Chapter 202: The Collapse of the Jin Southern Front

Sizhoucheng, on the Huai River frontline. The night before battle, the Jin army’s southern camp was eerily quiet. Wanyan Kuang sat behind the highest parapet on Sizhoucheng’s city wall, a map spread before him, its four corners weighted by stones—one fragment of blue brick from Lingbi, one chunk of rammed earth peeled from Dengzhou’s wall, one river stone picked up before Tangzhou’s government office, one shard of a shattered stone projectile from beneath Suzhou’s walls. Each stone was a city he had once held, only to lose.

He prodded the wick with a dry branch; the flame flickered, illuminating three cities circled in cinnabar on the map: Sizhoucheng, Lingbi, Suzhou. These three formed the iron triangle of the Jin’s southern front, the line he had built brick by brick over years. Now they crouched on the northern bank of the Huai, silent, staring at the ominous stillness across the river. The other side was too quiet. No horns, no campfires, no neighing warhorses. Too quiet for tens of thousands of troops massing.

Wanyan Kuang had faced steppe cavalry on the northern border for three years, seen every kind of army—but never an enemy like this. Their camp had no drums or gongs, no banners snapping, no soldiers shouting “Ten thousand years!” as generals rode past. Only a low, constant, metallic grinding sound, rising from deep within the earth, drifting across the Huai’s mist, day and night. He knew it wasn’t trebuchets—trebuchet sounds were too familiar: the creak of wood and hemp twisting, like an old ox plowing. This was different. This was steel. Rhythmic. Like a giant beast breathing.

The twenty-third day of the twelfth month, dawn. A thin mist floated over the Huai, its surface glazed with a thin layer of ice, reflecting scattered fires from the opposite bank. In Wanyan Kuang’s command tent, he held his final war council. Those present were the last remaining commanders of the southern front: Heshilie Zhizhong had come from Suzhou; Wanyan Alubao, wounded after retreating from Tangzhou, had remained in Sizhoucheng to recover; and several battalion commanders had just arrived from the northern border wall, their boots still caked with its yellow sand. These men were the last command core the Jin southern front could muster.

“Enemy strength is estimated between fifty and eighty thousand,” Wanyan Kuang said, his voice low but steady, as if stating a fact unrelated to him. “They advance in two columns—one crossing the Huai directly before Sizhoucheng, the other circling upstream. Their goal: to encircle and destroy both Sizhoucheng and Suzhou. Within two days, the entire Huai River line will be engaged.”

The tent fell dead silent. Heshilie Zhizhong’s single eye fixed on Sizhoucheng on the map, saying nothing. He had fought fifteen days in Lingbi, held Suzhou for two months—he knew better than anyone how fragile the Huai line was. But this enemy was not the Song army.

“Our forces,” Wanyan Kuang continued, “Sizhoucheng has fewer than three thousand defenders, Suzhou fewer than four thousand, Lingbi has been abandoned. The rest of the southern front combined total less than thirty thousand, scattered along hundreds of li from the Huai to Bianjing. The northern border’s main force cannot move. The western garrisons cannot move either. It’s not that His Majesty refuses to redeploy—he has, and the north would be left bare.”

“So,” Heshilie Zhizhong finally spoke, his voice rasping like sandpaper on iron, “we must hold with fewer than thirty thousand defenders against a fifty-to-eighty-thousand modernized force, on the open Huai plain, with no terrain to defend.”

“It’s not a defense,” Wanyan Kuang said, his voice suddenly soft, as if speaking to himself. “It’s a time war. We cannot stop them—but we can delay. One day, one day more. Two days, two days more. Until His Majesty finishes reinforcing Bianjing’s defenses. Until northern reinforcements—if His Majesty decides to send them—reach the Yellow River. If we fail, the Jin dies on the banks of the Huai. If we succeed, the Jin dies once more on the banks of the Yellow River.”

No one laughed. The words were not funny. But they were true. So true they were cruel.

