On July 12, the second year of Jianyan, the wind and rain were obscure, and zong ze, a famous general of the Southern Song Dynasty, was lying on his sickbed, already delirious. His generals stood silently around the sickbed, listening to him intermittently talk about the northern expedition. Finally, Zong Ze called out three times in a row to "cross the river" and passed away at the age of seventy. After Zong Ze's death, his only son Zong Ying and his beloved disciple Yue Fei helped the coffin to Zhenjiang Jingdan Mountain, where he was buried with his wife Chen.
Today, on the eastern outskirts of Zhenjiang, on the jingdan mountain, Zongze's tomb is located in the depths of a quiet and peaceful garden, a rarely disturbed attraction, and the stone arch in front of the tomb is carved with two couplets:
The Great Song Dynasty is endangered to hold a pillar, and the hero is dying and still shouts three times.
Eight hundred years ago, the medals were forever revealed in the sun and the moon, and the tin was thousands of years after the pearl was long and shining.
Now when it comes to the famous generals of the Great Song Dynasty, the first thing that people think of is Yue Fei, in fact, the one who can really be called the backbone of the Great Song is the elder of the main battle faction and Yue Fei's teacher- Zong Ze.
Zong Ze was born into a poor family, and his father and grandfather were ordinary rural intellectuals who gave Zong Ze a good enlightenment education. Zong Ze aspired to be an official and participated in the imperial examination, not simply for the glory of the family, but out of the patriotic heart of a young man with lofty aspirations. When Zong Ze was a teenager, the Zong family moved to the town of Twenty-Three Mile. Here is no more than a peach-like countryside, everywhere is permeated with the stench of corruption of the Song Dynasty officials and the threat of foreign invasion. Zong Ze made up his mind that he must find a way to save the country and save the people.
Even in the Song Dynasty, under the atmosphere of heavy literature and light martial arts, and the exaggeration and impracticality of officials, Zong Ze still paid attention to practice, and began to travel to study and practice martial arts before the age of twenty. Ten years of climbing mountains and wading waters and walking streets and alleys allowed him to understand the society and people's feelings at that time, and see the crux of the Song Dynasty system. At the age of thirty-three, Zong Ze entered Beijing to take the exam, and his excellent literary style coupled with years of investigation made his articles stand out from the paper. Zong Ze disregarded the limit on the number of words in the examination and used the 10,000-word article to pin the shortcomings of the times, but the chief examiner at that time was afraid that his character would rebel against the imperial power, and only put him in the "last section" and go to the grass-roots level to become a small official.
Soon, Zong Ze was promoted for being an official Qingzheng, and in the middle of the second winter of Shaosheng's second year, Zong Ze was transferred to inspect the Royal River Project. At that time, the thirty-six-year-old Zong Ze had lost his eldest son, and when the order was sent, he was still in mourning. Zong Ze did not hesitate to set off, and in the cold and freezing weather, he saw that the workers who repaired the river were freezing to death, frostbite, and he could not bear it, so he went to the imperial court and asked for a suspension of the river repair matter, and waited until the spring of the next year. The imperial court agreed that as soon as the spring arrived, the river repair project was completed efficiently, and Zong Ze officially showed his prominence in the official field.
Zong Ze later successively served as the governor of the four counties, serving as an official for one term to benefit the party, but he was never promoted. Zong Ze did not complain, he could do what he could for the people, and he had no regrets. He was already sixty years old, and he only wanted to build a grass house in his hometown of Dongyang after retiring, and wrote a book to say that he was comfortable and pensioning. However, Zong Ze, who had already returned to his hometown, was still able to be included in a copy of ginseng, and was demoted to Zhenjiang as an editor for the crime of "contempt for Taoism". Soon after, Lady Munazawa died and was buried in Gyeongdae-san.
Soon, this empty and vulnerable Great Song finally fell. In the first year of Jing Kang, the Jurchen who was originally allied with the Great Song Dynasty finally saw that under the surface of the prosperity of the Song Dynasty was a vulnerable soft bone. When the Jurchens drove south, the imperial court immediately thought of negotiating peace, and this dynasty's civil and military ministers could not find a suitable candidate. At this time, Zong Ze was already sixty-six years old, and he resolutely took over the heavy responsibility of negotiating peace.
Before leaving, Zong Ze said with his colleagues that this peace talk was ready to go and never return: If the Jin people felt remorse, it would be forgotten, and if they wanted to fight again, Zong Ze would not insult the Great Song and fight to the end. Zong Ze's words reached the emperor's ears, and the lord and faction of the dprk were afraid that Zong Ze would have a tough attitude and that the peace talks would not be successful, so they temporarily cancelled his task of negotiating peace.
