In the spring of 499 AD, outside the city of Xiangyang, the seat of the Southern Qi Yong Prefecture, a night of spring rain was silent, and countless new shoots broke through the ground. Local farmers dug bamboo shoots on the mountain as usual, but with the new shoots emerged a group of soldiers who looked well trained. It didn't look like it was coming at the farmer's bamboo shoots, which made the farmer's heart settle down.
But then doubts arose in the minds of the peasants, who had not heard of a war, so what were these soldiers going to do? In fact, the soldiers' own doubts are not less than theirs, they only know that they are ordered to cut down bamboo.
However, this is indeed a season that is not suitable for cutting bamboo, so what is the purpose of cutting bamboo? Unbeknownst to them, the trees on the mountain were also cut down. The logs were carried down the hill by the soldiers, bundled up, and thrown into a deep lake. The soldiers threw down bundles of wood, but wave after wave of doubts stirred up, and the lake gradually returned to calm, as if nothing had happened.
This was exactly what the people who gave the order expected, he was the Yongzhou Assassin Shi Xiaoyan (later Emperor Wu of Liang), and the capital city of Nanjing Jiankang at this time was not as calm as water.
Xiao Baojuan, the Emperor of Southern Qi, who had just ascended the throne the previous year, listened to the rumors of villains and killed many of his father's heroes during his reign. Among them was Xiao Yan's brother, which caused panic and turmoil within the Southern Qi regime. Although Yongzhou was very far away from Jiankang, as a former hero, Xiao Yan also felt a burst of murderous anger, not to mention that Xiangyang, the seat of Yongzhou's administration, was very important, and it had always been a place where soldiers and families had to fight, plus Xiao Baojuan had long wanted to replace Xiao Yan with his own cronies.
Xiao Yan, who was heavily armed, of course, did not want to tie his hands and capture it, but he also did not want to provoke the incident first, he wanted to brake with silence. The two sides secretly compete, like under the calm water, surging undercurrents, looking for a breakthrough in the eruption. Sure enough, it wasn't long before Xiao Baojuan, who couldn't stand the temperament, sent someone to raid Yongzhou.
The mystery that was silent at the bottom of the lake was finally about to surface, and this was related to the success or failure of Xiao Yan's move, and Xiao Yan launched a counterattack. He ordered his soldiers to fish up the wood that had been dormant at the bottom of the lake for more than a year, gathered thousands of craftsmen, worked day and night, and soon equipped the three thousand ships they had prepared into warships.
These three thousand warships, together with more than 10,000 newly recruited soldiers and more than a thousand warhorses, formed a large army against Xiao Baojuan, under the leadership of Xiao Yan, all the way to the east, straight to the health, the mighty Xiao Yan army soon captured Jiankang, all outside the healthy territory of Taicheng, fell into Xiao Yan's hands, Xiao Baojuan abdicated.
In 502 AD, the ceremony of emperor Xiao Baorong Zen's abdication of the throne was held, and Xiao Yan finally accepted Zen concessions after the Qunchen gu asked and presented the instrument of providence, became emperor, changed the name of the country to Liang, and under the leadership of Emperor Wu of Liang, a new era of the Southern Dynasty began.