Di Qing, a Famous General in the Northern Song Dynasty

During the Tiansheng period of the Northern Song Dynasty, Di Qing, a young man from a poor family, was raped by his elder brother and was sent to the army with a tattoo. The facial tattoo became an indelible mark on his life. When the Song-Xia war broke out, he wore a bronze mask on the front line of Yanzhou, fought eight times in twenty-five battles, and shocked the northwest as "General Nirvana". Fan Zhongyan taught him "Zuo's Spring and Autumn Annals" and taught him to read at every turn. From this, he moved from the courage of an ordinary man to the strategy of a general. In the fourth year of Huangyou's reign, Nong Zhigao rebelled and Lingnan was shaken. Di Qing was ordered to march south and spent the night at Kunlun Pass. The cavalry under his command in Quirenpu, holding a white flag, defeated the enemy and pacified the southern frontier in one fell swoop. Renzong defied all opinions and promoted him to Privy Councilor - the first military man to rise to the top of the power center from the ranks since the founding of the Northern Song Dynasty. Yet the highest merits bring the deepest hostility. Wen Yanbo said, "Isn't Taizu a loyal minister of Zhou Shizong?" Ouyang Xiu wrote three memorial letters, turning the "phobia of martial arts" into an institutional encirclement and suppression. Prophecies spread all over the capital, and the soldiers' compliments with their fingers and eyes became evidence of guilt. Di Qing dismissed Chenzhou's sentence and named it Pingzhangshi, but he was actually under house arrest. In the second year of Jiayou's reign, he developed ulcers on his lips and died. There are only four words in the official history: "He died of gangrene and moustache." A man who exchanged his life's service for a ticket finally discovered that the back of the ticket said: You don't deserve it. He chose to walk into the bedroom with the ticket, and let his body, which had been silent for a lifetime, use a sore to say all the things he could not say or dare not say for him.