Zhuge Liang marched south, captured seven and seven columns, and won a great victory. It also spread advanced farming techniques to Southern Man, which not only quelled the rebellion, but also won the respect and loyalty of Southern Man. To this day, many ethnic minorities in the south still remember Zhuge Liang's kindness and regard him as a god.
Meng Yu was the leader of the Southern Barbarians at that time, and the Southern Barbarians were the ancestors of the Yi, Zhuang and other ethnic groups. These ethnic minorities later belonged to the Central Plains Dynasty, often contributed troops to the imperial court, participated in the suppression of rebellion and bandits, and made great military achievements.
In the middle of the Ming Dynasty, the Ming army was not accustomed to fighting for a long time, and it was not an opponent of the Wukou at all, often hundreds of thousands of Ming troops were defeated by dozens of Wukou. The imperial court had to mobilize elite soldiers from all over the country, and a "wolf soldier" of the Zhuang ethnic group in Guangxi also received orders to go to the southeast to participate in the war.
The commander of this wolf army was Lady Wa, who was originally the daughter of a Guangxi Tuguan and married another Tianzhou Tuguan, Cen Meng. After Cen Meng's death, he ruled Tianzhou for decades and enjoyed a very high prestige.
Although these officials were hereditary, they were all subject to the dispatch of the imperial court. After Wa's grandson inherited the position of Tuguan of Tian Prefecture, he was ordered to go to Hainan Island to suppress the rebellion, and was killed in battle. When Pingwu's order came, the then 58-year-old Lady Washi resolutely replaced her great-grandson, who was still in her infancy, and led the army to participate in the war.
Lady Wa's army of 7,500 Zhuang was known as the "Wolf Soldier" by the Ming Dynasty because of her bravery and good fighting in various battles. They have been strictly trained since childhood, good at mountain jungle combat, and cooperate with small detachments, and their combat effectiveness far exceeds that of ordinary Ming Dynasty troops.
At that time, it was the most rampant period of the Wukou, and the Ming army generally did not dare to engage the Wukou unless it had a great superiority in troops. The arrival of the Wolf Soldier broke the situation.
Mrs. Washi was originally a master of martial arts, with excellent two-handed knife skills, and when she was young, she also killed tigers, and she must be a pioneer in every battle. She once led 24 people to rush into the encirclement of the Wokou and rescue the besieged Ming army Bai Dusi. Wokou found the wolf soldiers extremely fierce and no longer wanted to fight them easily.
Thirty-three years after Jiajing, the Ming army found a large number of Wukou in Wangjiangjing, and Lady Wa's wolf soldiers first threw themselves into battle, and then various Ming armies arrived one after another and surrounded the Wukou. The First World War annihilated 4,000 Wokou.
Lady Washi and her wolf soldiers, like fierce tigers descending the mountain, fought and retreated one after another, and collapsed into an army. They were the main force in land battles, and the Ming army's marine division cooperated with them to cut back the retreat of the Wokou, which achieved the largest victory since the anti-Wu dynasty. It also allowed the Ming army to build up confidence in defeating the Wokou.
In addition to Lady Wa's double knife, the wolf soldiers left the deepest impression on the other Ming troops that they liked to cooperate in small groups, seven people in a group, the first four and the three, seven together to fight an enemy. Even if Wokou was a samurai ronin from Japan, he could not match the combination of these seven long and short weapons.
Isn't this tactic a bit familiar? Yes, Qi Jiguang's "Mandarin Duck Array" is to absorb the tactics of the wolf soldiers' squads, carry them forward, and become a magic weapon to restrain the Wokou.
No sooner had the War of Resistance against The Japanese War been won than the infighting in the imperial court began. The governor Zhang Jing was dismissed from his post and questioned, the wolf soldiers were also transferred back to their hometown, and Lady Washi was given the title of Lady of Erpinzhu Guo for her military merits. After returning to his hometown, he died of illness in the following year due to overwork during the war for the country.
The legend of the wolf soldiers did not end, and in the later anti-Wu and anti-Qing battles, there were wolf soldiers. Until modern times, the wolf soldiers also participated in the Battle of Zhennanguan against the French, which dealt a heavy blow to the French army and killed and wounded more than a thousand French troops, which was a rare victory in the foreign war of the late Qing Dynasty.
Unfortunately, although the War of Resistance against France was won, the decadent Qing Dynasty still lost Vietnam and turned it into a colony of the French, and the blood of the wolf soldiers was wasted. But the spirit of wolf soldiers fighting for the country and serving the country loyally will never be forgotten by the world.
References: Ming Shi Liechuan No. 25 Guangxi Toast, Guangxi Tongzhi