At the same moment, across the Huai. The First Field Army of the Jiangnan People’s Revolutionary Army had set up its command post in an abandoned river god temple. The deity’s statue had long been removed; the empty shrine now held maps, rulers, and a hand-cranked field telephone. The phone line stretched from the temple’s entrance to an artillery observation post on the riverbank, where every fifteen minutes, the post called in wind speed, fog density, and changes in Jin campfires.

The combat order had already been issued. Signed jointly by the Chairman of the Jiangnan People’s Revolutionary Committee, Nie Huaishang, and the Military Committee, the text was under a hundred characters. The core directive: one sentence—“Advance both columns, force-cross the Huai, encircle and annihilate all major Jin southern front forces south of Suzhou.” No “fight bravely,” no “glorify our nation,” no “repay the imperial grace”—Jiangnan’s military documents never used such empty phrases. Only mission, time, route, and required outcome.

The assault units had already taken their jump-off positions. Engineer units had delivered their pontoon equipment to the riverbank—after two full years of targeted improvements. Not traditional wooden boats or floating bridges, but modular platforms of steel frames and inflatable bladders, disassemblable for mule transport, capable of bearing light artillery and armored vehicles. For these, Jiangnan’s steel workshops labored day and night; tungsten-manganese alloy from the steppe bases was prioritized for the bridge’s load-bearing joints. Every steel plate’s weld was inspected repeatedly; every cable’s tensile strength was tested.

The assault troops had crouched silently in the reed beds along the riverbank for half the night. Their gray uniforms blended almost perfectly with the mist. Each soldier’s steel helmet was wrapped in a coil of hemp rope—to prevent glare and to increase grip when climbing the riverbank. Dew had formed on their rifle barrels, but no one wiped it—discipline forbade it. The rifle was a soldier’s second life; water in the barrel could cause a burst. Before battle, every man wrapped his bolt in oilcloth, only removing it at the final moment before the charge.

The assault company’s captain crouched at the front of the line, leaning against a bundle of pontoon anchor ropes, a reed stalk clenched between his teeth. He was no older than twenty-five. Two years ago, he had carried sacks at the Jiankang docks, beaten so badly by the foreman that three ribs were broken. A underground party member of the Zhigeng Society smuggled him out of the city in a manure cart and delivered him to the Weisheng Academy. He lay there for three months, learned to read, learned to read maps, learned to operate a mortar. Now he commanded one hundred twenty men, all youths who, like him, had crawled out of misery.

Less than fifteen minutes remained until the general attack.

The twenty-third day of the twelfth month, Mao hour. Dawn had not yet broken; both banks of the Huai were shrouded in iron-gray mist.

The first shell landed on the southern gate tower of Sizhoucheng—no whistle. The 75mm mountain gun’s muzzle velocity far exceeded the slow, lumbering stone projectiles the Jin soldiers were used to. The shell’s report was still echoing through the air when the projectile struck its target. The Jin soldiers heard only a dull explosion, then the sharp crack of crumbling bricks and stones, then the shockwave hurling shattered masonry and flesh from the tower. The Jin flag, along with its pole, was blown apart; the pole leaned crookedly downward, the cloth burning into a black wisp in the firelight.

Wanyan Kuang, in his command tent less than a li from the wall, felt the explosion shake the map on his table. He burst out to see thick smoke rising from Sizhoucheng’s southern wall, mixed with reddish-brown dust. He had endured bombardments before—Song trebuchets had pounded Dengzhou’s walls for two months, leaving craters everywhere. But those were stone projectiles. This was artillery. Artillery forged by Jiangnan’s arsenal over two years of iterative refinement, using tungsten-manganese alloy from the steppe for gun barrels, assembled on standardized production lines. This gun could be disassembled into seven parts, carried by four mules, reassembled in half an hour, and unleash high-explosive and incendiary shells at any target. Jin city walls were designed to resist siege rams, scaling ladders, and trebuchets—not weapons like this.

