Today's story is about Guo Xin, the last Anxi protector of the Tang Dynasty, who took the remnants of the Tang army and held out in the Anxi Protectorate for decades, and finally died together with his subordinates who had gone through a hundred battles.
1. There is a journey to go and no return
With the outbreak of the Anshi Rebellion and the internal transfer of the elite of the border army, there was a huge hole in the defense of Hexi and Longyou, so taking advantage of this opportunity, the Tubo people invaded the Hexi region in a big way, and successively captured a number of border towns in the Tang Dynasty, and the Tang army in the Western Regions gradually lost direct contact with the Han region. In this context, Yang Zhilie was killed in Hexi Jiedu, and in order to replenish talents for the Tang Dynasty's military and political institutions in Hexi, Beiting, and Anxi, in 765 AD, Guo Xin embarked on a journey into Hexi and the Western Regions.
After the death of Yang Zhilie, due to the purge of the old Tang army in Ganzhou and Beiting and other places by Yang Xiuming, the joint defense system of Hexi, Beiting and Anxi began to gradually collapse, and the Tang army of Anxi, Beiting and Hexi, and the Tubo people cut off the connection between the Central Plains and the Tang soil in the Western Regions, judging from the information revealed by the Tang envoys in 772 AD to the defenders of the Western Regions "Edict to Anxi-Beiting Generals", the Tubo people at that time temporarily adopted the strategy of threatening and not directly attacking the Tang army in the Western Regions. At this time, Guo Xin was still serving under the account of General Erzhu Duhu of the Anxi Metropolitan Protectorate at that time, and there is no record of his independent activities.
Under the grand strategy of forming an alliance with the Hui Muyu Khan, the Hui army entered the Western Regions in large numbers to assist the remnants of the Tang army against the Tubo, but at this time, the Hui people did not want the Tang army to return to the east, and they did not let the envoys return to the east, so most of the Tang Dynasty envoys who entered the Anxi Protectorate in the west did not return. After the death of Erzhu Duhu, Guo Xin took over his position and became the new Anxi Duhu.
After Tang Dezong came to power, because he was humiliated by the Hui generals who supported the Tang Dynasty when he was young, he opened peace negotiations with the Tubo people, released the Tubo prisoners of war, and internally dismissed and recalled the generals who had made meritorious contributions to the fight against the Tubo, and even moved to the Yuanzhou area on the border of Tang and Tuzhou. In 781 AD, the envoys sent by Anxi and Beiting finally came to Chang'an to report to the Chang'an court that the Tang army was still holding on to the Western Regions, this information made the court very moved by the surprise, in the "Edict of Li Yuanzhong Guo Xin", the Tang court described it like this:
"Two courts and four towns, unified in Western Xia, fifty-seven Fan, ten surnamed tribes, since the dynasty, each other has been in charge. Since Guanlong was lost, the east and west were blocked, and the loyal and righteous people cried blood together. Prudent and sealed, respecting the law of the dynasty, all of them are Hou Bo guarded the generals, and the result of the common reason is also handed over. Li Yuanzhong, the observer of the northwest court of Yixi, can protect most of the north courts; Guo Xin stayed after the four towns festival, but Anxi Dadu protected the four towns to observe the festival. Its generals have been lowered, and the officials can exceed seven seniority. ”
But at the same time, Tang Dezong was still leading the peace negotiations between the Tang Dynasty and the Tubo people; The Tibetans also hoped to use the means of peace negotiations to restrict the large-scale actions of the Tang Dynasty in the northwest and create an opportunity for the complete engulfment of Tang land in the Western Regions. In 783 AD, Tang Tu at the alliance ceremony west of Qingshui, the Tang Dynasty recognized the occupation of Tubo in Ling, Feng, Long, Jing and other places, and the two sides made such provisions on their respective enclaves: in the enclaves, the Tang army occupants belonged to the Tang Dynasty, and the Fan soldiers occupied belonged to Fan, and in the empty space occupied by no one occupied, the two sides were not allowed to build new castles and train the army. However, such a treaty not only chilled the Tang soldiers stationed in the Western Regions, but also led to further ambitions of the Tubo people for the territory of the Tang Dynasty.
