Looking back at the history of the Southern Song Dynasty, the generals who mentioned the inscription written by Emperor Gaozong of Song to present the military flag are well known to the public as Yue Fei and Han Shizhong. There is a famous general of the Southern Song Dynasty who has not been known for a long time, and he is the outstanding general of the Southern Song Dynasty - Li Bao. Li Bao rushed thousands of miles, using "modern" weapons, and defeated the Jinbing Naval Division, which exceeded his own strength by 20 times. Although it is rumored in the "History of Song" and detailed, "The victory to Wei Tang Island, then (Guanyan) Liang's death is not expected, the danger of Qiantang is worrying, and (Li) Bao's work is great!" But most people do not know Li Baoqi, let alone this crucial battle to reverse the history of Song and Jin.
In 1141, the Southern Song Dynasty and the Jin Dynasty signed the Shaoxing Peace Agreement, and the Song and Jin state ostensibly maintained a false peace for 20 years. The rulers of the Jin Dynasty had always been eyeing the Central Plains and were bent on destroying the Southern Song Dynasty. In 1149 AD, Yan Liang launched a coup d'état and established himself as emperor, he greatly admired Han culture, and after usurping the throne, he promulgated an official system imitating the Song Empire.
After Yan Liang seized power, he deliberately wanted to launch a war to eliminate the Southern Song Dynasty, and for more than ten years he had been conscripting troops, collecting horses, grain and grass, and training the army. In 1160, Guanyan Liang had completed the preparations for invading the Song, and in order to provoke war, Guanyanliang deliberately created many disputes on the border, causing dissatisfaction among the people of the Southern Song Dynasty, and in this situation, Emperor Gaozong of Song had to order resistance to the Song.
In 1161 AD, the jin emperor Yan Liang led a large army of land and sea troops divided into four roads and officially launched a war to eliminate the Southern Song Dynasty. The Jin army dispatched 70,000 sailors and 600 warships to prepare to take Lin'an, the capital of the Southern Song Dynasty, in one fell swoop. In the face of the huge offensive of the Jin army, the Southern Song Dynasty had actually made preparations long ago, and the imperial court took the opportunity to depose Tang Sihui, the left servant of the Qin Junyu Party, and many veteran generals were pushed back to the front line.
At a time of national crisis, a group of patriots emerged, and Li Bao, a righteous soldier who had been fighting against Jin under the banner of Yue Fei in the north, was now the deputy commander of the Ma Infantry Army on Zhejiang West Road, a position that Emperor Gaozong of Song had only given him after Li Bao had introduced himself. Li Bao was born in a peasant family and had courage and boldness beyond ordinary people. In the early years, Li Bao gathered a crowd in Puzhou to resist Jin, but after failure, he went south to defect to Yue Fei. The Jin army violated the Shaoxing peace and went south, and Li Bao cooperated with Yue Fei's counterattack, attacked the Jin army many times, and successfully pinned down the Jin army to the south.
This time, the Jin soldiers attacked again, and the former Yue Fei general Li Bao took the initiative to ask the Commandery to go out on the expedition. Near Tangdao Bay in Qingdao, Shandong, 3,000 sailors and 120 warships led by Li Bao confronted the Jin army head-on. These 3,000 men were not the regular army of the Southern Song Dynasty, but were temporarily recruited crossbowmen. In the grim situation of the enemy and the enemy, Li Bao left a handwritten suicide note to show his determination to regard death as a homecoming, and the morale of the Southern Song Generals was instantly boosted.
In the case of the stalemate between the Song and Jin armies, naval warfare on the Surface of the Yellow Sea was also on the verge of breaking out. Before the Jin army invaded the south, Wei Sheng led the loyal militia to occupy Haizhou in advance, but was besieged by jin soldiers. Li Bao immediately led the fleet to help and fought with Wei Sheng's rebels. But after going to sea, the waves continued, and Li Bao couldn't help but sigh in his heart: "Is heaven trying Li Bao with this?" My heart is like an iron stone, and it will not change again! After that, the sea breeze stopped, and after two short exchanges, the Song army successfully untied the siege of Haizhou.
When the Song navy sailed to the waters of Shiusu Island in late October, it encountered hundreds of Han sailors of the Jin fleet who had come to surrender, and learned from them that the Jin fleet had left the sea and was anchored on Tang Island, only more than 15 kilometers away from Shiusu Mountain. Moreover, most of the officers and men of the Golden Fleet were from the north, and the water was not good, and they all slept in the cabin. Li Bao found that the Jin army's fleet was moored in the surface of the Yellow Sea to avoid the wind, and he planned to take advantage of the weakness of the Jin army's poor water warfare and the flammable oil sails of the warships, take advantage of its lack of preparation, preemptively attack the enemy with the help of the south wind with rockets, artillery, and other "modern" weapons.
In the early morning of October 27, 1161, the south wind suddenly rose, Li Bao used the original tactics to shoot at the Jin army's sailboats with rockets, and by the wind, the huge sails made of jin army tarpaulin ignited a raging fire, and 600 warships suddenly turned into a sea of fire. The Southern Song Dynasty Sailors saw the opportunity and fired artillery and thunderbolt cannons continuously, catching the Jin soldiers by surprise, and some of the Jin soldiers were forced to jump into the sea, some were killed by the explosion, and tens of thousands of Jin Army corpses were floated on the surface of Tang Island. In the short-term engagement that followed, the Southern Song Dynasty completely annihilated the entire division of the Jin soldiers.
The fire burned for four days and four nights, all 600 warships of the Jin army were burned, tens of thousands of horses died or fell, and the Jin fleet was completely destroyed. After Yan Liang's southern invasion, he finally ended up with no return, and his dream of destroying the Southern Song Dynasty was also shattered. The victory in the Battle of Tangdao extended the life of the Southern Song Dynasty, and Li Bao made great contributions, and the official promoted the Jing Navy to the envoy, and obtained the battle banner of "Zhongyong Li Bao" personally inscribed by Emperor Gaozong of Song, becoming a famous general of the same heavyweight as Yue Fei and others.
The Battle of Tangdao was won under the correct command of the famous general Li Bao, and the British magazine "World History" listed the Battle of Tangdao as one of the 100 most important battles that affected mankind, calling it the world's first modern naval battle. This campaign was the first time that the Song army used gunpowder weapons in large-scale naval battles at sea, before that, the southern Song dynasty's naval forces were only a supplement to the army, so the Tangdao victory not only reversed the political situation of the Song and Jin, but also had epoch-making significance for the course of the history of world naval warfare.