As we read Chinese history we frequently encounter
the name of one city - Xiangyang. Although it is now a fairly provincial city in northern Hubei
Province some 300 kilometers northwest of the provincial capital at Wuhan, there was a period of
11 centuries, from around the years 200 to 1300, when Xiangyang was one of the most strategically
important cities in China. And so in this video, let us explore the geography and history
of Xiangyang, the factors that allowed it to become one of the
most prominent cities in
China, and the causes of its eventual decline. Xiangyang is located on the south bank of the
Han River, the longest tributary of the Yangtze River. Upstream of Xiangyang, the Han River flows
through mostly mountainous terrains between the Qin Mountains to its north and the Daba Mountains
to its south, both of which form significant barriers to north-south travel. To the east
and south of Xiangyang are many more mountains, especially the Dabie Mountains, that also di
srupt
travel between north and south. The Han River, as it flows past the numerous mountains near
Xiangyang, makes a sharp bend southward and flows into the Yangtze River at the site of the
modern-day city of Wuhan. This southward bend of the Han River at Xiangyang creates one
of the most easily accessible north-south routes through the surrounding mountains.
Xiangyang is also located on the southern tip of a valley - the Nanyang Basin, named after the city
of Nanyang near the center of the
valley. A number of rivers form in the Qin Mountains to the north,
flow southward through the Nanyang Basin, and coalesce with one another before flowing into the
Han River north of Xiangyang. Ancient travelers could travel northward from Xiangyang along these
rivers and then through fairly accessible mountain routes to reach the densely populated Central
Plains, including the city of Luoyang, one of the main traditional ancient Chinese capitals.
Along the Han River upstream of Xiangyang is
the Dan River, the longest tributary of the
Han River. Ancient roads passed near the Dan River and through the strategic Wu Pass to connect
Xiangyang to the Wei River Valley around Chang’an, the other great ancient Chinese capital city
alongside Luoyang. And even further up the Han River, albeit through difficult mountain
terrain, is the Hanzhong Basin, named after its main city of Hanzhong, literally the “Middle of
the Han”. Hanzhong is a strategically important city in its own right, sin
ce it is situated
along the main north-south route connecting the Wei River Valley to the Sichuan Basin.
All of this puts Xiangyang at the center of a wide transportation network that spanned
much of China in ancient and medieval times. In addition to its central location, Xiangyang was
also well protected by the sharp bend of the Han River to its north and east and the heights of
Mount Xian to its west and south. On the north bank of the Han River facing Xiangyang is the city
of Fancheng.
Fanchang was traditionally smaller and far less defensible than Xiangyang, although
the defenses of the two cities still complemented one another. The region around Xiangyang
also has mild weather and plenty of rich, well-irrigated farmland that could
easily keep local armies well-fed. But despite the strategic importance of
Xiangyang, we can also easily see on the map that taking the north-south route through
Xiangyang requires making a big westward bend around a number of mountains, addin
g significantly
to the travel time. A much more direct route would be to travel directly southward along
the western edge of the Central Plains, cross the upper stretches of the Huai River before
it gets too wide, traverse the gap between the Dabie Mountains and the Tongbai Mountains through
one of three mountain passes, and then from there southward to the site of modern-day Wuhan at
the confluence of the Han River and the Yangtze River. This is the main transportation corridor
in use tod
ay, such as by the key railroad line from Beijing southward to Guangzhou that passes
through Wuhan, and is a key reason why Wuhan is now one of the largest cities in China,
whereas Xiangyang is just a regional city. But for most of Chinese history, this direct route
was far less useful than the more circuitous route through Xiangyang, for a number of reasons. The
first reason was because of the availability of cheap river navigation in the Nanyang
Basin and along the bend of the Han River,
whereas the direct route benefits much more from
modern technologies such as trains and cars. The second reason was because much of the region
around modern-day Wuhan was once a gigantic wetland named the Yunmeng Marsh and barely
inhabitable. And finally, for much of early and medieval Chinese history the political center of
China was deep inland around Chang’an and Luoyang, and it was only over the past 1,000 years that
these two cities declined into mostly political irrelevance. Xiangyang
benefited greatly
from its proximity to Chang’an and Luoyang. For a city as important as Xiangyang, how
it got its name surprisingly remains a mystery. According to traditional Chinese naming
conventions, “yang”, meaning “sunny” in English, corresponds to the north side of a river and not
the south side. This is because rivers in China typically flow from west to east to the sea, often
through mountains flanking them on either side. As a result, a city located north of a river or south
of
a mountain is on the sunny, or “yang” side, whereas a city located south of a river or north
of a mountain is on the shady, or “yin” side. Xiangyang is very obviously located on the shady
side of both the Han River and Mount Xian and not on the sunny side. Ancient writers have put forth
various explanations as to how Xiangyang got its name: perhaps it was located to the south of
a mountain whose ancient name was Mount Xiang, even if no much mountain can be found, or perhaps
there used to b
e a tiny river in the area named the Xiang River that flowed south of the city.
