Chapter 119: Daliang

Third year of King Jia of Wei, second month of mid-spring, the Wei capital, Daliang.

At breakfast time, a group of Wei soldiers with grey cloth wrapped around their heads sat cross-legged against the inner side of the city wall. They huddled around a cold earthen kang, staring at the thin, watery gruel in their clay bowls, silent and wordless, their morale utterly crushed.

The Qin army had besieged the city for half a month. Though the granaries within were still fairly full, no one knew how long this war would last. So the King of Wei had ordered rations to be restricted. Even the soldiers defending the walls were allotted only a third of a dou of millet each day — enough to leave them half-starved. As a result, every face bore a sickly, undernourished pallor.

But what could they do? They could only drink their bland, tasteless gruel in silence, praying that their king would quickly reach a peace settlement with Qin and end this hopeless war.

Ever since Lord Xinling died, in battles against Qin, Wei had not won a single victory for twenty years.

The silence was broken by a slowly approaching carriage. The creaking of its wheels halted, and an old man, his beard and hair completely white, stepped down beside the towering walls of Daliang. Refusing his servants' support, he leaned on a pigeon-staff and walked, trembling, toward the steps leading up the wall, the jade ornaments at his silk sash clinking and chiming.

Anyone who could wear jade and silk was naturally a noble lord or high minister, but the top of the wall was a critical defensive position — not just anyone could go up.

The colonel in charge of this section of the wall immediately stepped forward to block him, but after the old man's servant produced a bronze tally, his expression changed, and he bowed to the old man with the utmost reverence and awe.

"I had no idea it was Lord Tang who had arrived!"

Hearing the name "Lord Tang," the Wei soldiers below the wall all rose to their feet and saluted the old man with solemn bows.

In Daliang, there was only one Lord Tang: the ninety-year-old Tang Ju!

He held no official post, bore no noble title, yet from the King of Wei above to the humblest commoner and peddler below, no one dared not revere Tang Ju.

Because this old man was the last living legend of Wei.

Tang Ju had enjoyed great longevity. He was born ninety years ago, in the era of King Xiang of Wei. In his youth, he accomplished little, and even at forty, he was still just a minor envoy, utterly unknown.

It was not until the eleventh year of King Anxi of Wei (266 BC), when Qi and Chu attacked Wei, that the helpless King Anxi dispatched Tang Ju to Qin to plead for aid. Relying on his silver tongue, Tang Ju persuaded King Zhaoxiang of Qin to swiftly dispatch troops, who marched day and night to Wei. The people of Wei all said: "When Qi and Chu heard of it, they withdrew their armies. That the House of Wei was preserved whole was entirely due to Tang Ju's persuasion."

After this meritorious deed, Tang Ju, who should have been promoted, resigned from office out of disgust at King Anxi of Wei's boundless debauchery and his doting on Lord Longyang, and instead became a retainer of Lord Xinling.

In the twentieth year of King Anxi (257 BC), Lord Xinling stole the tally to save Zhao. After his success, he grew smug and arrogant, priding himself on his achievement. It was Tang Ju who admonished him: "When others show virtue toward us, we must not forget it; when we show virtue toward others, we must not remember it." Only then did the prince, Wuji, awaken with a start, treating the King of Zhao and Lord Pingyuan with courtesy. Thus was he revered by the feudal lords and became the leader of the Vertical Alliance.

The period when Tang Ju assisted Lord Xinling was once the last hope of Wei, and of the six eastern states. Lord Xinling led the armies of five states to crush the Qin forces beyond the Yellow River, driving Meng Ao back to Hangu Pass, so that the men of Qin dared not venture east. At that time, Lord Xinling's might shook the world, and his household teemed with talented retainers.

Regrettably, Lord Xinling's life was not long. After he died, depressed and joyless from the King of Wei's suspicion, Tang Ju, nearing seventy, still carried on Lord Xinling's legacy, traveling tirelessly among the six states.