Peace was not successful, and the imperial court did not want Zong Ze to go back to the pension. Zong Ze led more than a dozen old, weak, sick and disabled people to the front line to repair the city wall and appease the people. It was here that Zong Ze's military prowess and revenge for saving the country finally awakened, and he wrote to the imperial court to describe his views on the placement of border defenses, and soon after, he was finally promoted to the commander-in-chief of the Hebei Volunteer Army. The small city that Zong Ze was guarding could actually resist the attack of the Jin people. The Great Song suffered frequent setbacks in the war with the Jin people, but raised his eyebrows in zong ze's hands, and Zong Ze was promoted to deputy marshal of the world at the age of sixty.
The Jin soldiers came to Kyoto, and Zong Ze encouraged the generals to rescue the Second Emperor. The sixty-eight-year-old Zong Ze's blood-boiling proposal was not supported by the soldiers. He took his son and his soldiers all the way through more than thirty villages and killed them all the way to the capital. He wrote to Zhao Shuo asking for support, and Zhao Shuo perfunctorily asked him, and he asked the generals and soldiers of all sides to meet, but no one paid any attention. Although this lonely army was overwhelming and won more than a dozen major battles, the Jin people all honored him as "Grandpa Zong", but he still could not catch up to save the Second Emperor.
During the Jing Kang Rebellion, the Second Emperor was captured. Zong Ze was furious and wanted to intercept the jin people's team and save the Second Emperor. At that time, the military and people were already desperate for the Second Emperor, and Zong Ze, who had two white sideburns, could no longer gather an army of Qin Wang. Hui Qin was plundered by the Northern Song Dynasty, and only Zhao Zhao was left in the Song imperial family, and Zong Ze assisted him in moving the capital to Jiangnan.
The Southern Song Dynasty temporarily stabilized, but the sixty-nine-year-old Zong Ze asked him to return to Beijing. This is the capital of the Northern Song Dynasty and the place of revival that Zong Ze never forgot. The Second Emperor was captured here, and he was going to get Song back on his feet here. This stubborn old man vowed to reorganize this place so that Zhao Zhuo could return with a beautiful scenery.
In order to expand the rebel army, Zong Ze successively said that the bandit groups of Wang Shan and other giant Kou, Huainan, Henan, Hebei and other places successfully defeated the Jin army in several major battles. Zong Ze saved the young general Yue Fei and became his proud general. In the first year of Jianyan, Jin Bing wanted to destroy the Southern Song Dynasty in one fell swoop. Zhao Shuo was like his father. Zong Ze led a million rebels to defeat the Jin army one after another, making everyone seem to see the hope of recovering the lost land.
Zong Ze intended to take advantage of the victory to pursue, and connected the twenty-four seals to Zhao Zhao, which is the famous "Twenty-four Shu of Qihui Luan".
If the subject has the slightest plan to mislead the country, the subject has a son and five grandchildren, and he is willing to be killed, in order to thank the world!
But what was Zhao Zhuo thinking? Maybe it was the fear of being captured like the Second Emperor, or maybe it was the fear of going into exile again, or perhaps his suspicions of Zong Ze,a million-strong master were more profound than his fear of the Jin people... A letter of loose stone sinks into the sea, Zong Ze is enraged and suffers from poisonous sores, and finally dies in anger and pain. Before his death, Zong Ze was reluctant to the country and the monarch every word, and did not mention his family a word.
The sadness of the southern Song Dynasty warlords was not just a continuation of the emphasis on literature and light force, but the atmosphere of capitulationism that permeated the entire dynasty. This negativity, from top to bottom, makes the monarch cowardly and incompetent, and leaves officials to be selfish and self-protective. Even with figures like Zong Ze and Yue Fei, the victories in battle after battle were only a moment of stability for the monarch, and they were never transformed into real strategic advantages.
The four years from the age of sixty-six to seventy years old for Zong Ze were the glorious moments in his life, the most unbearable years in the entire Song Dynasty, and the most painful years for countless Song Dynasty patriots. Zong Ze's glory, success, grief, regret, and unwillingness to bury him in the loess soil for hundreds of years, and by the Ming Dynasty, Zong Ze's tomb had become a ruined wall. During the Qing Dynasty, the Manchu regime, which also belonged to the Jurchens, in order to win the hearts and minds of the people, vigorously promoted against the Jin ming generals. Kangxi Nan toured to the Jinshan Temple in Zhenjiang, leaving behind the four characters of "Zhongxing Yongzhao" to praise Zongze. The tombstone of Zong Ze that we see today was rebuilt by the Provincial Education Department on the eve of the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression and against the historical background of the people's anti-Japanese sentiment. The four words "Light of the Nation" engraved on the stone archway were exactly the determination of millions of Chinese sons and daughters to resist Japan at that time. If Zong Ze knew that his spirit could have inspired the Chinese nation hundreds of years later, he would have been very pleased.