There is also the geological possibility that the Han River used to flow south of Xiangyang,
and only more recently changed its course to make the big loop around the north side of the city.
But all of this is to say - nobody really knows. Around 1,000 BC, the Zhou Dynasty, based out
of the Wei River Valley in the northwest, had just conquered the much larger Shang Dynasty
to its east. The Zhou Dynasty establish
ed a number of feudal states to colonize and
absorb its newly conquered territories, and also continued the Shang Dynasty policy of
expanding southward into the Nanyang Basin and, from there, towards the Yangtze River. Much of the
mid-Yangtze region was still sparsely inhabited wilderness with abundant wildlife such as tigers,
elephants, rhinos, and buffalos, all of which have long since disappeared. China was at the height
of the Bronze Age at the time, although both the copper and tin nee
ded to make bronze were far
more abundant in the south than they were further north. Instead of taking the marshy route directly
southward along the Han River, the Shang and Zhou Dynasties preferred to expand southeastward along
a drier route situated between the Dahong and Tongbai Mountains toward the Yangtze River. To
protect this route, the Zhou Dynasty established a number of feudal states in the region, with the
state of Sui, also known as Zeng, being one of the most prominent. Another
state, Deng, was based
out of a site not far to the north of Xiangyang. As the centuries passed, a previously
minor state in the region named Chu began to grow more prominent. Although Chu was
nominally a vassal of Zhou, its people spoke a language unintelligible from Old Chinese and had
vastly different customs than the Zhou people, and were often considered to be barbarians by
those living further north. The capital of Chu had earlier been in the Nanyang Basin, but eventually
Chu moved
its capital southward to Ying, next to the Yangtze River near modern-day Jingzhou.
By the Spring and Autumn Period from approximately 770 to the mid 400s BC, the Zhou court
had lost authority over its vassals, which began to fight against one another for
hegemony. Chu aggressively expanded against its neighboring states, either outright annexing them
or forcing them into vassalage, until it dominated the Nanyang Basin and began to march its armies
northward to intervene in the Central Plains
. Sui, aka Zeng, was one of many states subjugated
by Chu. Its rulers went on to become vassals of Chu, and the Sui state disappeared from recorded
history. In 1978, archaeologists excavated the tomb of a Zeng ruler from the 400s BC, centuries
after the subjugation of Zeng by Chu. The tomb remained surprisingly intact, and contained, among
other things, a set of large bronze bells used as musical instruments, widely considered to be one
of the greatest Chinese archaeological finds. By the t
ime of the Warring States Period, which
followed the Spring and Autumn Period and lasted until 221 BC, China was reduced to just a small
number of major states, with Chu growing to become a supermassive state that encompassed
almost all of the mid to lower Yangtze River basin. Grant it, much of Chu was still sparsely
populated wilderness, and its geopolitical role was not unlike that played by the Russian Empire
in the 19th Century. The core territory of Chu remained the corridor along the
Han River to the
west of Yunmeng Marsh that stretched northward to encompass the Nanyang Basin. The site of Xiangyang
is located in the center of this region, although the city was still fairly insignificant and
hardly mentioned at all in ancient texts. Instead, an ancient city named Yan was situated
not too far to the south of the site of Xiangyang and served as a secondary Chu capital.
By around 300 BC, tensions had grown between Chu and the state of Qin to its northwest. Qin
had a much b
etter organized, centralized bureaucracy and military than Chu, and in 279
- 278 BC, a large invading Qin army under the general Bai Qi marched down the valley of the Han
River. The defending Chu army set up base at Yan, only for Bai Qi to divert the waters of a nearby
river, flooding the defenders. Bai Qi subsequently captured the Chu capital at Ying and burned it
to the ground. Afterwards, Chu was forced to relocate and reestablish itself in its eastern
territories, whereas Qin annexed th
e basin of the Han River and went on to establish two
new commanderies in the region divided by the Han River. The commandery to the north of the
Han River, with its seat at the city of Wan, was named Nanyang Commandery. “Nan” means “south”,
referring to the fact that it was located to the south of the Zhou capital at Luoyi, and “yang”
like we said earlier refers to the southern, sunny side of a mountain. Nanyang remains the
name of the city to this day. The other, more distant commandery t
o the south of the Han River
was simply named “Nan Commandery, or the Southern Commandery, with its seat at Jiangling, built
on top of the ruins of the former Chu capital. Qin went on to conquer the rest of China
to establish the short-lived Qin Dynasty, which then gave way to 400 years of mostly
peaceful rule under the Han Dynasty. The Han Dynasty collapsed in a series of civil wars around
200 AD that were dramatized in The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and it was during this time
that X
iangyang finally made the big jump out of obscurity when the warlord Liu Biao chose
Xiangyang as his base. Although Liu Biao was nominally the governor of all of Jing Province,
which encompassed the entire mid-Yangtze basin, the area under his direct control was mostly
limited to the Southern Commandery around Jiangling, and he faced especially heavy pressure
from rivals to the north in Nanyang Commandery. Establishing his base at Xiangyang allowed Liu
Biao to control the chokepoint that pr
evented enemies from the north from attacking further
south, all while giving him a forward base to threaten the north should opportunities arise.