In the second year of King Jingmin of Wei (241 BC), Tang Ju went to Chu and persuaded Lord Chunshen, telling him that "as the prime minister of Chu, a state of ten thousand chariots, you should confront the calamity threatening the Central States and become the leader of all under Heaven." Thus, with King Kaolie of Chu as the Vertical Alliance chief, he facilitated a new — and the final — allied attack on Qin.

Regrettably, Tang Ju had still overestimated the six states. Six scattered chess pieces, each harboring its own designs, could ultimately not defeat Qin, the supreme player who already held a third of the world. After Pang Nuan's attack on Qin failed, the six states' slide toward defeat and destruction was irreversible.

But this was no fault of Tang Ju's. Aside from the fabricated "Tang Ju Fulfills His Mission," which was false and never happened, Tang Ju never once disgraced his mission on any diplomatic journey. It was simply that the era of Su Qin and Zhang Yi was over. The overwhelming momentum Qin had built over six generations could no longer be altered by the silver tongues of wandering persuaders and envoys.

Now, Tang Ju was ninety. He could no longer leave Daliang, yet the years had not left too many marks upon him. Though advanced in age, his complexion was still good. Smiling, he waved a hand, bidding everyone rise.

"You gentlemen have toiled hard defending the city. No need for excessive courtesy."

Then Tang Ju said to the colonel, "Young man, would you escort this old man up to the top of the wall for a look?"

The colonel hesitated, cupping his hands in salute. "Lord Tang, the wind is strong atop the wall, and the Qin army looses arrows at it from time to time. If by any chance..."

If by any chance anything happened to Lord Tang, wouldn't he be cursed to death by the entire city?

But Tang Ju burst out laughing. "For over a hundred years, the Qin army has besieged Daliang no fewer than ten times. Because I have lived so long, I have had the fortune to witness the greater part of them. Windblown sand and flying arrows and stones — I have long grown accustomed to such sights. Yet in all those dozen-plus attacks on Daliang, not once did Qin succeed. Every single time, the soldiers and people of Wei united as one and defended the city!"

These words instantly lifted their sunken morale! The Wei soldiers even raised their weapons and let out a long-absent cheer!

Seeing that everyone's spirit had returned, Tang Ju nodded. "Now lead me up the wall. This old man merely wishes to see with his own eyes the scale of the Qin army besieging us this time. How does it compare to Bai Qi's three incursions into the Liang Park?"

Though he had received no military order, the colonel dared not disobey Tang Ju's command. He had several soldiers take up shields to escort Tang Ju, helping him step by step up to the top of Daliang's wall.

The walls of Daliang stood ten zhang high. The wind was indeed fierce, whipping Tang Ju's white beard and hair into disarray.

Squinting into the distance, he gazed long toward the west, north, and east. A bitter smile crept onto his lips. "Is this still the outskirts of Daliang? In just half a month, it has become utterly unrecognizable."

To the northwest of Daliang had once been the royal park enclosed during King Anxi's reign: the Liang Park. Its architectural style was exquisitely refined. The park was planted with dense flowers and trees, stocked with milu deer, with cranes roosting beneath the pines, and boats could be rowed across its ponds.

Now, the Liang Park was completely transformed. The trees had all been chopped down by the Qin men. The flower gardens, once filled with rare plants, were now nothing but an ugly clearing covered in stumps. The river deer the King of Wei once hunted had likely long since become delicacies in the Qin army's mess.

As far as the eye could see, everything was filled with Qin army tents and black-headed Qin soldiers. Siege equipment was concentrated to the west, intermittently hurling stones and shooting flaming arrows at the top of Daliang's wall, giving the city no peace.

There was also the Honggou Canal, which skirted the city to the northeast. Ever since King Hui of Wei ordered Bai Gui to excavate this waterway, it had become the great artery of the Central Plains, linking the regions of Liang, Song, Chen, and Cai. Every day, countless boats departed from Daliang, carrying Wei's mulberry silk, hemp, and cloth southward, and returning laden with Chu's fish, salt, leather, rhinoceros horn, and cassia spices, which fetched high prices in the markets of Daliang.

