On the nineteenth of December, in the eleventh year of Wu Jianshuo, the Battle of Yushui Creek — a battle that later generations would regard as a turning point for the entire Jin state — had, in its main phase, already concluded before the day was over.
The fighting that followed in its wake naturally did not stop there.
At its core, the Battle of Yushui Creek was the result of Qu Zhengyan launching, for the first time, an open frontal assault, taking advantage of a psychological blind spot: the Jurchens had not yet fully accepted that the Huaxia Army’s troop quality now surpassed their own. A little over fourteen thousand Huaxia Army soldiers broke a coalition force of nearly fifty thousand Jin, Liao, Xi, Bohai, and puppet troops head-on, and while the enemy was still reeling, expanded their gains.
The core element underpinning this battle was the simple fact that the Huaxia Army was now capable of crushing the Jurchens’ elite main force in a direct, frontal confrontation. Given this core fact, the many tactical schemes and stratagems woven through the details of the battle became, by comparison, secondary matters.
Among these, the bloody stand at Victory Gorge and the killing of Elili at Eagle Beak Cliff were, in the larger scheme of things, no more than embellishments upon the main achievement. Fundamentally, once it had become reality that the Huaxia Army’s quality surpassed that of the Jurchens, this outcome was bound to reveal itself sooner or later, on some battlefield, or through the accumulation of many victories. What men like Qu Zhengyan had chosen to do was to seize this initiative and lay their strongest card on the table, pressing the advantage all the way through to take Yushui Creek in one decisive stroke.
The war had already dragged on for two months, and by this point the Jurchens could no longer retreat. At precisely this moment, it was declared to everyone: the Huaxia Army’s confidence in holding the southwest did not rest on the Jurchens having marched a long distance to fight, nor on the advantage of defending familiar terrain, nor did it need to rely on dragging the enemy down over a long campaign while exploiting internal Jurchen troubles.
The Huaxia Army’s confidence in facing the Jurchens rested on this: even in a direct, frontal fight, you are still no match for us.
“Thinking about it this way, if I were Nian Han, I’d be in agony right about now.”
In the early hours of the twentieth of December, while a large crowd at the Zizhou command post waited for news from Yushui Creek, at the front lines, the two division commanders Qu Zhengyan and Yu Zhongdao sat wrapped in blankets by a fire in a small hut, waiting for dawn. That night, the mountains outside remained in complete disarray.
The day’s fighting had brought a decisive, undisputed victory. More than thirty thousand men had been killed or captured in the surrounding mountains, the majority of the dead being Jurchens, Khitans, Xi people, Bohai people, and Liaodong natives.
In this campaign, to avoid the risk that poor performance by the Han puppet troops might reflect badly on himself, Zonghan had limited the Han troops brought into the Jianmen Pass to no more than two hundred thousand. The force attacking Yushui Creek numbered nearly fifty thousand, of which roughly twenty thousand or so were puppet troops, while the backbone of the force was still made up of Jurchens, Khitans, Xi people, Bohai people, and Liaodong natives.
That these men had been brought south under Jurchen command was itself a sign that their combat ability was not weak. Considering that the Jin state had now existed for nearly twenty years, and had enjoyed an unbroken run of good fortune, the sense of belonging among its various constituent peoples remained fairly strong. The Xi and Bohai peoples had long been on good terms with the Jurchens; even the Khitans, whose state had once been destroyed, had since seen a number of their elder statesmen returned to positions of trust; and the Han people of Liaodong did not regard the southerners as kin at all.
Twenty years on, most of the Jurchens had found a comfortable place for themselves, while the other peoples burned with an even more fervent ambition to rise — much as a man without a good father must work that much harder. This southern campaign was seen by many as a last chance to earn merit, and the non-Jurchen forces often displayed an even stronger desire for accomplishment and a fiercer will to fight than the Jurchens themselves.
Among the fifty thousand men of the Jurchen army, aside from the Han puppet troops who were themselves surrendered soldiers, many had never even mentally prepared themselves for the possibility of being routed or forced into mass surrender on the battlefield. As a result, once things turned against them, a good number still fought to the death, driving up the Huaxia Army’s casualties in the assault.
By the time this day had fully passed, the outer camp of the Jurchen force at Yushui Creek had been destroyed. The inner camp still held together, some five thousand men centered on a Jurchen core, putting up stubborn resistance behind dense artillery fire, while several thousand deserters were scattered through the surrounding mountains. At this point, weighing the difficulty of a total annihilation, Qu Zhengyan kept a level head and pulled his forces back.
In truth, although the road between Yushui Creek and Yellowhead Cliff had still not been fully cleared, two generals of the same rank as Elili — Yuyu and Dalai — had already made their way over the mountains with several hundred men and reached Yushui Creek.
Having stormed an enemy force of fifty thousand with only fourteen thousand men, and having captured over twenty thousand more that day, the Huaxia Army was itself utterly exhausted, pushed almost to its limit. At around three in the morning, just past the hour of Chou, Dalai led over six hundred men in a difficult detour around the Yushui Creek camp, attempting a surprise attack on the Huaxia Army’s position. His hope was to throw the already exhausted Huaxia Army into a panic, or at the very least to trigger a mutiny among the more than twenty thousand prisoners who had not yet been fully escorted to the rear.
What he had not anticipated was that Qu Zhengyan’s monitoring network at the front remained fully operational. To guard against a Jurchen counterattack that night, Qu Zhengyan and Yu Zhongdao had stayed awake through the entire night, personally calling roll to make sure small patrol units kept up their strict watch along the front.
Scouts keeping watch in the darkness spotted Dalai’s force sneaking forward, and word was quickly relayed back. The regimental commander responsible for the area quietly gathered several cannons, and as the enemy advanced, launched a sudden volley of artillery fire without warning.