But ultimately, what allowed Xiangyang to rapidly rise from obscurity to become one of the most
important cities in China around 200 AD was not just the strategic decision of a single warlord,
but rather the dramatic population growth that had taken place across southern China during the
Han Dynasty. By the end of the Han Dynasty, the population o
f southern China, defined as south of
the line of the Qin Mountains and the Huai River, had rapidly grown to about 40% of the total
Chinese population. Nanyang Commandery was especially prosperous as one of the wealthiest,
most populated commanderies in the empire. For the first time in Chinese history, a faction based out
of southern China had the population and economic foundation to resist a coordinated attack from the
north. As such, it was only natural for Xiangyang, located at a key c
hoke point between north
and south, to finally grow important. The central location of Xiangyang and Jing
Province meant that Liu Biao faced threats from multiple directions, including
the downriver Yangtze River Delta, which was beginning to come under the control
of the warlord Sun Quan. The forward base of Liu Biao against Sun Quan was Jiangxia
Commandery, where modern-day Wuhan is located. Liu Biao’s ambitions ultimately went nowhere, and
soon after he died of illness in 208, the warlo
rd Cao Cao, fresh from conquering most of northern
China, marched southward against Jing Province. Liu Biao’s son and successor surrendered to Cao
Cao, allowing Cao Cao to easily occupy Xiangyang. One of Liu Biao’s subordinates, Liu
Bei, who like Liu Biao was also a member of the Han Dynasty imperial family,
although a much more insignificant member, refused to surrender. Liu Bei and Sun Quan
set aside their old differences to join forces against Cao Cao. in the winter of 208 -
209, Cao Ca
o led a large fleet down the Yangtze River against the outnumbered allied armies of
Liu Bei and Sun Quan, only to suffer a surprise defeat at the Battle of the Red Cliffs. After
the battle, Cao Cao was forced to return north and soon became bogged down fighting enemies along
other fronts. With Cao Cao preoccupied elsewhere, Sun Quan and Liu Bei gobbled up much of Jing
Province for themselves. Liu Bei also rapidly conquered Yi Province in southwestern China,
leading to the tripartite divisio
n of China that would become the Three Kingdoms. But despite all
of these changes, Cao Cao held on to Xiangyang. During these final few years of the Eastern
Han Dynasty, the geopolitical situation in Jing Province became highly contentious. Each one
of the three major factions controlled one of the key cities in Jing Province: Cao Cao controlled
Xiangyang, with a new commandery named Xiangyang Commandery established around the city. Sun Quan
controlled Jiangxia Commandery. Liu Bei controlle
d the Southern Commandery centered around Jiangling,
often simply referred to as Jingzhou, even if technically for this time period using “Jingzhou”
to describe Jiangling is somewhat anachronistic. A geographer from the 1600s concisely summarized
the geostrategic relationships of these three mid-Yangtze cities with one another. To
paraphrase, Xiangyang is the most important of the three in regards to China as a whole, Wuchang
is the most important of the three in regards to the southeast, t
hat is, the Yangtze River Delta,
and Jingzhou, aka the Southern Commandery or Jiangling, is the most important of the three
in regards to the immediate mid-Yangtze region. To clarify what he means: Jiangling is located
roughly midway between Xiangyang and Wuchang, and for much of Chinese history its
surrounding countryside was relatively wealthy and densely populated compared
to that of the other two cities. As such, a faction based out of Jiangling, such as Liu Bei,
could easily threaten
both Xiangyang and Wuchang. In the case of Wuchang, it was one of the
last easily defensible positions along the Yangtze River against attacks from upriver. An
upriver faction that controlled Wuchang could take advantage of the Yangtze River water
current to sail its ships directly against the Yangtze River Delta. For this reason,
Wuchang was absolutely vital to the survival of Sun Quan, and one of his main geostrategic
prerogatives was to keep it safe at all costs. But even Wuchang, despit
e its central location
near the confluence of the Yangtze and Han Rivers, is traditionally mostly relevant for communication
within the south up and down the Yangtze River. For communication between north and south
Xiangyang was much more useful than Wuchang. Ultimately, Wuchang was always going to
be susceptible to attacks from a fleet sailing downriver with the water current to its
advantage, regardless of if the fleet originated from Jiangling or Xiangyang. An attacking
force from Jiang
ling, however, would usually be relatively limited, because Jiangling has a very
small hinterland from where the attacking force could draw its soldiers and supplies. An attacking
force traveling downriver from Xiangyang, on the other hand, might do so with the backing of all of
northern China, and that is much more dangerous. By 219, Liu Bei had wrestled the strategic
Hanzhong Commandery from Cao Cao, all while maintaining an uneasy alliance with Sun Quan.