But now, merchant vessels and carts on the Honggou Canal had vanished without a trace. Only boats laden with Qin army provisions and arms remained. Thousands of bare-chested trackers hauled the wooden boats, and even the work chants they shouted were in the unfamiliar accents of the Guanzhong region.

What worried Tang Ju most, however, was the north. There, a great turbid yellow river sprawled across the land, flowing slowly eastward.

The river was wild and untamed. In the Warring States era, when Zhao, Wei, and Qi were mutual enemies, each using the river as a weapon against its neighbor, natural disasters compounded by human malice had made it flood ever more frequently. Fortunately, Wei had built earthen embankments stretching dozens of li along the river, which prevented the floodwaters from crashing into the low-lying Liang region. Over the decades, between the city and the river, countless households had gradually gathered, boundless fertile farmland had been opened up, and hamlet after hamlet had been established.

But now, those fine fields, which should have been busy with spring plowing and planted with tender shoots of millet and wheat, lay empty and desolate, without even a sparrow. The common folk had all been driven away. Instead, countless black-headed Qin conscripts, carrying iron spades and hoes, were driven by the whips of Qin overseers. Formed into long lines, they marched endlessly along the field paths toward the north of Daliang.

Seeing this, Tang Ju's hand, gripping the battlements, trembled slightly. He knew very well where those Qin men were going and what they intended to do!

They were heading to Xingyang!

Decades ago, in Tang Ju's youth — the era when Zhang Yi, Gongsun Yan, and Su Qin wove their Vertical and Horizontal Alliances, full of deceit and intrigue — Qin, to force Wei into the Horizontal Alliance, had sent Zhang Yi to Daliang, where he uttered this threat:

"Breach the dike at Xingyang, and Wei loses Daliang; breach the dike at Baima, and Wei loses Waihuang and Jiyang; breach the dike at Suxu, and Wei loses Xu and Dunqiu. Attack by land, and you strike Henei; attack by water, and you annihilate Daliang!"

But in over a dozen attacks on Wei and sieges of Daliang, the Qin army had always been an isolated force thrusting deep, unable to fully occupy Wei territory, and so never had the chance to make good on this threat.

Until today. Was Wei's nightmare finally about to arrive?

In Tang Ju's view, this was all the bitter fruit of the past twenty years, as Wei bribed Qin with its land, allowing strategic passes and vital roads to be steadily devoured. Only thus could the Qin army act so recklessly, even beginning to plan the drowning of Daliang.

It seemed that this time, unlike those dozen or so previous skirmishes, the King of Qin was utterly determined to capture Daliang and annihilate Wei!

"O Heaven..."

Even someone as steady and seasoned as Tang Ju could not remain calm after foreseeing this nation's tragic future.

He raised his head to gaze at the cloudless azure sky and sighed again in a low voice: "If only Lord Xinling were still here — if only Lord Xinling were still here, how could Wei have fallen to such a state?!"

Tang Ju's gaze was fixed too high and too far, so he failed to notice that below this very section of the wall, just over two hundred paces away, a minor Qin clerk with his hair bunched to the right and dark skin was brazenly relieving himself into the moat.

After pissing into Daliang's moat, Heifu tied the hemp cord at his waist and looked up to see a white-haired old man on the wall of Daliang, sighing and lamenting. He felt a flash of surprise.

"Has Daliang already run out of food and men, so desperate that they're sending old geezers up to guard the walls? It's only been half a month, and there hasn't even been a single fierce assault. Surely not."

His musings done, Heifu did not linger. He turned and headed back along the path toward the camp.

To guard against desperate sallies from the enemy within the city, the sprawling encampment was enclosed with wooden stakes, and tall watchtowers had been erected, manned by Qin soldiers armed with bows and arrows.

Upon entering the camp, all Heifu saw were low, crude shelters, though they at least appeared orderly rather than chaotic. He had always felt that Qin officials, molded by the Qin Legal Code, all had a touch of obsessive compulsion, a love for uniformity and neatness. Naturally, when designing the camp, they had made sure the rows of shelters looked tidy.