On the Huai’s surface, the morning mist had not yet lifted; Jin archers still rubbed sleep from their eyes behind the parapets. Then the heavy machine guns on the opposite bank opened fire. Not one, but one every hundred paces along the entire riverbank, creating interlocking fields of fire that sealed every beachhead position. Bullets struck the rammed-earth breastworks like rain on banana leaves, spraying fragments. Jin soldiers crouched behind them, heads too low to lift. They had bows, crossbows, repeating crossbows—the Jin’s famed repeating crossbows, with bolts as thick as spears, capable of reaching three hundred paces. But the heavy machine guns had triple the range and a hundred times the rate of fire. A Jin crossbowman needed at least ten breaths to load, draw, aim, and fire. In that time, the unyielding steel monster across the river had sprayed out hundreds of rounds. The crossbow’s bowstring was severed, its horn decorations shattered, the crossbowman crouched motionless behind his weapon.

The Jin soldiers began to panic. They had lost battles before—but never one like this: they couldn’t even see the enemy, yet comrades fell in entire ranks.

As the heavy machine guns pinned the Jin beachhead defenses, the assault troops’ pontoon bridges emerged from the reeds. Engineers pushed the modular steel-frame pontoon platforms into the Huai’s swift current; the bridge sections, held aloft by invisible hands, remained perfectly steady. Jin rockets struck the bridges sporadically, their flames flickering out instantly against the steel frames—this was their only counterattack.

Assault infantry followed the engineers, crouching low as they crossed the bridges. At the front was the dockworker-turned-captain, who had traveled a distance no ordinary man could imagine—from Jiankang’s docks to this Huai pontoon. After crossing, he was the first to leap onto the northern bank, his boots sinking into the soil of the Jin southern front’s defenses, still veiled in morning mist. He raised his rifle and fired at a Jin crossbowman crouched behind the breastwork, reloading. The shot rang out. The crossbowman fell backward, his bolt shooting into the gray sky. Behind him, one hundred twenty assault infantry surged onto the beachhead, advancing into the depth of the Jin’s first line under the covering fire of the heavy machine guns.

From the first shell’s impact to the first red flag planted on the Jin beachhead, the time it took to tear open the Huai River line was shorter than any Jin commander had imagined possible.

Eastern flank. Sizhoucheng. Main axis of attack.

Sizhoucheng was the core pillar of the Jin southern front’s defense system, garrisoned by nearly three thousand troops. Its walls had been personally reinforced by Heshilie Zhizhong, with two moats and a palisade line outside. These defenses held for less than half an hour against the Jiangnan army’s firepower.

The artillery barrage was not the traditional rhythm of intermittent salvos. It was continuous, unbroken, like an assembly line—first row hit the arrow towers on the walls, second row struck the firing positions at the wall’s base, third row targeted the reserve assembly points behind the gates, fourth row arced over the walls to strike the city’s interior. The entire fire rhythm was as precise as a machine: as one shell exploded on target, the smoke had not yet cleared before the next landed on the adjacent target. The Jin had no chance to breathe. They were accustomed to siege warfare: trebuchets slowly lobbing stones, then infantry charging with scaling ladders. They knew how to respond to that. But this was not warfare. It was harvesting. Death did not wield a scythe slowly—it pushed an invisible combine harvester through a wheat field.

The eastern corner tower was the first to collapse. A 75mm high-explosive shell struck the junction of rammed earth and brickwork at its base. The explosion tore the earthen structure from within; the entire tower split open along a great crack, then collapsed. The two repeating crossbows atop it, along with six crossbowmen, tumbled down, their bodies and broken masonry heaped at the wall’s foot.

The southern gate was hit by three armor-piercing shells in rapid succession at the same spot. The first pierced the iron-plated outer wooden panel; the second exploded inside the gate passage; the third blew away the remaining frame. Sizhoucheng’s southern gate stood open, like a man’s mouth with a tooth pulled out. The siege ram was not used. The scaling ladders were not used. Even the infantry charge had not yet begun—the gate had opened by itself.