Immediately after Liu Bei’s victo
ry in Hanzhong, his general Guan Yu, who commanded Liu
Bei’s army in Jing Province, attacked in the direction of Xiangyang. Guan Yu bypassed
Xiangyang, led his army across the Han River, and laid siege to Fancheng, which was defended
by Cao Cao’s cousin Cao Ren. An army led by Cao Cao’s generals Yu Jin and Pang De faced off
against Guan Yu’s army to the north of Fancheng, only for the autumn rains to cause the Han River
to overflow. Guan Yu subsequently led his troops onto ships and annihil
ated his drowning enemies:
Pang De was captured, refused to surrender, and executed, while Yu Jin surrendered to Guan
Yu. Guan Yu then turned around and besieged both Fancheng and Xiangyang, all while gaining
the support of numerous local factions in the Nanyang Basin. At the time the court, including
the puppet Emperor Xiandi of the Han Dynasty, was located not far to the north of Xiangyang.
Guan Yu threatened to free the emperor, which in turn might trigger a cascade of rebellions
across
the north against Cao Cao’s rule. At this critical moment, Cao Cao and Sun Quan
temporarily set aside their differences to prevent Liu Bei from growing too powerful.
With Guan Yu preoccupied on the front line, Sun Quan’s army launched a surprise attack
against Jiangling, easily capturing the city. Guan Yu was forced to retreat, but was captured
by Sun Quan’s army and subsequently beheaded. Despite Guan Yu’s untimely death, his
exploits, including those around Xiangyang, were dramatized ove
r the centuries, until he was
elevated to a god in Chinese folk religion and worshipped in Chinese martial temples.
His imagery remains near-ubiquitous in Chinese communities around the world today.
During the subsequent Three Kingdoms Period from 220 to 280, the Cao Wei Dynasty continued to
control Xiangyang, putting a constant, significant strategic pressure on the Eastern Wu Dynasty
established by Sun Quan. On numerous occasions the Eastern Wu Dynasty launched expeditions
against Xiangya
ng, only to be repulsed each time. By the 270s AD, the southwestern Shu Han
Dynasty, founded by Liu Bei, had been conquered by the Cao Wei Dynasty, and the throne of the Cao
Wei Dynasty had been usurped by the Jin Dynasty, which then went on to conquer Eastern Wu in
280 to unify China. The Jin Dynasty ruled over a unified China for little more than two
decades before the north was occupied by non-Han Chinese barbarian groups. The traditional
capitals of Luoyang and Chang’an were occupied, a
nd a previously insignificant member of the
imperial family established a new government in Jiankang, modern-day Nanjing, known
in history as the Eastern Jin Dynasty. From its very beginning, the Eastern Jin
Dynasty was hampered by infighting between aristocratic houses based out of the mid-Yangtze
and those based out of the Yangtze River Delta. The physical distance between the two regions
contributed to differing interests between their respective elites, and on multiple occasions the
up
river factions around Jiangling and Xiangyang, with their powerful local armies, sailed their
fleets down the Yangtze River against the capital. When the Eastern Jin Dynasty elites were not
busy fighting among themselves, they still made numerous attempts to reconquer the north from
the barbarians, and Xiangyang played a key role in this strategy. As long as the south controlled
Xiangyang and the rest of the Nanyang Basin it enjoyed significant strategic flexibility
to strike the north: nor
thwestward through Wu Pass against Chang’an and Guanzhong, directly
northward against Luoyang, or northeastward into the open terrain of the Central Plains.
The proximity of Xiangyang to the frontier meant that large numbers of
refugees, especially from Guanzhong, also settled there. Generations of these northern
refugees established their own communities around Xiangyang, with a strong military culture and
loyalties to their local leaders. A province, Yong Province, was eventually establish
ed around
Xiangyang, with the armies from Yong Province becoming a major force in southern politics.
