During the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms, the Central Plains was in turmoil. Liang, Tang, Jin, Han, and Zhou changed like horses, and the war burned out people's livelihood. In a corner of Lingnan, there was the hero Liu Wei (original name Liu Yan), who took advantage of the troubled times - he refused to be promoted by the Later Liang Dynasty, took Guangzhou as his base, proclaimed himself emperor in 917 AD and established the "Han" (known as Southern Han in history). Since then, a counterattack legend has begun from "Lingnan partial hegemony" to "cross-regional empire".
He abandoned the shackles of "addiction to pleasure and eunuch monopoly" in history, and took "first solidify Lingnan, then expand Central South, advance westward to the Western Regions, and finally secure the Central Plains" as the strategic core: training the Pearl River Navy to monopolize the South China Sea spice trade route to obtain expansion capital; conquering the city, pacifying Laos, breaking Burma, collecting elephant soldiers and jungle soldiers to make up for the shortcomings of the army; connecting Dali, and opening up the Western Regions, borrowing back The falcon cavalry formed iron cavalry and formed a multi-arms system of "water + infantry + elephant + cavalry". They took advantage of the civil strife in the Later Jin Dynasty and sent troops on both fronts. They used the strategy of charging the elephant soldiers and outflanking the cavalry to defeat Luoyang and trap Kaifeng. This ended the regime of the Later Han Dynasty. In 947, he proclaimed himself emperor in the Central Plains and established the "Southern Han Empire", which spanned Lingnan, Indochina Peninsula, the eastern part of the Western Regions and the core area of the Central Plains.
He was not only a military conqueror, but also stabilized his rule by "equal pay for foreign races, imperial examinations regardless of ethnic origin, light corvee and low taxes", connected the "Lingnan-Central Plains-Western Regions" trade route, and promoted multi-ethnic integration. However, the empire was initially established, the cavalry of the northern Liao Dynasty moved south, and the war in Youzhou resumed. Standing at the top of Kaifeng City, Liu Wei, faced with the choice of "going north to resist the Liao" and "internal stability", finally understood: the day when the hegemony was established, it was also the time when new challenges began. This work, with Liu Wei as the protagonist, restores the troubled times of the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms, and writes about a period of "Southern Empire" that has been ignored by history.