The Jingyuan mutiny made the Tang army soldiers very chilled and bent on cutting the domain, strengthening the imperial power, and the various behaviors of Tang Dezong, who lacked trust in the feudal town, finally launched a mutiny when the local garrisons of Jingzhou and Yuanzhou went south to quell the rebellion, the Tang Dynasty once hoped to quell the rebellion with the help of the Tubo army, and also sent an envoy through the Tubo region into the Anbei Ting area to pacify the local Tang army, hoping to cede Beiting and Yixi at the expense of Tubo in exchange for the Tubo army to help quell the rebellion, but in the case of the limited Tubo troops, it was the Shence Army that quelled the mutiny, ironically, Many of the soldiers of this rebellion were the elite troops of Anxi and Beiting who entered the customs to support the Tang army to quell the rebellion. It was also the decision to cede Yixi and Beiting, which was strongly opposed by the generals of the DPRK and the Tang army, so Tang Dezong was forced to order the recovery of the edict that had previously ordered the soldiers of the Anxi court to move inward, and instead in 784 AD, Guo Xin and Li Yuanzhong were added to the official ranks, and the soldiers of the Western Regions were greatly rewarded.
And because the Tubo people were not satisfied with the treaty obtained by the Qingshui Huimeng, and hoped to further seize the remnants of the Tang Dynasty's territory in the west, in order to further eliminate the Tang Dynasty's famous generals Li Sheng, Ma Sui, and Hun Xuan, the Tubo people used the return of Lingzhou and Xiazhou as bait, and invited Hun Ying and other high-ranking officials of the Tang Dynasty to participate in the Huimeng, but they were ready to take the opportunity to kidnap the hostages. On the altar of the alliance, the Tubo people really sent troops to raid the Tang Dynasty officials, and Tang Dezong also showed enough sincerity before that, and almost succeeded in causing Hun Yang to be arrested. The hostage-taking behavior of the Tubo people strengthened the determination of Tang Dezong and Hui to reconcile, and what followed was that the Tang Dynasty and Hui Heqin + united with Nanzhao and Da Shi and other surrounding forces to limit the expansion of Tubo. It was also during this period that Master Wukong, who had returned from India, passed through the four towns of Anxi, which were still in the center of the eye of the storm, and had a relationship with Guo Xin.
2. The relationship between Wukong monk and Guo Xin - the last record of the Anxi Tang Army in the pen of the monk seeking the law
Wukong mage Che Fengchao In Wukong's records, the Tang Dynasty's fetters system is still operating in an orderly manner, he met with Pei Lengleng, the king of Shule, Lu Yang, the town guard of the Tang Dynasty, and the king Chi Yao and the town guard Zheng Ju in Khotan, and in the city of Qiuci Wang, he met with Baihuan, the king of Qiuci, and the deputy capital of Anxi, Guo Xin, the backbone of the Tang army in the Western Regions.
On the walls of the castle of King Qiuzi, the armored, weather-beaten defenders opened the gates of the city and carefully checked the customs clearance documents of those entering the city and quarantined suspicious people. These people were the remaining troops selected after many selections and sifting out the elite soldiers, and dealt with the morale-strong Tubo people with the old, weak, sick and disabled.
The Tang Army of the Western Regions recruited the local Qiuzi people to enlist in the army, but for various reasons it could not be shown in "The Last Transfer of the Tang Mobei" Of course, Wukong also saw that there were many more local faces with high noses and concave eyes, red hair and green eyes in the Tang Army of the Western Regions, as well as pro-Tang Turkic people, as well as mixed descendants of Han Chinese and Indo-European natives, which was the countermeasure exercised by the Anxi Protectorate in the face of the dilemma of insufficient troops. And these comrades-in-arms have been sent to the East to participate in the melee, either killed or wounded, and the survivors have been relegated to other formed units; For example, the king of Khotan, Wei Chi Sheng, gave up the throne to Yu Chiyao after leading his troops into the interior to quell the rebellion, and then took his subordinates to take root in the Central Plains.