The throne of the Eastern Jin Dynasty was usurped by the Liu Song Dynasty in 420. From then on, a
succession of four dynasties, Song, Qi, Liang, and Chen, known collectively as the Southern
Dynasties, ruled the south until 589. Xiangyang remained one of the most critically
important garrisons of the Southern Dynasties, with its command often reserved for the
emperors’ most trusted subordinat
es. For much of the 400s, the Southern Dynasties
did not only control the south, but also large portions of the Central Plains. But as the
century went on, the Northern Wei Dynasty, under the rule of the Tuoba branch of the
proto-Mongolic Xianbei people, unified the rest of the north under its rule and began to
push southward. Pengcheng, modern-day Xuzhou, another strategically-important city like
Xiangyang that also served as a forward base of operations for the south against the north, fe
ll
to Northern Wei in 467, and afterwards the border settled roughly along the Huai River, a fairly
stable dividing line between north and south. In the center, however, the south continued
to control the entirety of the Nanyang Basin from Xiangyang, providing the south with a great
deal of strategic flexibility against the north. This was initially a peripheral concern for the
Northern Wei Dynasty since its capital was in the far north at Pingcheng, modern-day Datong, but in
494, Emperor
Xiaowen of Wei, as part of a massive sinicization effort, moved his capital southward
to the traditional heart of China at Luoyang. To protect Luoyang, Emperor Xiaowen launched
an expedition in 497 - 498 against Nanyang, conquering the region around Nanyang after tough
fighting. Emperor Xiaowen’s army pushed all the way to the north bank of the Han River, but was
unable to cross the river to take Xiangyang. Afterwards, the natural geographical unit of
the Nanyang Basin was split across the
middle, with Northern Wei controlling the northern
half from Nanyang and the Southern Dynasties controlling the southern half from Xiangyang.
In China, as elsewhere, a political border drawn along easily defensible natural barriers
such as mountains and rivers tends to create the most stable equilibrium between two sides.
The Nanyang Basin defies this observation, since a line drawn through the middle of the
valley that disregards the natural topography of the region paradoxically makes a mo
re stable
border. This is because even though a natural geographical divide exists between northern
and southern China in the form of the line of the Qin Mountains and the Huai River, the Nanyang
Basin somewhat straddles this divide. As a result, in a geopolitical configuration in which China
were to be evenly divided into two halves between north and south, neither side could allow the
other side to control the entirety of the Nanyang Basin. If the south were to control Nanyang then
it co
uld strike Chang’an and the Central Plains, whereas if the north were to control Xiangyang
then it could sail its fleet down the Han River to strike the Yangtze River Delta. Nanyang
was much more valuable to the north than it was to the south, whereas Xiangyang was much more
valuable to the south than it was to the north. Nowadays, Nanyang and Xiangyang continue to
be administered under different provinces: Nanyang is part of Henan Province whereas
Xiangyang is part of Hubei Province. Becau
se of this division it is easy to think of Nanyang
and Xiangyang as two fairly unrelated cities, even though they belong to the same geographical
unit of the Nanyang Basin and were administered together under the same provinces for many
periods in Chinese history. It is hard to talk about the history of one of these two
cities without also talking about the other. China reunified in 589 and soon reached
the heights of the Tang Dynasty, which ruled China from 618 to 907 from its capital in
Chang’an. During the Tang Dynasty, the proximity of Xiangyang to the capital continued to make
it one of the empire’s most important cities. Chang’an was highly dependent on grain supplies
from the Yangtze River Delta along the Grand Canal. This supply was disrupted during the An
Lushan Rebellion from 755 to 763 by rebels based out of the area around modern-day Beijing.
The grain shipments to Chang’an continued, this time up the Han River, through Xiangyang
to the Dan River, and then throug
h mountain roads to Chang’an. Even though this route
was less efficient, it still kept the capital supplied through the crisis.
One of the greatest Chinese poets, Du Fu, lived through the An Lushan rebellion in
exile around the southwestern city of Chengdu. When he heard news of the rebel’s defeat in 763
he joyously wrote one of his many masterpieces, and in it he described the itinerary he
planned to take to go home to the north. “I shall pass through the Ba Gorge and the
Wu Gorge, and fro
m there onwards to Xiangyang and towards Luoyang”. The poem is a reminder of
Xiangyang’s importance during this time period. By the time of the Northern Song Dynasty, which
ruled a mostly unified China from 960 to 1127, Xiangyang remained an important city, but
was already starting to lose some of its prior significance. As the Chinese population and
economy shifted more and more towards the east and south, with Kaifeng serving as the capital
of the Northern Song Dynasty, Chang’an became mu
ch more of a frontier city and Luoyang also lost
much of its prior importance, making Xiangyang’s proximity to both of these cities less politically
significant. The Yunmeng Marsh had also largely disappeared by then, allowing Ezhou, where Wuhan
is now located, to gradually grow in importance. But despite Xiangyang’s declining importance
in a unified China, it retained its military importance in a divided China. In 1127, the
Song Dynasty capital at Kaifeng was captured by the Jin Dynasty, r
uled by the Jurchens, the
ancestors of the Manchus. The Song Dynasty was reestablished in the Yangtze River Delta,
this one known as the Southern Song Dynasty, with its capital at Lin’an, modern-day Hangzhou.