Because it happened at night, the actual damage caused by the bombardment was hard to gauge, but the enormous noise it created was enough to make Dalai’s men abandon their plan for a surprise attack and scurry back to their own camp in fright.
This was the small episode that occurred in the early hours of the twentieth. By the time dawn broke, reinforcements from Zizhou had already begun arriving at Yushui Creek one after another. What remained now was to clear out the scattered routed troops in the mountains and press forward to expand the gains — and the fundamental foundation of victory at Yushui Creek had, at last, been fully secured.
Over the following days, the wounded and the prisoners were steadily moved to the rear. Every day, the mountain road between Yushui Creek and Zizhou was packed with people coming and going. The wounded and prisoners moved toward Zizhou, while propaganda teams, logistics and supply units, and newly trained recruits steadily reinforced the front. By this time, the Lesser New Year had arrived, and the rear sent pigs and chickens forward to reward the troops; entertainment troupes also came up to the front. The achievements and significance of the Battle of Yushui Creek were, by now, being amplified by the Huaxia Army’s propaganda departments. As word spread to the rear and throughout the ranks, the entire southwest stirred with excitement over the outcome of this battle.
At Huangming County, Balishu’s offensive had temporarily halted. Across the dozens of miles of mountains stretching from Jiange to the front, the Jurchen forces led by Zonghan found themselves plunged into a true, bitter winter.
Having reached the final stretch of their lives, these Jurchen heroes who had swept across the world found themselves caught in an awkward bind — riding a tiger they could neither dismount nor control, unable to advance or retreat.
They would, of course, come to a decision.
And the Huaxia Army was waiting for that decision to fall.
On the afternoon of the twenty-sixth of December, after receiving initial treatment, Mao Yishan was called to the rear as a representative hero. By this time, the regiment’s casualty reports and follow-up arrangements had already been completed. He set off with two deputies, a red flower pinned to his chest, accompanied by several members of the propaganda department.
There was no fixed schedule for when he had to return. On the way, with so many soldiers about, Mao Yishan felt self-conscious wearing the red flower and took it off once he was out of the mountain pass at Yushui Creek. Passing by the main field hospital, he sent the propaganda staff on ahead and went in himself with his deputies to visit his badly wounded comrades. Toward evening, he stopped by a nearby prisoner camp to visit Hou Wu and his son, Hou Yuanyong.
Having personally killed Elili with his own hands, Mao Yishan was a great hero who had earned real merit, and when he was arranged to take temporary leave from the front, Division Commander Yu Zhongdao had casually handed him a bottle of liquor as a send-off. That evening, Mao Yishan brought it out to share with Hou Wu and Hou Yuanyong. Hou Wu, who managed the prisoner camp, waved it off, so it was Hou Yuanyong who kept him company and finished the bottle with him. After the meal, in high spirits, Mao Yishan went to tour the prisoner camp, heading straight for the section holding the captured Jurchen elite soldiers.
At that moment the camp was just finishing a rough evening meal, and when Mao Yishan arrived, a large number of prisoners were out getting some air after eating, walking a loop around a square dirt yard cordoned off with rope. Mao Yishan climbed up onto a wooden platform to the side. “Do any of these guys understand Chinese?”
“A few of them know a bit.”
“Oh, Brother Wu, get someone to translate for me.” Mao Yishan, in high spirits, put his hands on his hips. “Hey! You Jurchen bastards! Look at me! I’m the one who killed your boss, Eli-Eli!”
Hou Wu didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. “Yishan, you haven’t even had that much to drink.”
“What ‘ten thousand strong and unbeatable’ — cowards!” Mao Yishan laughed and tugged at Hou Wu’s sleeve. “Brother Wu, translate for me.”
Down below, the Jurchen prisoners gradually turned to look this way. A few who understood his words began to look displeased, and Hou Wu’s expression turned grim as he waved a hand around; the soldiers stationed around the perimeter raised their crossbows.
“What, not convinced! If you’ve got the guts, come up here and fight me one on one! My name is Mao Yishan — sounds a lot better than your boss’s ugly name, Eli-Eli!”
Hou Wu kept his eyes on the crowd’s movements, while beside him Hou Yuanyong was already covering his face, secretly laughing. Mao Yishan had been rather introverted in his younger years; later, after starting a family and becoming an officer, he’d become known for his steady, honest temperament, and rarely acted this flamboyant. He shouted a few more times, and, annoyed that the prisoners didn’t understand, asked his deputy for the big red flower and pinned it back on his chest, waving his arms about. “Me! Chop! Eli-Eli!”
“Ha ha ha! Aren’t you thrilled!”
After carrying on like this for a while, Hou Wu finally pulled Mao Yishan away. Once the group had gathered back around the fire in a room, Mao Yishan’s mood turned somber, and he began talking about the battle at Eagle Beak Cliff. “After the fighting, when we counted heads, three hundred and thirty-two of the men around me were dead. They say a jar breaks near the well, and a general dies in battle — I know that — but this time I’ll still have to go deliver the news to their families myself.”
Having fought for over a decade, he had watched the people around him die again and again, wave after wave, but no matter how many times it happened, it always felt like a soft blade carving words into his heart. It was a long, piercing pain that could not even be released through any kind of outburst. Mao Yishan tossed a stick of firewood into the flames, his expression closed off, only a faint reddish moisture showing at the corners of his eyes.
Hou Wu patted him on the shoulder. Beside them, Hou Yuanyong laughed. “Uncle Mao, let’s not talk about that. Let’s talk about you killing Elili instead — guess who’s going to be most unable to sit still when they hear about it?”
Mao Yishan and Hou Wu looked at the young man, then exchanged a glance with each other, and both broke into laughter at the same moment.