Occasionally, halberd-wielding soldiers passed by outside the camp gate as they crossed through the encampment, but far more numerous were the convict laborers with characters tattooed on their faces, herded together and driven off to work sites everywhere under the overseers' cracking whips.

There were also garrison conscripts in coarse hemp clothes, their hair matted and faces grimy. Their accents varied — they came from different commanderies and counties. Heifu occasionally spotted a familiar face and would nod or wave a greeting their way.

As he walked through the camp thick with every kind of smell, Heifu grumbled inwardly, "I never imagined the Daliang campaign would look like this."

It turned out that after setting out from Fangcheng County at the start of the first month, under the company commanders' urging, Heifu and the others — along with thirty thousand garrison conscripts and convict laborers from Hanzhong, Nan Commandery, and Nanyang — had taken only ten days to reach the walls of Daliang.

Once here, Heifu discovered that Daliang was already surrounded by Qin troops from Chenying. And besides the fifty thousand armored spearmen of the combat forces, more conscripted garrison laborers were still streaming in endlessly.

In addition to the thirty thousand from Hanzhong, Nan Commandery, and Nanyang, garrison conscripts and convict laborers from Guanzhong, Sanchuan, Hedong, Shangdang, and Henei were also converging on Daliang. Once assembled, their numbers would likely exceed a hundred thousand.

This was a war where auxiliary troops far outnumbered the regular soldiers.

What let Heifu breathe a sigh of relief was that General Wang Ben did not require the hundred thousand convict laborers and garrison conscripts to carry out the deadly, perilous tasks — like storming the walls or filling in moats — that came with appalling casualty rates. Instead, they were made to serve as boat-trackers and grain-hauling porters. Apart from the bitter toil and exhaustion, it was quite safe.

After the second month began, half the garrison conscripts and convict laborers were further ordered to set out for Xingyang, several dozen li to the northwest. Those who remained were to dig yet another deep trench between the Honggou Canal and Daliang, running straight to the city walls!

So the outskirts of Daliang did not look like a battlefield for storming a city and destroying a kingdom, but rather like a massive construction site for a waterworks project.

This kind of time-wearing manual labor sorely tested a man's patience, and soon someone could no longer sit still.

Approaching the small lean-to where the garrison conscripts from Anlu County were quartered, still ten paces away, Heifu heard Dongmen Bao's voice erupting in fury...

"I can't take it anymore! What kind of siege is this supposed to be? Does that 'Young General Wang' even know how to fight wars!?"

(Asking for monthly tickets)

PS: The author's note below is not counted toward the billable word count.

Tang Ju appears four times in the Strategies of the Warring States. First appearance: In the forty-first year of King Zhao of Qin (266 BC), Qi and Chu attacked Wei. King Anxi of Wei dispatched Tang Ju to Qin to request aid. — Strategies of the Warring States, Wei Strategies IV.

Second appearance: In the fiftieth year of King Zhao of Qin (257 BC), Lord Xinling of Wei stole the tally to save Zhao and, swollen with pride over his achievement, grew arrogant. Tang Ju admonished him: "When others have shown kindness to me, I must not forget it; when I have shown kindness to others, I must not fail to forget it." — Strategies of the Warring States, Wei Strategies IV.

Third appearance: In the sixth year of the First Emperor of Qin (241 BC), Tang Ju persuaded Lord Chunshen of Chu to form a vertical alliance, "matching the ten-thousand-chariot state of Chu, warding off the calamity from the Central States," and "becoming the owl among all under Heaven." — Strategies of the Warring States, Chu Strategies III.

Fourth appearance: In the twenty-second year of the First Emperor of Qin (225 BC), he was sent by the Lord of Anling as an envoy to Qin — this is the account "Tang Ju Does Not Disgrace His Mission." — Strategies of the Warring States, Wei Strategies IV.

But the fourth appearance is highly disputed. The characters, time, place, and logic all diverge too greatly from historical records, and it can basically be deemed a literary creation. I believe this was an article fabricated by Wei strategists after Wei's fall at the end of the Warring States period, written out of grief and indignation, with Tang Ju as the protagonist.

(End of chapter)