The Jin Dynasty continued to launch attacks into the south. In 1133, a Han Chinese puppet regime
of the Jin Dynasty launched a southward invasion, capturing Xiangyang and putting the entire
mid-Yangtze region at risk. The following year, the Song emperor ordered a counterattack led by
a young, up-and-coming general named Yue Fei. Yue Fei easily defeated the invading northern army
to recapture Xiangyang. He would eventually set up his main base in Ezhou, and over the next
half decade organized a number of northern expeditions from the mid-Yangtze region to
recover the occupied northern territories. Yue Fei’s northern expeditions were ultimately
unsuccessful. Powerful people at court preferred the security of a peace treaty with the Jin
Dynasty - the lost northern territor
ies and its subjugated peoples be damned - over the risks that
continued fighting would inevitably bring about. In 1140, immediately after Yue Fei’s army had
pushed victoriously to the outskirts of Kaifeng, the lost Song Dynasty capital, Yue Fei was ordered
to retreat home. He was subsequently recalled to the capital, arrested, and killed by his enemies.
Yue Fei was highly popular during his lifetime, and, in the centuries after his death, became one
of the most enduring Chinese exemplar of
loyalty and devotion in the face of overwhelming
foreign threats. He, along with Guan Yu, became the two most significant figures of
worship in Chinese martial temples. The stories of both are inextricably linked to Xiangyang.
The death of Yue Fei coincided with the signing of a peace treaty between the Southern Song Dynasty
and the Jin Dynasty, with the front line set along the line of the Qin Mountains and the Huai River,
where it remained for the best part of the next century. The Nanyang
Basin was again split into
two parts - Nanyang as part of the north and Xiangyang as part of the south. Xiangyang became
one of the most critically important frontier cities of the Southern Song Dynasty, linking
the eastern and western sectors to one another. By the early 1200s, the Jin Dynasty faced
increasing pressure from the rising Mongol Empire to its north. The Mongols launched
repeated invasions against the Jin Dynasty, finally conquering it in 1234 with the help
of the Song Dynast
y. But no longer having the Jin Dynasty as a buffer state, the Song
Dynasty found itself face to face along a several thousand kilometer long frontier with
one of the greatest military powers in history. Faced with the question of what to do against
this existential threat, the Song leadership, later in 1234, told themselves YOLO and attacked
the Mongols first. The poorly prepared Song army, with little cavalry, was wiped out by the
Mongol horsemen on the Central Plains, and afterwards the
Mongols launched counter attacks
against the Song Dynasty along the entire border. The Mongols made the quickest progress in the
mountainous Sichuan Basin, which was relatively less defended, and brutally sacked Chengdu.
The Mongols also briefly occupied Xiangyang, but failing to appreciate the strategic importance
of the city, they allowed the Song army to recapture it easily. The Song Dynasty subsequently
made significant additions to the defenses at Xiangyang, making it one of the centra
l pieces of
its new defensive strategy against the Mongols. Over the next two decades, the Mongols continued
their southward invasions, generally avoiding the heavily defended eastern sector along the
Huai River, especially by river fleets that the Mongols had little experience fighting against,
and instead repeatedly attacking the mountainous southwest so that they might eventually outflank
the Song Dynasty from the rear. To this end the Mongols went as far south as conquering the
dynasti
c state of Dali in 1253 and then pushing into northern Vietnam by the late 1250s, but the
vast distances and extreme terrain of what is now southwestern China eventually rendered this
southwestern strategy untenable. The Mongols became especially bogged down in the mountains
and hills of eastern Sichuan, fighting battles of attrition around heavily-defended fortifications
that prevented the Mongols from eventually sailing a fleet down the Yangtze River. The most famous
of these fortificatio
ns was Diaoyu Fortress near modern-day Chongqing, where Möngke Khan,
the ruler of the Mongols, died during a siege of the fortress in 1259, with accounts
differing on whether he died from an infectious disease or mortally wounded by the defenders.
