Chapter 204

On the fourth day of the first lunar month, at the hour of Mao. Outside the Nanxun Gate of Bianjing, the mist had not yet cleared when the vanguard of the Jiangnan Army advanced to within three li of the city walls. On the artillery position, engineers were pounding the final few anchor stakes into the frozen ground—not to deter the Jin troops, but to prevent the recoil of the mountain guns from loosening the permafrost. The reconnaissance balloon slowly ascended in the southern breeze; the observer in its basket held a telescope in one hand and the receiver of a wired telephone in the other, overlooking the ancient capital untouched by war for eighty years. The telephone line hung down from the balloon, its other end connected to the artillery command post on the high ground to the south. The duty staff marked every target on the map, then spoke a series of commands into the receiver. The gun barrels slowly lifted, like a row of silent steel fingers pointing at the southern city wall of Bianjing.

Wanyan Kuang stood atop the Nanxun Gate tower, spotting the balloon through his telescope. Inside the basket, a figure was writing slowly and calmly. Wanyan Kuang lowered the telescope and said dryly, “They’re drawing our city defenses.” He was half right—the observer wasn’t just sketching; every coordinate he reported over the phone was instantly converted into artillery firing data, with an error margin of no more than thirty paces. This was a style of warfare the Jin generals had never seen: the enemy had already measured them from head to toe before firing a single shot.

Meanwhile, two li behind the artillery position, in the assembly area, a convoy the Jin army had never seen was undergoing final preparations.

They were steam tanks—primitive armored combat vehicles developed by the Jiangnan Arsenal after nearly two years of trials, armored with tungsten-manganese alloy plates supplied by the grassland base, and powered by steam engines. Their shape did not resemble the sleek tanks of later eras, but more like iron coffins placed atop tracks. Each vehicle was less than two zhang long, with armor no thicker than half an inch; rivets clustered densely on the steel plates like rashes on skin. The tracks were cast iron, each segment weighing dozens of jin, creaking loudly as they turned, the noise audible even miles away. Two firing ports opened on each side, mounting light machine guns; a heavy machine gun sat atop, operated personally by the commander. The driver’s vision was limited to a narrow slit directly ahead, so he drove nearly blind, relying entirely on the commander’s verbal commands to adjust direction. Each steam tank bore a name, crudely painted in white paint along its side—“Laborer,” “Iron Ox,” “Dawn,” “Revenge.” These names were not chosen by headquarters, but by the workers who built them. Half the workers who built “Laborer” had escaped from the Jiankang docks years earlier; they named it to mean: once the Jin used iron horses to trample us, now it was our turn to crush them with iron.

Three steam tanks lined up in a row, their boilers heated to rated pressure. Assault infantry followed behind in squads and platoons. The leading officer crouched at the front of the formation, repeatedly instructing his men—stay close to the tanks, never run ahead, never fall more than three steps behind. The tank armor can stop arrows and lead bullets, but your flesh cannot. Each soldier stuffed two small wads of cotton into each ear—not to block the Jin soldiers’ shouts, but to mute the tanks’ noise. The sound was too loud—the roar of the steam engine, the creak of the tracks, the rattle of machine guns—combined, it could rupture eardrums.

At three-quarters past the hour of Mao, three red signal flares shot into the sky. The general assault began.

The roar of the 75mm mountain guns was not in single shots, but in waves. Artillery crews fired their first salvo nearly simultaneously; the Nanxun Gate tower was instantly swallowed by fire and smoke. The blast wave tore the Jin flag and its pole to shreds; the fabric burned into black ash and drifted onto the frozen surface of the Hulong River. Then came the second and third barrages, striking the battlements and parapets; the crisp cracking of shattered bricks mingled with the thunder of explosions. Jin soldiers crouched behind the parapets, unable to lift their heads—not because they dared not, but because the shockwaves and shrapnel had turned the battlements into death traps.

The artillery barrage lasted fifteen minutes. Afterward, all the flanking parapets on both sides of Nanxun Gate had collapsed, and dozens of zhang of the city wall’s battlements were leveled flat. The gate itself was struck dead center by an armor-piercing shell; the iron-clad wooden outer layer exploded into splinters, exposing the internal structure like a man’s mouth gaping after losing his front teeth.

