically coincided with this part of the Red Army's Long March, but in the opposite direction: the Red Army was going from south to north, and the Mongol army was going from north to south.
The route through which Kublai Khan's southern expedition to Dali passed is still the most difficult road to walk in China, and the loss of warhorses has reached a staggering 40,000. But it is precisely because it is a road that no one has traveled that the battle has achieved a surprisingly successful effect. Gu Zuyu, a famous scholar of the Qing Dynasty, in his famous book "Minutes of Reading the History of Fang Public Opinion", commented that this expedition was the most talented example of the use of troops he had ever seen:
"I have used soldiers from ancient times, and those who have been in a trance are like the Mongol Kublai Khan's destruction of Dali."