Assault troops poured through the gate—not in a chaotic, shouting mob, but in tactical squads, alternating cover, clearing street by street, alley by alley. Every corner, every window, every rooftop was swept with light machine guns before infantry advanced, or cleared with a grenade from a grenade launcher. The Jin’s urban warfare experience came from fighting the Song, whose siege tactics relied on cold weapons and minimal firearms. Against Jiangnan’s systematic clearance, the Jin were utterly unprepared—they hid in houses waiting for hand-to-hand combat, only to have a grenade fly in first. They waited at alley mouths to ambush, only to hear the light machine gun’s probing burst around the corner.

The three thousand defenders of Sizhoucheng were shattered in less than half a day. Over a thousand killed, over fifteen hundred captured, a few scattered remnants fled through the northern gate. Jiangnan forces suffered fewer than a hundred casualties. This casualty ratio was unprecedented in the history of cold-warfare combat.

Western flank. At the same hour, the second column, circling upstream along the Huai, advanced rapidly toward Suzhou.

Their mission: penetrate and sever the connection between Sizhoucheng and Suzhou, prevent reinforcements from reaching the Jin southern front units, and join forces with the eastern main force south of Suzhou to encircle all remaining Jin southern front troops. They carried no heavy artillery, only lighter mountain howitzers and ample mules, enabling swift movement. The vanguard rode cavalry ahead; infantry followed aboard steam tugs racing north along the tributaries of the Huai River—these steam tugs, traveling day and night from Jiankang to Zhenjiang, loaded with ammunition and supplies, navigated the Huai River system as if it were an open highway. Jin river outposts stared in disbelief as iron ships spewing white smoke surged upstream faster than the swiftest cavalry, utterly unprepared to respond.

Before news of Sizhoucheng’s fall reached Suzhou, the circling force had already severed the southern road to Suzhou. Heshilie Zhizhong, commanding fewer than four thousand defenders, was trapped in the isolated city. Heshilie Zhizhong had spent his life fighting the Song, the Western Xia, and steppe cavalry—his military experience was the richest among Jin southern commanders, his defensive will the strongest—he had proven himself the Jin’s most tenacious defender with fifteen days in Lingbi, two months in Suzhou. But now he faced a cruel truth: all his defensive experience was built on cold-weapon siege warfare. How he dug moats, positioned repeating crossbows, organized reserves, how he counterattacked after a breach—every tactic failed against an enemy with 75mm mountain guns, heavy machine guns, reconnaissance balloons, and steam tugs. It was like a man who spent his life learning to knock down jujubes with a bamboo pole, only to find the tree was made of iron.

Heshilie Zhizhong set down the scout’s battle report and sat in silence for a long time. Then he raised his head, his single eye fixed on the distant, flickering outline of the enemy positions, and said: “I waited my whole life for an enemy who could defeat me head-on. Now he has come.”

The twenty-fifth day of the twelfth month. On the plains between Sizhoucheng and Suzhou, the last two mobile Jin field units were urgently retreating toward Suzhou. These were elite forces Wanyan Kuang had pulled from Sizhoucheng’s outer defenses—twelve thousand men total, including three Jurchen cavalry battalion commands and one Han militia infantry ten-thousand-man regiment. Their mission: retreat to Suzhou, join Heshilie Zhizhong, and fight a decisive battle against the Jiangnan army beneath Suzhou’s walls. But they never reached Suzhou. The circling force intercepted them on an open plain south of Suzhou.

It was a direct clash between cavalry and modern infantry. The three Jurchen cavalry battalions led the charge, forming the classic Jurchen shock formation—front row with sabers, rear row with spears, light cavalry on the flanks. This was the tactic the Jin had prided itself on for a century—Wanyan Aguda had shattered the Liao’s Pi Shi Army with it; Wanyan Zongbi had crushed the Song’s Western Army with it. Iron hooves thundered, sabers gleamed like snow, forming a steel flood across the Huaibei plain.

The Jiangnan infantry, upon spotting the Jin cavalry, quickly formed up. Their formation was not the traditional square, but a horizontal skirmish line the Jin had never seen. Artillery observation balloons had risen into the sky. Observers in the balloons transmitted real-time data—direction, speed, distance, formation—via wired telephone to the artillery command post, each datum precise beyond the Jin’s comprehension. The command post calculated firing parameters in seconds, then relayed orders to the already-positioned mortar and 75mm mountain gun batteries.