As the artillery ceased, three steam tanks burst from the smoke, crossing the frozen Hulong River in a line. The ice cracked with a sickening groan under their dozens of tons of weight—but did not break; engineers had already surveyed the ice thickness, and this winter’s Hulong River ice was thick enough to bear the tanks. The tanks left three white furrows on the ice, the churned ice shards splattering onto the sandbags of the Jin outer defenses like a hailstorm of steel. The Jin archers on their arrow towers began firing. The crossbow bolts were as thick as spears, capable of reaching three hundred paces; they struck the tank armor with dull thuds. One bolt pierced the front armor of “Laborer,” punching through the half-inch steel plate and lodging in a rivet seam, the exposed half-shaft vibrating with a hum. Inside, the driver saw the bolt enter just inches above his head, his palms slick with sweat—but he did not slow, nor veer off course—the instructor had taught: the tank is the infantry’s shield, and a shield must not stop. If you stop, the infantry behind you is exposed.

The tanks pressed forward, their front armor bristling with arrows like a steel rhinoceros unaware it had been pierced by a hundred darts. After passing beyond the arrow tower’s range, the tanks returned fire. The heavy machine guns atop them swept the defenders clustered around the breach in Nanxun Gate; bullets tore into the rammed-earth walls, sending bricks flying, forcing Jin soldiers to remain crouched behind the parapets. The assault infantry surged onto the breached wall, spreading left and right under the tanks’ cover. Each infantry squad was equipped with one light machine gun and two grenade launchers; their tactics were clean and precise—first lob a grenade behind the parapet, then sweep with the machine gun, then charge forward to clear survivors, then repeat. The Jin’s melee formations were useless in the narrow confines of the wall top; rows of axe-wielders were pinned at the wall’s corners, cut down before they could take three steps. Blood pooled beneath them.

Wanyan Kuang tried to rally his fleeing troops atop the rubble of the destroyed Nanxun Gate tower; his hoarse voice was nearly drowned by the artillery. He drew his sword, standing atop the broken bricks, waving it wildly; a few personal guards remained beside him. One steam tank had already rolled through the breach; its right-side light machine gun swept the inner rampart. Wanyan Kuang saw it—a smoking iron coffin, its tracks caked with powdered bricks from the wall and ice shards from the Hulong River, advancing steadily into the city. He shouted something, but his voice was swallowed by the machine gun’s roar. Then a shell landed less than twenty paces away, hurling him into the air with flying debris. When his guards dug him from the rubble, his face was covered in blood, his right arm slashed deep to the bone by shrapnel—but he was still alive.

After the fall of Nanxun Gate, the Jiangnan Army’s tactics subtly shifted. They did not flood into the city for street-by-street fighting—as they did not need to. The reconnaissance balloons had precisely mapped every barracks, granary, command post, and key road within the city; artillery now delivered blanket bombardments along the depth of the inner city, based on those coordinates. Shells flew over the walls, landing directly on the heads of reserve troops, cutting off messengers carrying assembly orders, severing reinforcement routes between gates, and shattering the city’s command structure into disconnected fragments.

The Jin command structure had already been fragile. The defenders of Bianjing came from different systems—Wanyan Kuang’s southern remnants, elite troops transferred from Zhongdu, local conscript armies from Henan, and western forces rushing day and night from Shaanxi. Units could not communicate, orders conflicted; once messengers were cut off by artillery, each camp fought alone. When one section of wall fell, neighboring defenses showed no reaction. The Jin’s defensive system, faced with this “first paralyze, then mop up” tactic, was like a giant with its spine broken—limbs still twitched, but it could no longer stand.

On the eleventh day of the first lunar month, the bombardment entered its eighth day; nearly every target within Bianjing had been destroyed. The attacking forces advanced simultaneously from the south and east; infantry, covered by extending artillery fire, cleared streets one by one, steadily compressing toward the city center. Wanyan Jing was no longer in the city—he had escaped north through the northwest water gate on the night of the ninth day, a fact Wanyan Kuang had concealed from all. But the defenders eventually learned the truth from fleeing elite troops. The news spread like plague through every garrison. First to lay down arms were the Han conscript troops—their homes lay mostly in Henan, and they had never wished to die for the Great Jin. Then came the old and weak conscripts in the Jurchen infantry battalions. The last to resist were Wanyan Kuang’s personal guards and a few veteran Jurchen soldiers, holding out inside the imperial palace’s main gate, Xuande Tower. No artillery. No reinforcements. No hope. Only dozens of men, dozens of blades, and a gate already shattered.