With the support of the local kings of the Western Regions, although Anxi and Beiting were cut off from the mainland, various local military, political, civil, and agricultural infrastructure were in operation. The Tang army also maintained a very limited regional trade by actively cultivating land and coining its own coins to maintain the survival of the army. Moreover, since the Han Dynasty, there are rich copper and iron mines near Qiuci, and Qiuci has a long smelting tradition in the local area, and the precious metals produced here in the Han Dynasty can meet the consumption of the 36 countries in the Western Regions. The Tang army minted some self-styled currencies such as the Great Calendar Ingot and Jianzhong Tongbao here to maintain the operation of society. Later, these coins were unearthed in large quantities in the Kuqa area, as well as in the ancient city of Holinger on the Uighur Trail. It's just that due to the inconvenience of contact with Middle-earth, after the new era name was changed in the mainland, Anxi and Beiting are still delaying the use of the previous old era name. Moreover, from the Great Calendar to Jianzhong, the quality of the Tang coins produced by the defenders continued to decline, suggesting that the final economic state of the defenders was deteriorating.
The Tang Army in the Western Regions minted the money in Jianzhong on its own, but the waves of refugee groups from the Hexi Corridor will bring some disturbing news. The drastic drop in trade and the defenders' increased dependence on local oasis agriculture undoubtedly increased the burden on local land, and what Wukong saw was patches of overloaded manors and fields, as well as finely divided military fields, and once the scouts found the alarm, everyone had to put their cattle into the city of sheep and horses and enter the city for defense. During the nervous months of his free time, Venerable Wukong visited important temples and grottoes in various parts of the Western Regions, staying in each country for several months, sitting and translating Buddhist scriptures, and asking local monks from Qiuci and Beiting to translate the collected scriptures into Chinese, waiting for the situation to ease before embarking on the road. In the chaos of war, it seems that only the exquisite murals in the Buddhist caves, the Sanskrit singing in the temple, and the faint light of the Buddha lamps can slightly soothe the hearts of the people in the troubled times.
Exquisite murals of Qiuzi
Subsequently, Wukong crossed the mountainous land of "snow in the mountains of May, no flowers but cold" from Yanqi, the main road between southern Xinjiang and northern Xinjiang, and came to the Beiting Duhufu (Jimusar) where Yang Zhenggu was seated, and saw the few good breed military horse farms of the Tang Army at that time. On the endless plain, horses of different colors were gathered in groups, carefully tended by grooms, but the place was plagued by a shortage of troops, and it was obvious that there were not enough warriors to defend in front of the battlements at the head of the city. Che Bongchao, who used to be a military general, can easily find the embarrassing situation here.
The cavalry and war horses of the Tang Army were completely cut off by the Tibetan army due to the traffic in the Hexi Corridor, so Wukong carried holy relics through the Hui Khanate, because the Hui people vigorously supported Manichaeism at that time, and the Hui State Minister was flying in the country, and the political situation was turbulent, so in the Hui Khanate, Wukong, as a minority, did not dare to say much. After suffering a lot, Wukong finally returned to Chang'an, the capital of the Tang Dynasty, in the sixth year of Zhenyuan, ending the journey that lasted for more than 30 years, and the scriptures he brought back were finally recognized by the Tang Dynasty government.
3. The Day of the Destruction of the City: The last years of the Anxi Protectorate and the end of the remnants of the Tang Dynasty
However, in December 789 AD, the combined army of Yang Zhenggu and the Uighurs was defeated by the Tubo people and the army of the Qarluq, and the Beiting was quickly lost, although the Tang army and the Uighurs had the intention to counterattack, but the subsequent battles were successively defeated, and finally the remnants of the Beiting army of only more than 160 people were killed by the newly defeated Uighurs because they lost their strategic location and importance, and the last blood of the Beiting Protectorate was scattered in the desert Hu Chen. And this battle also meant that the connection between the Tarim Basin and the Uighur grassland was completely severed.