The death of Möngke Khan led to a brief pause in the Mongol attacks against the Song Dynasty
as rival factions fought against one another to claim the throne. In 1267, Kublai Khan, after
consolidating his power against his enemies, resumed the Mong
ol invasion of the Song Dynasty,
this time pursuing the much more sensible strategy of attacking through the middle sector against
Xiangyang. The Mongol strategic shift caught the Song Dynasty by surprise, and the twin cities
of Xiangyang and Fancheng were soon surrounded by the Mongols. But even then, the cities, under
the command of the Song general Lü Wenhuan, were heavily defended, stocked with enough grain
supply to last for 10 years. The defenders had also installed wooden stakes into
the Han
River, connected the stakes with iron chains, and tethered ships to the chains to build a
pontoon bridge connecting Xiangyang and Fancheng, allowing the defenders in the two cities
to support one another. The pontoon bridge, in turn, was protected by Song
warships patrolling the Han River. The Mongol attacking force, which included large
numbers of Han Chinese soldiers, methodically built a ring of fortifications around the twin
cities to prevent the defenders from leaving and rel
ief forces from entering. The Mongols also
established a river fleet, something they have had little experience doing up to that point, on
the Han River to intercept Song relief efforts. The Mongols sent diversionary attacks against
other fronts in Sichuan and along the Huai River, both to mask their true objective of capturing
Xiangyang and to prevent the Song Dynasty from organizing effective relief forces. Despite all
this, the Song Dynasty still tried to relieve Xiangyang and Fancheng m
any times, although
these relief forces were limited and made little progress against the Mongol fortresses and fleets.
As the years passed, the Mongol ring around Xiangyang and Fancheng became tighter and tighter,
and the situation in the two cities grew more and more desperate: critical resources
such as salt became scarce. The defenders dismantled houses to use as firewood and kept
themselves warm using paper as insulation. And yet Xiangyang and Fancheng held on.
In 1272, five years into
the siege, the Mongols finally began to launch direct
attacks against the twin cities. First the Mongol fleet attacked the pontoon bridge,
destroying it and cutting the defenders of the two cities off from one another. The Mongols
then focused their efforts against Fancheng, the much easier of the two cities to take.
Over the long course of the siege, the Mongols had been gathering resources from
across their vast domains in Asia and Europe and sending them to the front lines at Xiangyang
a
nd Fancheng. This included engineers from the Middle East who brought with them blueprints
for some of the most advanced superweapons of the time period - counterweight trebuchets.
Trebuchets, as a class of siege engines, work by utilizing the law of the lever: force is applied
to one end of a rotating arm around a fulcrum, and a projectile is launched from the other arm
in the opposite direction. There are two major types of trebuchets, traction and counterweight.
Traction trebuchets were
likely first used in China before spreading to the rest of Eurasia and
were commonly used in ancient and medieval Chinese warfare. With traction trebuchets, soldiers pull,
that is, provide traction on one end of the lever, causing the projectile to launch from the other
end. Although medieval traction trebuchets tend to be fairly light and mobile, they had limited
payload and range, all while requiring large numbers of soldiers to operate. Then there are
counterweight trebuchets, which are
the type of trebuchets we typically see in medieval movies:
a large weight is attached to one end of the arm, and after the arm is released, gravity brings
the weight down, launching the projectile. Counterweight trebuchets could launch far larger
payloads than traction trebuchets, although understandably are less mobile and slower to fire.
The counterweight trebuchets built by the Middle Eastern engineers were referred to as the “Hui
Hui Pao”, or literally, the Muslim artillery. The Hui Hui
Pao were used in the Mongol assault on
Fancheng, systematically destroying fortifications that other siege engines could not reach.
The defenders of Fancheng tried to repair the damaged fortifications with temporary
wooden structures, only for the Mongols to launch flammable projectiles into the city with
the Hui Hui Pao, causing even more damage. The Mongols took the other walls of Fancheng, and,
after bitter street by street fighting, finally captured Fancheng. The Mongols subsequently
massacred the remaining population of the city. In early 1273, the Mongols moved on towards
Xiangyang. Although the defenses of Xiangyang had been weakened by years of siege, they remained
far more formidable than those at Fancheng, especially with the city surrounded by a moat up
to 150 meters wide. The counterweight trebuchets again battered the Song defenses, destroying
fortifications in the city that other siege engines could not reach and providing just
as much psychological intimidati
on to the defenders as it did physical damage. Finally, Lü
Wenhuan, realizing that there was no hope left for the defenders, made the most of the situation
by negotiating a surrender with the Mongols: he kept his command of the Xiangyang
garrison, and the city’s population was spared from the inevitable massacre.
