On the banks of present-day Hangzhou's Xizi Lake, three national heroes of the Southern Song Dynasty, the Southern Ming Dynasty, and the Ming Dynasty are buried in turn, namely the tomb of Yue Fei in Qixialing, the tomb of Zhang Huangyan under the Lychee Peak in the northern foothills of Nanping Mountain, and the tomb of Yu Qian on the south bank of the West Lake. Although these three national heroes lived in different eras, they all had historical merits in resisting foreign invasions. Among them, Yue Fei and Yu Qian have become well-known historical figures, but everyone is still somewhat unfamiliar to Zhang Huangyan.
My understanding of Zhang Huangyan began with the two seven-law poems he wrote before he was about to take up his righteousness. The title of these two seven laws is "The Hometown of Jiachen in August", and one of the poems is as follows: "What is the desire of the country to break the family and die?" There is my division at the head of Xizi Lake. The sun and moon are both suspended in the tomb of the clan, and the Qiankun half-wall Yue Family Ancestral Hall. Kuo divides the hands into three seats and dares to borrow one branch for Dan Xin. He risu che Zhejiang East Road, nu tao will belong to the Yiyi! ”
The poems are written generously and movingly, and even today they are awe-inspiring to read. Our nation has not decayed for thousands of years, relying on countless heroes like Zhang Huangyan from ancient times to the present.
Zhang Huangyan was born in the 48th year of the Ming Dynasty (1620 AD) to a bureaucratic family in Yinxian County (present-day Ningbo), Zhejiang. At this time, the countdown to the demise of the Ming Dynasty has entered, due to the extreme corruption of the Ming ruling class, the entire empire seems to be in the crater waiting to erupt, the people in various places have revolted, and the Jurchen tribes located in the Liaodong region have risen and are peeking into the Central Plains.
Zhang Huangyan grew up in such an environment of internal and external troubles. Because his father had a sense of family and country and was a clean official, and he also served in the military department, Zhang Huangyan, who grew up next to his father, talked about military affairs since he was a teenager, and had the ambition to serve the country with his heart, and he took the world as his responsibility.
Zhang Huangyan studied poetry and at the same time loved to learn military books, and at the same time learned martial arts. When he took the county exam at the age of sixteen, he became a hit, and he not only wrote well, but also excelled in archery. When he was testing the riding and shooting kung fu in the county, Zhang Huangyan fired three arrows in a row, and the arrows hit the target, which made the candidates who took the exam sigh one after another.
Just as Zhang Huangyan was preparing to make a grand plan in the examination of The People (Chongzhen Fifteenth Year, 1642), the Ming Dynasty was overthrown by Li Zicheng's rebel army in the seventeenth year of Chongzhen (1644 AD), and the Chongzhen Emperor Zhu Youjian was martyred. In the same year, due to the perverse actions of Li Zicheng and his gang in Beijing, the Manchu Rulers took the opportunity to defeat Li Zicheng's rebel army, and thus entered Beijing in a dignified manner surrounded by traitors.
When the country was in existence, Zhang Huangyan, who was twenty-five years old at the time, resolutely chose to devote himself to the road of survival from Rong. Thus began his twenty-year career of resistance to the Manchu Qing regime.
Due to the corruption of the Hongguang regime, this small southern dynasty regime that lasted less than a year was quickly destroyed by the fierce offensive of the Manchu Qing army, and the Hongguang Emperor Zhu Yousong, who was so dim-witted that he only knew good wine and beauty, escorted Beijing to be beheaded.
In order to continue to raise the banner of resistance against the Qing, Zhang Huangyan, who was in the city of Ningbo, gathered at the City God Temple with Qian Sule and other officials from the punishment department in the township, swore an oath to fight the Qing army to the end, and at the same time paid tribute to Zhu Yihai, the king of Lu in Tiantai, and urged king Lu to go north to supervise the country to stabilize the overall situation.
Scholar Gu Cheng once commented on the celebrities of the late Ming Dynasty, he believed that in Shi Kefa, He Tengjiao and other political figures can only be regarded as second- and third-rate figures, only Zhang Huangyan and Tuoba Yinxi can be called first-class politicians in the late Ming Dynasty, because in terms of political foresight and boldness, Shi Kefa and others cannot be compared with Zhang Huangyan and others.
Unfortunately, although Zhang Huangyan's political foresight was extraordinary, and he could be called a first-class politician of that era, it was a pity that there was no first-class military expert to cooperate with him, which eventually led to the failure of Zhang Huangyan's anti-Qing plan. Doesn't this correspond to Cao Xueqin's words that "the fortune of being born in the last days is partial"? Alas, history can never be assumed.
Zhang Huangyan successively served as the right-hand man of the Lu Dynasty, the Left Attendant of the Army, and the Shangshu of the Bingbu. Although his anti-Qing cause suffered repeated setbacks, he was always loyal to the Ming Dynasty, and although he and Qing Zuo were repeatedly defeated, he was still defeated and defeated, and he was never discouraged.
Zhang Huangyan once entered the Yangtze River three times to fight against the Qing army, and at the peak of his battle record, he once conquered the four provinces, three prefectures, and twenty-four counties in Jiangnan, captured more than thirty cities and pools of the Qing army, dealt a heavy blow to the arrogance of the Qing army, and inspired the fighting spirit of the vast number of jiangnan people.
However, such a good situation was buried in the hands of Zheng Chenggong's light enemy in joint operations. Because Zheng Chenggong was caught in the Qing army's strategy of slowing down the army under the city of Nanjing, the result was that not only was Nanjing not captured, but the Zheng army was defeated by the Qing army.
Once the Zheng army was defeated, Zhang Huangyan's army fought alone, the Qing army counterattacked, and all the achievements of Zhang Huangyan's army were also in vain.
After the fall of the Yongli regime, Zhang Huangyan urged Zheng Chenggong of Taiwan to support King Lu, who had taken refuge in Kinmen, as the main one, in order to raise the banner of anti-Qing and restoration of the Ming Dynasty again, but before Zheng Chenggong could successfully agree to Zheng Chenggong, he died young in Taiwan.
In the third year of the Kangxi Dynasty (1664 AD), as various anti-Qing forces were destroyed by the Qing army one by one, Zhang Huang, who had resisted the Qing army for twenty years, saw no hope of recovering the country, and in order to avoid the innocent sacrifice of more people who followed him, he dismissed his troops at a small island mountain in Nantian, and he and the two subordinates lived in seclusion there.
The Qing Dynasty could not let go of Zhang Huangyan's huge hidden danger, so they paid a lot of money to find Zhang Huangyan's traces, so Zhang Huangyan was sold by traitors and captured by the Qing army.
After Zhang Huangyan was captured, the Qing officials, after repeatedly persuading them to surrender, were ordered by the emperor to execute Zhang Huangyan and others in Hangzhou.
Before the execution, Zhang Huang's spirit remained unchanged, and he looked at Wu Shan from afar and sighed: "Great rivers and mountains, but it is a pity that they have fallen into fishyy!" Because he insisted on not kneeling down to be tortured, the Qing army also respected him as a tough man, so they specially allowed him to sit down and be tortured.
Zhang Huangyan was only forty-five years old at the time of his death.