In the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, the gradual decline of the Shu state in the late period is described, which led to the barbarian tribes in the south began to riot, intending to encroach on the land of the Shu state.
Adhering to the principle that the outside must be the first to be inside, Zhuge Liang personally led the army to the south and the leaders of the southern tribes and ethnic groups. Meng was defeated, and the seven captures and seven columns made Meng yu lose convincingly, so he quelled the rebellion in the south in one fell swoop. There is a story about this southern expedition to quell the chaos, the seven captures of Meng, the description in the book is very wonderful, and the strategies for the seven births to capture Meng are different.
At the beginning, Meng was captured by Wang Ping and Guan Suo to lure the enemy, and then attacked in the canyon, and Meng was defeated. After being captured, Meng was captured by the Shu army, and his heart was very uneven, and if he was captured again, he would be convinced. The second time, Meng Yu was directly defeated by the Shu army and escorted to Zhuge Liang, but he was still hard-mouthed, thinking that victory and defeat were common to soldiers, and Zhuge Liang was not in a hurry, and he let him go with a wave of his hand.
Then, whether Meng was deceived, attacked the Shu camp at night, or borrowed troops to ask for help, Meng's plans were broken by Zhuge Liang one by one. In the end, Zhuge Liang used oil truck gunpowder to destroy the Ugo state vine armor soldiers, Meng Yu was finally convinced, and also persuaded all the tribes to surrender to the Shu state, so the Shu state completely rehabilitated the rebellion of the southern barbarians.
Unfortunately, this popular story is actually made up. In the records of the zhengshi, there is no leader of this barbarian tribe, and the seven captures of Mengyu are a fabrication of the rich fantasies of the novel. In fact, from the perspective of the Shu state at that time, the north was oppressed by the forces from Cao Wei, and the south was constantly invaded by barbarian tribes, and the top priority of the Shu state was to quickly quell the turmoil in the south, so that it could concentrate on dealing with the threat from the north. It is impossible to play with the enemy like seven captures and seven columns, and death without surrender is the real situation of the vast majority of peace wars.
However, the plot of the Seven Captures of Meng is not empty, and there is indeed a battle of southern conquest and quelling chaos in the middle and late period of the Shu Kingdom, and this battle was first provoked by the State of Wu.
At first, the Shu state's regime in the south was relatively stable, and many important fortresses in the south were garrisoned, and the turmoil of the barbarians in the south could be suppressed. The initiator of the unrest in the south, named Yong Min, was after the Yongya of Hanshi Fang. At the beginning of the separation of the Three Kingdoms, he defected to Liu Bei and remained stationed in the south. After Liu Bei's death, a generation of generals of the Shu state passed away one after another, and the Shu Han clique had no successor and began to go down the road of decline.
Yong Min saw that the Shu kingdom was weak in its stamina, so he turned to his family's thoughts. In order to express his heart, Yong Min killed the Shu taishou Zheng'ang and kidnapped Zhang Yi and sacrificed it to Eastern Wu. Eastern Wu was falling into a freezing point in its relations with the Shu state at that time, and tried to balance the Shu state. At this time, someone from the rear of the Shu Kingdom sent a letter of submission, and Eastern Wu had no possibility of not accepting it, and even directly waved a big hand, and sealed Yong Min with a Yongchang Taishou, and directly regarded it as its own territory.
Yong Min also united with the tribal forces in the south to "secretly rebel", obviously with the idea of encircling the land as king. However, he thought that his calculations were played well, and he felt that the Shu Congress had no time to take care of him because of the pressure on the front. Unexpectedly, Zhuge Liang directly regarded him as a thorn in his eye and personally led a large army to conquer Yong Min. Poor Yong Min was still thinking of zhan shan as king, and before Zhuge Liang's army could suppress the territory, he was killed by the clichéd rebellion.
However, it is true that the rebel army united the minority tribes. According to historical records, the large army led by Zhuge Liang easily broke through Gao Ding's troops, and the rebel forces had declared "bankruptcy". However, after this, Zhuge Liang continued to march south, and fought until Dianchi Lake before the class returned to the dynasty. The purpose of this time is to recover the lost land occupied by the barbarians.
It can be seen from this that after the defeat of the rebel army, the barbarian troops did not disappear with it, which proves that the ethnic minority tribes should have their own leaders. Today's historians believe that although the Seven Captures of Meng Yu are fabricated stories, the king of "Meng Yue" should have a historical prototype, and it can even be considered that "Meng Yue" is the collective name of a tribal chieftain in Southern Man.
It was also the surrender of this barbarian king that made the rear area of the Shu kingdom more stable than in the past, and became a solid backup and supply place for the Shu kingdom. From the time Zhuge Liang attacked Dianchi and submitted to the southern tribes, it can be learned that the southernmost sphere of influence controlled by this "Mengyu" chieftain should also be in the area of present-day Dianchi in Yunnan. According to the living range of the Yi people today, it can also be concluded that the approximate living range of the ethnic minority tribes in the south is in the land near Kunming and Yuxi in Yunnan.
Coupled with the rebellion's initiator, Yong Min, who was located in Jianning, Yunnan (present-day Qujing, Yunnan), it can be seen that the sphere of influence of the ethnic minorities in the south did not exceed Qujing in Yunnan at most. To sum up, at the time of the rebellion, the sphere of influence of the ethnic minority tribes in the south was about Mo in the north to Qujing, south to Yuxi, and west to Chuxiong, all of which were centered on Kunming.
Judging from the map, it is still a considerable sphere of influence, and it is not too far away from the capital of the Shu Han Dynasty and chengdu in Sichuan today. The southern ethnic minorities who surrendered to leaders such as "Meng Yue" not only made the Shu state have no worries in the duel with the Wei state, but also injected a "strong needle" into the decadent Shu Han regime.
In the next way to balance wu and Wei, and even the later northern expedition, the strength supported by the recovered southern barbarian tribes was also indispensable, and it is no wonder that Zhuge Liang chose to personally conquer the south in the case of the enemy in the belly of the north and the south, which can not be said to be far-sighted.