Two Hundred Years of War: Heroes of the Northern and Southern Dynasties

A Comeback Amid the Flames of War

As the Yangtze's waves beat against Jiankang's walls, Liu Yu, a poor boy who sold straw sandals, huddled on a street corner hawking his wares. Ten years later, clad in the bloodstained armor of the Northern Command Army, he cleaved the banners of Huan Xuan's rebels with his ring-pommeled saber. A Qiang flute wailed atop Luoyang's walls as he raised with his own hands the fallen stone stele of the Western Jin imperial tombs. On the Yellow River's floating ice, the shattered Northern Wei cavalry reflected the Moon-Crescent Formation. The iron hooves of a man from a humble family shattered the century-old shackles of the great clans. Yet on Jiankang's abdication platform, the Jin emperor's vermilion brush trembled as he wrote the character "Song," while the old map of Xie Xuan in Liu Yu's arms had long since been soaked by the snow and wind of Guanzhong.

In the cold wind at the northern foot of the Yin Mountains, Tuoba Tao, an orphan of a fallen kingdom, crawled out from beneath a Rouran horse's belly, blood obscuring his fifteen-year-old eyes. Seven years later, the heaps of corpses at Canhe Slope formed the steps to his throne. The herdsmen's songs of the Chile Plain mingled with the recitation of the Confucian classics of the Han. Fires burning on the northern bank of the Yangtze illuminated the long spear in his hand. For the first time, Northern Wei cavalry watered their horses at the natural moat, and all lands south of the Yellow River fell to the Xianbei wolves. But before the imperial seal had even warmed, a eunuch's blade pierced the hand with which he was writing the Edict of Sinicization.

Beneath the walls of Huaishuo Fort, the garrison soldier Gao Huan chewed on grass roots and gazed at the stars. The thundering hoofbeats of Erzhu Rong's warhorse shattered his dreams, but he leapt onto its back and wagered his life to claim his hegemony in Ye. Amid the ten thousand skeletons at Yubi, he laughed as he wiped his sword and shouted across the river to Yuwen Tai: "A Xianbei steed should be reined by Han hands!" His dying words were carried away as Hou Jing's rebel banners set Ye ablaze. His son Gao Yang picked up the crown of Northern Qi from the ashes. Beside the stray dogs gnawing at bones during the famine in the Six Garrisons, the orphan Yuwen Tai snatched back half a cake of bran bread. The ambushers hidden in the reeds of Shawan were like the traps he had laid as a child: an enemy twenty times their number fled before the spears of the fubing army. He placed the tiger tally in the trembling hands of Han nobles, and from then on, the lands of Guanzhong forged the bloodlines of Hu and Han together.