The story of "Water Margin" has been widely circulated for many years and is very popular. I remember when I was a child, my favorite set of "Water Margin" comic strips of the People's Fine Arts Publishing House was 30 volumes, and the twenty-ninth volume was "Zheng Fang La's Loss of Soldiers", which told the story of Fang La's peasant uprising and occupied twenty-five counties in eight prefectures. The imperial court was terrified and sent Song Jiang and Lu Junyi to lead troops to the conquest. In this battle, the casualties were heavy. In the end, although he won a great victory and captured Fang La, when Banshi returned to Beijing, the original Liangshan 108 would lose seven-tenths of the way, and Song Jiang was deeply saddened by this. Song Jiang and Fang La are real historical figures, but there are many differences between the two, the Song Jiang Uprising was quickly defeated by the imperial court, while the Fang La Uprising made the Northern Song Dynasty hurt bones and bones, and the loss of Fang La's soldiers in "Water Margin" will be consistent with history. Today we will talk about how powerful Fang La really is.
During the Xuanhe period of the Northern Song Dynasty, Emperor Huizong of the Song Dynasty liked flowers and bamboo trees, and set up a "Suzhou and Hangzhou Yingfeng Bureau" in Jiangnan, sending minions to various places in the southeast to loot folk flowers and bamboo trees and rare treasures, and transport them to Beijing in large ships, forming a program every ten ships, then called "Huashi Class". Qingxi County, Zhejiang Province, is rich in bamboo and wood paint, which is the key cool place of the Ying Feng Bureau, so it is deeply suffering from exploitation and oppression, and the peasants cannot survive.
Manichaeism is a hybrid religion founded by the Persian Manichaeism, whose teachings are a mixture of Christianity, Zoroastrianism, and Greek philosophy. In the process of spreading eastward, Manichaeism had some ideas mixed with Buddhism in Central Asia. As a result, at the same time as the Tang Huichang campaign to destroy Buddhism, it also attacked Manichaeism in the Central Plains indiscriminately. The remnants of the faithful were forced to move southeast to escape the suppression of the government.
Manichaeism in the Song Dynasty began to spread widely in the two Zhejiang and Fujian regions, and has become an underground sect outside the sight of the government. They differed in doctrine from orthodox Manichaeism in the Tang Dynasty, and merged with buddhist sects such as the White Lotus Sect and the Pure Land Sect of the same period. Since its transformation into an underground religion, it has gradually become a spiritual guide for the people to rebel against the government. This aroused the vigilance of Emperor Huizong of Song and the imperial court, and ordered that this kind of "magic religion" be strictly prohibited.
There is no substantial evidence that Fang La was a Manichaean, nor is there any evidence that the thousand or so people he first gathered to revolt were Manichaeans. However, after Fang La's rise, there were many Manichaean uprisings in the southeast in response to Fang La. Hua Shi gang successively plundered the Huizong Dynasty for more than twenty years, becoming the biggest maladministration of the Huizong Dynasty in the southeast. In the intensification of the contradictions between the government and the people, religious forces began to rapidly infiltrate to the southeast. This led the government to believe that Manichaeism was the driving force behind the uprising. Therefore, Fang La was denounced as a demon thief, saying that he "trusted the left way to confuse the people." According to legend, Fang La's temperament is bold and popular, and he can appeal to many peasants who are living in hardship.
During the reign of Emperor Huizong of the Song Dynasty, Fang La went to Qingxi County, Muzhou (present-day northwest of Chun'an, Zhejiang) to help Yuan Zhibao Zhengfang to have a changing family as a domestic worker, and it is also said that Fang La was a lacquer garden owner, which was a standard household in the Song Dynasty. However, the Fabrication Bureau, which was responsible for creating utensils for Emperor Huizong, often came to extort the production of the lacquer garden and did not pay the remuneration according to the regulations, which actually became a disguised scientific donation. Newly discovered information suggests that Fang La may be linked to salt smuggling organizations that are active in the south-east all year round. The salt smugglers in the southeast have always had strong organizational skills, strong fighting power and close ties with various anti-government forces. It is not surprising that Fang La made contact with the Manichaeans through salt merchants.