On the twelfth day of the first lunar month, at dawn, the last steam tank, “Dawn,” rolled over the rubble of the Zhuhumen gate and turned slowly toward Xuande Tower. Infantry followed behind, rifles aimed at every window and doorway. Inside Xuande Tower, Jurchen shouts and clashing swords rang out. The assault infantry did not charge in—they mounted light machine guns at the windows and swept the interior. The firing ceased. Silence followed for a moment. Then the door of Xuande Tower opened from within, and Wanyan Kuang stepped out. His armor was scarred with cuts and caked in blood; his right arm was wrapped in a strip of cloth torn from a flag—not the Jin wolf banner, but the red flag of the Jiangnan Army, retrieved by his guards from the ruins of Nanxun Gate. He had used it to bind his wound. His left hand was empty; his right could no longer hold a sword. Behind him lay the last dozen or so of his personal guards, dead in pools of blood. He stood alone on the stone steps before Xuande Tower, gazing at the ruined city of Bianjing beyond Zhuhumen. On the twelfth day of his defense, he was the last man still standing. Nanxun Gate had fallen. Chenzhou Gate had fallen. Dailou Gate had fallen. All gates had fallen. The ice of the Hulong River had been shattered by artillery, turned to sludge. The Jin flags on the walls fell one by one, replaced by wave after wave of red banners.

Wanyan Kuang slowly drew his sword with his left hand. One assault infantryman raised his rifle, but the political commissar pressed down the barrel. The commissar shook his head. Wanyan Kuang looked at them, then held the blade horizontally before himself. He spoke a phrase in Jurchen—no one understood. Then he knelt, facing north—that was Hebei’s direction, the direction Wanyan Jing had escaped, the last hope of the Great Jin. A flash of steel, his body slowly toppled sideways, falling onto the stone steps before Xuande Tower, his face pressed against the cold blue flagstones. His blood trickled down the cracks between the steps—from the first step to the second, from the second to the third, finally absorbed by the moss in the crevices. The Jurchen veteran who had fought from the northern frontier to the Huai River, who had defended Tangzhou to the last breath at Bianjing, had finally stopped.

On the thirteenth day of the first lunar month, at dawn, the last scattered resistance in the northern corner tower of the imperial palace was cleared. Jiangnan Army engineers began clearing the rubble from the Nanxun Gate breach; follow-up troops streamed through the gap. The gate stood open. Bianjing, the fortress that had once cost Genghis Khan immense effort, had fallen in eleven days. No organized street fighting. No last-ditch defense. Eleven days was not because the Jin were weak—it was because siege technology had surpassed the defensive threshold of city walls. Traditional city walls were designed for cold weapons and early firearms, built on two assumptions: the attacker must camp outside the walls, and the defender could sustain resistance atop them. The Jiangnan Army breached the walls with heavy artillery, paralyzed command with reconnaissance balloons, used steam tanks to shield infantry assaults on the breaches, and employed combined arms to clear internal nodes. From the first shot to full control, the Jin defenders never had a single effective response.

Nie Huaishang, Chairman of the Jiangnan People’s Revolutionary Committee, entered Bianjing the day after its fall. He did not ride in triumph through the main gate, but walked through the breach at Nanxun Gate, accompanied only by a few staff officers and a secretary. The rubble on either side had not yet been cleared; the air reeked of gunpowder and burnt timber. He stepped over the broken bricks through the breach—this gap, once the old wound left by Jin troops when they breached Bianjing eighty years ago, had since been patched with blue bricks by the Jin, and now reopened by Jiangnan’s mountain guns. Old scar, new wound, layered on the same stretch of wall. After walking through, he stopped and turned to look back at the breach.

“Repair it,” he said. “Fix the wall—not to defend against enemies, but to show future generations. Tell them this city was breached twice. First, by the Jin’s iron cavalry. Second, by the people’s iron fist.”

At noon, a massive red flag rose atop Xuande Tower. Alongside the sickle and hammer emblem were the names of ordinary soldiers who had marched from the Jiankang docks, the Shaoxing dye houses, the Yanshan tea gardens—all the way to the battlements of Bianjing. The names, written in ink on the lower right corner of the flag, were crooked, uneven, but each name belonged to a living person. The people of Bianjing watched the flag from behind door cracks, from behind charred window frames, from beneath half-collapsed shop doors. They did not know what the flag meant, nor what the Jiangnan People’s Revolutionary Committee was, nor who Nie Huaishang was. But they knew one thing—this flag was not the dragon banner, not the wolf-head banner. It bore no dragons or phoenixes, no beasts—only the sickle and the hammer. Tools for farming. Tools for forging.

As the red flag rose over Xuande Tower, Wanyan Jing’s carriage trudged slowly northward across the icy, muddy plains of Hebei. He turned to look south—Bianjing’s direction held no fire, for the flames had burned out. Above, only a gray winter cloud hung, like a shroud, covering the last embers of the Great Jin’s eighty-year dream of the Central Plains.