When people think of the Tang Dynasty, they will think of the bustling worldly wealth on Chang'an Avenue, and think of Li Bai Dufu's amazing and brilliant famous poems, but many people have forgotten that it also has the majesty of blood-stained frontiers and restoring our rivers and mountains.
In 850 AD, on Suzaku Avenue in Chang'an City, people rushed from all directions and crowded on Suzaku Avenue to greet a monk from afar, all of whom were enthusiastic and shouted "God bless the Great Tang"!
This monk's name was Wu Zhen, and he came from Hexi and brought news that ignited the pride in the hearts of the Tang people.
"Hexi Victory! Sandbar Victory! Guazhou Victory! ”
"The rebel army led by Jie Shuai Zhang Yichao has retaken Shazhou and Guazhou, and hopes to restore the homeland of Helong with Wang Shi!"
The news of victory is always exciting, but the protagonist of this article is not the monk Wuzhen, but Zhang Yichao, a remnant of the Tang Dynasty who recovered 4,000 miles of rivers and mountains.
In 799 AD, Zhang Yichao was born in the fall of Shazhou, which is today's Dunhuang, and the ancestors of the Zhang family were all Tang generals, real and genuine Tang people.
At that time, the sandbar was controlled by Tubo, who believed in the nobility of his people and practiced the slave ownership system. The custom of the Tubo people is to be noble, strong, and old, and it is still true for their own people, not to mention the Tang people, who have always been oppressed, facing a more cruel situation, "cutting off their hands and chiseling their eyes", and treating them as livestock.
Every Spring Festival of family reunion, it is only on this day that the Tang people wear Han family clothes, worship the Tang Dynasty, cry bitterly, and pour out countless homesickness. The people of Hexi are nostalgic for their homeland, and they have not changed for hundreds of years, and whenever they encounter tang envoys from the east, they earnestly ask: "Does the emperor still remember to trap the living beings?" ”
Growing up in such an environment, Zhang Yichao's heart naturally planted the seeds of recovering his homeland.
In 848 AD, there was no rain in the sky, there was a great drought in Tibet, riots at the bottom, and power struggles at the top. When the time came, Zhang Yichao led the recruited rebels to launch an attack with lightning speed, and soon drove the Tubo people out of the sandbank.
The great victory of the first battle brought confidence to the Tang people, and in the face of many counterattacks by the Tubo army, the rebels still firmly controlled the sandbar.
Subsequently, Zhang Yichao sent messengers to the Tang Dynasty, and he led the rebel army to defend the sandbar, hoping to attack Tubo on both sides with the imperial army. In order to ensure that the information could be smoothly reported to the imperial court, Zhang Yichao sent a total of ten messengers.
From the sandbar to the Tang Dynasty Chang'an, it is not only the word "difficult" that can be described, it is simply a journey of nine deaths, crossing the uninhabited Badain Jaran Desert, the Tengger Desert, and the Kubuqi Desert... In addition to the threat of the environment, there are also the ruthless machetes of the Tubo people all the way to hunt down.
The Ten Road Messengers, with their heads hanging on their chests, traveled thousands of miles to Chang'an, however, in the end, only the team led by Wu Zhen successfully crossed the desert of thousands of miles and arrived at the Tiande Army, which is today's Inner Mongolia Urat Front Banner, and arrived in Chang'an in 850 AD with the assistance of the defensive envoy Li Pi.
At this time, a full two years had passed since the sandbank uprising.
From the sandbar to the Tiande Army, the straight-line distance on the map is about 1400 kilometers, the straight-line distance from the Tiande Army to Chang'an is about 800 kilometers, more than 80% of the way is the desert area, people who have played the western self-driving tour know that the desert sun shines, the cool white ice Coke can not soothe the blue thin soul, and spit out how much they want to come to this ghost place in minutes. What about the Tang Dynasty? Not only is there no car transportation, but even the water source is difficult to guarantee.
Those who come out are heroes!
The "Three Caos" and "Seven Sons" laid the foundation for the generous and sad, vigorous and masculine Jian'an Wind Bone, and countless Tang people like Zhang Yichao and Wu Zhen also created the Tang Dynasty Wind Bone!
In 851, after three years of army expansion and military supplies, with the full support of the people of Hexi, Zhang Yichao led the rebel army to launch a large-scale counterattack against the Tubo garrison in the Hexi region. The people of The Tang Dynasty who were always concerned about their homeland in Hexi have risen up one after another, and they have joined the nine prefectures of Yizhou, Xizhou, Hezhou, Ganzhou, Suzhou, Lanzhou, Minzhou, Buzhou, and Kuzhou.
At this point, the "Gan and Liang Eleven Prefectures" in Hexi, which had been ruled by Tubo for a hundred years, had all once again belonged to my Datang!
In August of the same year, Zhang Yichao led 28 emissaries to Chang'an, and as the leader of the Hexi rebel army, he presented the maps and household registrations of the eleven states in the Hexi Corridor to the Tang court, and personally presented tribute to Tang Xuanzong.
For this day, Datang has waited too long. After the good news was presented to Tang Xuanzong, it was immediately announced to the world and the whole world celebrated.
Zhang Yichao was officially enthroned as the Envoy of the Gui rebel army Jiedushi, the observation envoy of the Eleven Prefectures, the Shangshu of the Inspection and Correction Department, and the general of The Golden Wu, becoming the highest military and political governor in the entire Hexi region.
In 856 AD, in the face of three large-scale sneak attacks by the surrounding ethnic minorities, Zhang Yichao rushed thousands of miles to attack, waved the flag, and then raised the prestige of the Tang Dynasty.
In 858, Zhang Yichao personally led 7,000 elite cavalry to attack Liangzhou, the last stronghold of Tubo in the Hexi region. The enemy's ordnance was abundant, and the soldiers were several times larger than their own, however, "the Han family held the blade like frost and snow, the captives rode wide in the sky and had nowhere to escape, the head was in the center of the arrow to accompany the earth, and the blood splashed through the corpses of the battle jacket", playing a grand Tang Dynasty war song.
After three years of bloody battles, more than 10,000 enemies were annihilated, and finally the last piece of the map of Hexi was spelled out for the Tang Dynasty, after which there were no Tubo forces in Hexi, and the blood of "expelling Hu Yu and returning Hexi to China" in his youth finally became a reality.
Hexi has returned to China, how can he bear the hands of others?
In 866, Zhang Yichao led tens of thousands of cavalry to the west, and all the way to the west, recapturing the Western Regions of Xizhou, Beiting, and Luntai, a journey of more than thousands of miles.
In October of the same year, Zhang Yichao captured the Tubo commander Shang Fear Fever and sent his head to Chang'an. At this point, the Tubo Dynasty, which was once powerful enough to capture Chang'an, was fragmented and completely decayed.
The history books record that all the way to the west, the Tang army "went all the way to Yiwu in the west, to Lingwu in the east, to more than 4,000 miles of land, to a million households, to the mountains and rivers of the six counties, just like the old".
However, Zhang Yichao, who recovered 4,000 miles of rivers and mountains in the Tang Dynasty, has been submerged in the long river of history for a long time, and if it were not for the author's inadvertent watching of the movie "The Great Desert Purple Ban", I would never even have heard of such a heroic figure.
In addition to Zhang Yichao and the monk Wuzhen, there are also the Nine-Way Messenger who has not left his name and surname, and the rebel army whose blood stains the Western Expedition Road, all of which are worthy of historical memory and even more worthy of our remembrance.