On the ninth day of October in the second year of Xuanhe (1120), Fang La, pretending to be "heavenly runes", led the peasants, killed Fang Youchang's family, and used the help of Yuanyuan as a base to gather poor peasants and call for an uprising. Zhang Huiyan of Muzhou Zhizhou heard that Fang La had rebelled, and sent Cai Zun, the governor of the two Zhejiang soldiers and horses, to lead 5,000 officers and soldiers to the bomb press. However, the Song army stationed in the two Zhejiang provinces was mainly van troops and township soldiers. The van army was a town soldier stationed in the local area according to the system of the Song Dynasty, and could not really fight in battle. They only work as local errand boys, and they have the dual status of maintaining law and order and acting as laborers, so those who have a little ability will not join. Moreover, the soldiers of the van army mainly relied on the recruitment of unemployed personnel, the recruitment of famine refugees and the allocation of criminals. It can be said that the shortcomings of the large and useless Song Dynasty army were particularly evident in it.
On the other side, Fang La's peasant army had no armor or bows and arrows, and there was no formal armament. He even pretended to be a ghost to scare the officers and men. However, the peasant army had an advantage that officers and soldiers did not have, that is, they were familiar with the geography of Qingxi County. They lured the officers and troops to the rest pit in the east of Qingxi County, and ambushed them. The Song army, which was still too late to line up, was thus divided and surrounded. Caught off guard, it soon collapsed, and Cai Zun himself was beheaded. The two Zhejiang terracotta warriors and horses led an important garrison of zhejiang troops, and after Fang La annihilated them, all the prefectures and counties were exposed to the attack of the peasant army.
Fang La, who called himself Sheng Gong and Jianyuan Yongle, set up officials and generals, used turbans to distinguish ranks, and tied various turbans such as red scarves as symbols to establish peasant power. The Fang La uprising is different from the uprising we think of, the people revolt is to pursue the policy of fighting and beating, hoe out of the world, while Fang La borrowed the name of the ghost god to deceive the ignorant people and let them join the ranks of the rebel army. Later, the rebel army evolved into a place to force people in that place to join the rebel army, and if they did not join, they were regarded as northern Song dynasty people and would be killed. At the call of Fang La, farmers near and far in Qingxi responded to the wind and soon grew to tens of thousands.
The rebel army captured Hangzhou, the capital of Zhejiang Road, killed Chen Jian, the envoy of the two Zhejiang Roads, and Zhao Yue, the envoy of Lian, and Zhao Ting of Zhizhou fled. The Song Dynasty's rule in the southeast almost collapsed. A considerable number of the insurgents were Manichaean congregations, and with the participation of these militant believers, the Fangla rebel army was even more unstoppable. The involvement of religion in the war also made the war more brutal and bloody. The Song people recorded that at that time, the rebel army captured all the Song officials and killed them. Or pull out the intestines, or cut off limbs, or put them in a frying pan, or shoot randomly with arrows. It shows the extreme qualities of war with religious overtones.
When the news of Fang La's rebellion reached Beijing, it was a critical period for the Song Dynasty to gather troops and prepare to attack Yanyun north. Shaozai Wang, who was also one of the six thieves of Cai Jing, concealed the news, fearing that the plan of the Northern Expedition would be aborted halfway because of Fang La. Soon the rebel army broke through Hangzhou, destroying the tomb of Cai Jing's grandfather, exposing the bones and shaking the southeastern counties. The Huainan dispatch envoy Chen Sui sent a letter to the imperial court to ask for the rapid dispatch of elite troops to support, and Fang La's matter was learned by Emperor Huizong of Song. Taken aback, Emperor Huizong of Song immediately aborted his Northern Expedition and diverted the large army he had assembled to the southeast.