When the Jin cavalry reached eight hundred paces from the Jiangnan line, the first mortar shells fell. These shells came from above—not fired horizontally, but arcing steeply down from overhead. The Jin cavalry had never faced indirect fire—they had always believed the greatest danger in a charge was frontal arrows and repeating crossbows; once they closed the distance, they would win in hand-to-hand combat. But now, death fell from above. Mortar shells exploded among the cavalry formations, each bursting into dozens of cast-iron fragments. Horses’ legs were severed, riders thrown from their mounts, those behind tripped over fallen bodies, the formation collapsed.

The surviving cavalry that broke through the mortar fire pressed forward. At three hundred paces from the Jiangnan line, the heavy machine guns opened fire. This three-hundred-paces distance had been meticulously calculated by Jiangnan staff officers—here, the machine gun’s fire density could blanket the entire front of the cavalry charge, while the Jin’s bows had a range of less than two hundred paces. That hundred-paces gap was a death zone they could not cross. Bullets struck horses, sending them to their knees; riders were thrown clear, cut down before they hit the ground. Bullets struck men, piercing armor, sending helmets flying, bodies piling on bodies. The rear ranks kept charging—they could not stop. Cavalry momentum forced them forward, into a wall of bullets. Shells exploded overhead, bullets swept the front—the cavalry charge was annihilated between three hundred and one hundred paces. Corpses covered the entire charge route, men and horses piled together, burying the winter wheat seedlings.

Twelve thousand Jin field troops were completely destroyed in less than half an hour—not routed, annihilated. More than half killed; the rest either surrendered or scattered. The once-feared Jurchen heavy cavalry, which had shattered the Liao and destroyed the Northern Song, never even saw the enemy’s faces before being torn apart by a storm of steel.

The remaining Han militia infantry ten-thousand-man regiment did not charge. They stood on distant fields, watching the Jurchen cavalry being slaughtered. Their weapons were spears and shields; their armor was leather and paper. The enemy they faced was beyond their worst nightmares. When the battlefield smoke cleared, a Jiangnan political officer stepped forward with a metal megaphone and shouted to the surviving Han militia: “Lay down your arms, none will be killed. Those who wish to return home will be given travel funds. Those who wish to stay will join the People’s Armed Forces, receive land and property, and no longer serve the Jurchens.”

The Han militia ten-thousand-man regiment wavered for no longer than the burning of an incense stick. First, the front-line spearmen planted their spears in the ground and raised their hands. Then the archers cut their bowstrings and threw their bows down. Then the entire regiment’s war horns fell silent. The entire regiment surrendered en masse. This had never happened in Jin history—not that men had never surrendered, but never had so many Han militia soldiers, so many in formation, so willingly laid down their arms. Jiangnan’s political slogan of “Oppose Song, Resist Jin” and its land reform policies were deeply familiar to these Han soldiers. Their hometowns had long sung of them; their elders had long awaited them. The Jin court forced them to fight with swords and spears; Jiangnan called them home with land and freedom. They chose the latter.

The twenty-eighth day of the twelfth month. Sizhoucheng and Suzhou were fully under Jiangnan control. Between the Huai and Bianjing, the Jin southern front’s defense system no longer existed. Thirty thousand defenders: over half killed, nearly ten thousand captured, the rest scattered. Wanyan Kuang, with a handful of personal guards, broke out through Sizhoucheng’s northern gate and fled north across the Huaibei plain, behind him burning Sizhoucheng and red flags stretching across the hills. He turned his horse to look back—the fires of the Huai line lit half the sky. He knew his military career was over. The Jin southern front’s defense system was over. The Central Plains, never lost since the Jin’s founding, now lay open. He turned his head, spurred his horse north, and never looked back. Bianjing was next.

And Jin Zhangzong, Wanyan Jing, was at that moment touring the defenses of Bianjing.