Huazhou in the last twelve years of the Yuan Dynasty

Huazhou in the last twelve years of the Yuan Dynasty

Author Yan Guangqin

In the last years of the Yuan Dynasty, ethnic and class contradictions had become increasingly acute, and the rule of the Mongol nobility was in jeopardy. The Huazhou region, like many parts of the country, was in turmoil at the intersection of war and natural disasters.

Huazhou Yuan Dynasty built a meditation temple

In the sixteenth year of the Yuan Dynasty (1356), Liu Futong and Han Lin'er, who opposed the Yuan Dynasty, sent a Western Expeditionary Force directly to Shaanxi. In September, Li Wu and Cui Debu, the forwards of the Red Turban Army, attacked from east to west, and the first three attacks captured Tongguan, and the commander of the Yuan army, Shu Lujie, was killed. On the fifth day of the first month, the Yuan army recaptured Tongguan, but the Red Turban Army counterattacked and reoccupied the pass on the 19th. The Yuan army was not willing to accept defeat, and counterattacked on a large scale, recapturing Tongguan, and the Red Turban Army was defeated. The Battle of Tongguan changed hands four times in 20 days, and the fight was very fierce, and its impact on Huazhou is not clearly recorded in history. However, Tongguan was under the jurisdiction of Huazhou (Tongguan did not have a county at that time, it belonged to Huayin, and Huayin was a county of Huazhou), and the distance between Huazhou City and Tongguan was only more than a hundred miles, and the war should spread to the area of present-day Hua County. At the end of the Yuan Dynasty, the scholar Zhang Yi once wrote a poem describing the Battle of Tongguan, one of which was "Fire flies Huayue Tianguan is broken, and blood soaks Qinchuan Wanma Ben". From this, we can imagine the weight of war in Huazhou and other places.

Li Wu and Cui Deqiang attacked Tongguan without success, returned to Henan territory, and again led the Red Turban Army to attack Shaanxi in February of the seventeenth year of Zhizheng (1357). This time they bypassed Tongguan, broke through Wuguan (in present-day Danfeng County, Shaanxi) from the south, captured Shangzhou (present-day Shangluo, Shaanxi), passed through Lantian, tunbing Bashang (in eastern Xi'an), directly threatened Chang'an, and divided their forces to attack Tongzhou and Huazhou, and for a time there was a major earthquake in Guanzhong. While the Yuan army held Chang'an, it transferred the Tongguan garrison and Henan reinforcements to attack to the west, and the Red Turban Army attacked from east to west. After the Yuan generals Chahan Timur and Li Siqi entered Tongguan, they encountered the Red Turban Army, and the two sides fought fiercely, and the Red Turban Army was defeated, fled into Nanshan, and went straight to Xingyuan (present-day Hanzhong, Shaanxi).

After experiencing the two wars of the Red Turban Army's attack on Shaanxi, Huazhou suffered another swarm of locusts in the nineteenth year of Zhizheng (1359). In the summer of that year, locusts occurred in large areas, so that they developed to the extent that the locusts covered the sky and the horses were difficult to walk, and it is said that the locusts fell to the ground and the trenches could be filled. Because crops and even grass and trees are eaten by locusts, large-scale famine is triggered. The locust plague spread throughout Guanzhong and Shandong, Henan and southern Shanxi.

The Red Turban Army was finally defeated in Shaanxi in the twenty-first year of Zhizheng (1361), and by suppressing the rise of the Red Turban Army, Chahan Timur, Li Siqi, Zhang Liangbi and others seized the throne, attacked each other, competed for territory, and did not listen to the dispatches of the imperial court, Shaanxi was already in a state of warlord division. The eastern part of Guanzhong, including Huazhou, was first occupied by Li Siqi and later owned by Zhang Liangbi, and Huazhou was trampled by the iron hooves of warlords.

At the same time, the anti-Yuan forces in the south, Zhu Yuanzhang, expanded with all their might, and after basically annexing Chen Youyi, Zhang Shicheng, Fang Guozhen and other southern heroes, in October of the twenty-seventh year of Zhengzheng (1367), Zhu Yuanzhang ordered Xu Da to be the general of zhengfu and Chang Yuchun to be the deputy general, leading a 250,000-strong army to the Northern Expedition, first capturing all parts of Shandong. In the first month of the twenty-eighth year of Zhengzheng (1368), Zhu Yuanzhang declared himself emperor and established the Ming Dynasty. Xu Da led the Ming army to capture Henan again in April of that year, and sent his general Feng Sheng (also known as Feng Zongyi) to directly attack Tongguan. In May, Feng Sheng broke through the Yuan army, captured Tongguan, and moved west to occupy Huazhou. The strategy of the Ming Dynasty at this time was to seal the eastern gateway of the Three Qins and cut off the connection between the Yuan army in Guanzhong and the Central Plains, not to occupy Shaanxi. Therefore, when the Ming army occupied Huazhou and ensured the safety of Tongguan, Feng Shenghui's division accompanied Xu Da to attack the capital of the Yuan Dynasty (present-day Beijing), leaving Guo Xing to garrison Tongguan and Huazhou. In the spring of the second year of Hongwu (1369), Xu Da, after occupying Dadu and expelling the Yuan court, led an army to attack Shaanxi through Shanxi. In April, Xu Da commanded the Ming army to reach Hezhong (河中; present-day Yongji, Shanxi). Chang Yuchun and Feng Sheng took the lead in crossing the Yellow River and driving west from Weibei. Guo Xing, a Ming army garrisoned at Tongguan and Huazhou, also led a light horse from Weinan to Chang'an. In the face of the Ming army's north-south attack, the Yuan army stationed in Chang'an had no intention of resisting, abandoned the city and fled west, and the Yuan Dynasty's rule in Shaanxi collapsed, and Guanzhong was all returned to the Ming Dynasty. By September, the Yuan Dynasty's power in the northwest had also been completely eradicated. In the third year of Hongwu (1370), Hu Weijun went to Huazhou to serve as Zhizhou, the first Huazhou Zhizhou appointed by the Ming Dynasty, announcing that the Ming Dynasty had begun to formally and effectively govern Huazhou.

About the author: Comrade Yan Guangqin is more than a rare person, and was the deputy editor-in-chief of the 1992 edition of "HuaXian Zhi", the deputy secretary-general of the Huaxian Guo Ziyi Research Association, and the vice president of the Zheng Huangong Culture and Art Research Association. He is the author of "Huazhou History" and other historical monographs. He is the editor-in-chief of Huazhou Ancient and Modern, and the deputy editor-in-chief of "A Hundred Years of Xianlin".

Source: Huazhou Literature and Art ~ "Huazhou History"

Original author: Yan Guangqin

Compilation and editing: Huazhou Literature and History Collection