The Iron Cavalry of Liaodong

Name: The Iron Cavalry of Liaodong
Author: Interesting Plantain

辽东铁骑

by Interesting Plantain (有趣的車前子)

Status: Completed
Length: 286k Words
Genre: Historical
Subgenre: Historical & Ancient
Updated: 12mo ago
Source: Fanqie

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Synopsis

In the winter of 1580, when Nurhaci scattered his grandfather’s ashes into the Hun River with his own hands, Li Chengliang was at a training ground a hundred miles away, shooting a rebel general through the throat with a single arrow.

The frigid land of Liaodong had always believed in one law: the strong prey on the weak. Li Chengliang, a descendant of a military family who had yet to make his mark even as he approached forty, finally saw his fortunes turn while his wife and children went hungry and cold. With a lightning-fast nighttime raid, he entered the military world and began a legendary career that would see him guard Liaodong for thirty years.

This is no tale of simple good and evil. He was the Great Ming’s northern rampart, who formed the world-renowned Liaodong Iron Cavalry and earned the honorific title of Grand Tutor through his illustrious military achievements. He was also a frontier commander steeped in political intrigue, one who falsified accounts of his victories and indulged, even personally supported, a Jianzhou youth named Nurhaci, raising a fierce tiger at his very bedside.

Like father, like son. His eldest son, Li Rusong, surpassed even his father. To quell the rebellion of Bai in Ningxia, he flooded an isolated city. Crossing the Yalu River to aid Korea against the Japanese, he shattered the enemy’s courage with cannon fire beneath the walls of Pyongyang and faced vastly superior numbers in the bloody battle of Byeokjegwan. He carried the valor and glory of the Li military family to their peak, only to fall like a shooting star, killed in battle at the Hun River, his body carried home on horseback.

When Li Chengliang died quietly of illness in the capital at the age of ninety, the empire he had spent his life protecting was already riddled with wounds. Barely a year after his death, Nurhaci founded Later Jin and drew his blade against the Great Ming.

This is an epic of generals, cavalry, and the fires of war, and a lament for loyalty, ambition, and family legacy. Witness how the father and son of the Li family used blood and political cunning to write one of the most momentous chapters on the empire’s frontier, and see how they themselves

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106Chapters

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7.0Score

823Listens

16.4kReads · all time

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