By the time Xiangyang fell in 1273, Kublai Khan had already declared a dynasty
in the Chinese tradition in 1271 named the Yuan Dynasty. Although the Mongols were ultimately
victori
ous at Xiangyang, the siege was nonetheless expensive and exhausting for the Mongols, and
they took a year to recuperate before launching a major attack in 1274 against the Song Dynasty
down the Han River and into the Yangtze River, this time with Lü Wenhuan as a part of the
Mongol army. The Song Dynasty, already at its breaking point after forty years of resisting
the Mongols, finally collapsed against the Mongol invading force, and Lin’an fell to the Mongols
in 1276. Remnants of the Song
Dynasty held on in the far south until 1279, when the Mongols
completed their conquest of Southern China. The Hui Hui Pao remained a common weapon
in the Chinese arsenal after the fall of the Song Dynasty, although it became much more
commonly known as the Xiangyang Pao, the Xiangyang artillery. The Xiangyang Pao was in use until
its eventual replacement by gunpowder weapons. In the centuries after the Mongol siege, Xiangyang
underwent a slow but steady decline driven by changes that took p
lace in faraway parts of China.
During the Ming Dynasty from 1368 - 1644 and then the Qing Dynasty, which ruled until 1911,
the capital at Beijing, in the northeast, needed to be supplied with grain and other goods
from the Yangtze River Delta via the Grand Canal. But the Yangtze River Delta was also becoming
more populated and urbanized and could barely produce enough grain to feed itself, let alone
supply Beijing. Instead, goods from across the south were shipped down the Yangtze River an
d
then along the Grand Canal to Beijing. Wuchang, as the seat of the mid-Yangtze province of Huguang
and the key hub along this west to east route, permanently eclipsed Xiangyang in importance.
By around 1500, after two millenia of continued settlement, the mid-Yangtze region around Wuchang
and stretching southward into modern-day Hunan Province finally began to fulfill its agricultural
and economic potential. A saying became popular at this time, or literally, “a harvest
in Huguang Provinc
e feeds all of China”, referring most specifically to this
newly developed breadbasket of China. While Wuchang was the main political center of
the mid-Yangtze region, much of its commerce was concentrated at the town of Hankou, on the north
bank of the Yangtze River across from Wuchang. Goods from all over southern China, including down
the Han River or via overland routes through the Dabie Mountains, gathered at the emporium
of Hankou before being shipped to the rest of China. The third c
ity at the confluence
of the Han and Yangtze Rivers was Hanyang, located between the Han and the Yangtze and
a decently-sized city in its own right. These three cities: Wuchang, Hankou, and Hanyang,
would eventually merge in the 20th century to form the three main parts of modern-day Wuhan.
In addition to the rise of Wuhan, another reason for Xiangyang’s decline was that since the Ming
Dynasty, China was never again divided between north and south for more than a few years
at a time. For a
number of complex reasons, regionalism has become more difficult since then
as the fortunes of different regions in China became more tightly intertwined with one another.
As such, Xiangyang has not been needed to serve as the frontier garrison between north and south.
The gap between Xiangyang and Wuhan has only widened in modern times. In the 19th
Century, the three cities that would make up Wuhan became a significant inland port
connecting interior China to the outside world, with a numbe
r of foreign powers establishing in
Hankou their own concessions, where expats lived under laws from back home. Many industries,
educational institutions, and transportation facilities developed during this time around Wuhan
and not Xiangyang. In the early 20th century, the main north-south railroad connecting Beijing,
then known as Beiping, to Wuhan bypassed Xiangyang completely. So much of modern Chinese urbanization
has been impacted by the routes early 20th century railroads such as thi
s one took, and Xiangyang
missed out on yet another opportunity to grow. In 1948, Xiangyang and Fancheng were merged into
one administrative unit and renamed “Xiangfan” in the same way that Wuhan was created out of
combining neighboring cities with one another. But unlike the name “Wuhan”, the name “Xiangfan”
was unpopular and did not quite catch on. I’ve read various stories on the internet about
travelers telling the people they met that they come from “Xiangfan”, only to be met
with con
fused looks, and then having to explain that “Xiangfan” was just supposed to be
“Xiangyang”. The city’s name was finally changed back to Xiangyang in 2010, especially given
the tourism implications of such a name change. Modern-day Xiangyang remains steeped in history,
and contains one of the best preserved city walls in China. The walls of Xiangyang are surrounded
by one of the widest, if not the widest, moats in the world, up to 250 meters wide with an
average width of 180 meters - which
had given the Mongols so much trouble over 700 years ago.
The cityscape is dominated by the Han River, which still flows between the Xiangyang and
Fancheng portions of the city. These sights: the walls, moat, the Han River, and the nearby
slopes of Mount Xian all bear witness to the people that have passed through the city,
and the events that have taken place there.
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