In 1964, not long after the Tang cavalry wooden figurines unearthed from the No. 29 tomb of Astana in Turpan, in 790 AD, the Kingdom of Khotan, one of the four towns of Anxi, fell, which meant that Qiuci lost an important barrier in the south, and the Tang army lost half of the Tarim Basin; Although Guo Xin had contacted the Uighur Khanate, the remnants of the Tang army and the Uighurs had inflicted heavy losses on the Tibetans in the Beiting region in 793-794 CE, and briefly regained the vicinity of the Beiting, a victory that was even known to the Nanzhao in the far south, who had informed the Tang that the Tubo had been defeated by the Uighurs near the Beiting, so they wanted to recruit troops to the Nanzhao to continue the war. At the same time, the Tubo and Tang dynasties continued to tug of war in the Xizhou region: in 793 AD, Zhao Yanbin, a former envoy of the Yixi Jiedu and a judge known as the Broken Official, reluctantly wrote the words "Xizhou fell last year (792 AD)" when copying the scriptures, and the Tang army's control area was further compressed. However, a few years later, a monk from Xizhou, Yilin, wrote a record of his completion of the Vajra Prajna Sutra in Xizhou in the 19th year of the Zhenyuan Dynasty (803 AD), indicating that the place was once under the control of the Tang army with the help of the Uighurs, but this struggle did not last long.
Uighur support did not last until 808 CE during the Yuan and He periods: in this year, there were no records of envoys between the Tibetan and Tang dynasties, but there were constant exchanges between the Tang envoys before and after; It was also in this year that the Uighur Nine Khans did not have any record of defeating the enemy, but the Tibetans boasted of their victory over the enemy in the inscriptions of the same era. Also in the Yuan and He years, Yuan Zhi and Bai Juyi both wrote a documentary literature called "Binding Rong People", in the pen of Yuan Zhen, the city of Qiuzi fell in a winter raid by the Tubo people, "In the middle of the night, the city destroyed the geese and geese, and the wives and sons cried endlessly." The gloomy temple did not dare to follow, and the brittle river ice was safe and crossed", these old and weak people in the Tang army were cut off and their feet were broken, and the strong were forced to shave their hair, and they could only wear Tang costumes on the first day of the first month of each year to worship to the east; Among them, there was a Tang army captive in the Anxi Protectorate who fled to Tang Tu with the same life as Zhang Qian escaped from the surveillance of the Xiongnu, but the border cavalry did not care that he spoke Chinese at all, but sent him to Chang'an as a Tubo and other Tubo prisoners, and finally was escorted to the southeast region for strict surveillance; In Bai Juyi's version of "The Bound Rong People", a Tang soldier originally from Liangzhou was captured by the Tubo people during the Great Calendar Year, and his hometown was captured by the Tubo people, he made up his mind to abandon his wife and children and defect to the Tang Dynasty, but he was also sent to Chang'an with other Tibetan prisoners of war, and was finally exiled to the Jiangnan region.
Therefore, after resisting for a long time, "the Han soldiers fought to the death everywhere", the banner of the Tang Army at the head of Qiuci City finally fell, and the sound of swords and soldiers gradually subsided, indicating that the times changed hands. And Guo Xin finally died in this battle. The most tenacious Tang army in the Western Regions was wiped out. If you want to grow and serve the country, why should you be born in Yumen Pass? The remnants of the Han Chinese and the natives of the Western Regions, the Turks, and the Sogdians were divided into different tribes and ruled by the Tibetans, and different tribes had to provide silk and linen and other products, or directly provide military troops for the Tibetans. Of course, there were also Han Chinese who persisted until the time when the Uighurs moved westward to the Western Regions, and under the pen of the envoys of the Five Dynasties and the Northern Song Dynasty, these Han Chinese remained important subjects under the rule of the Uighurs, with their own chieftains and lords, and maintained Han surnames.
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