Why the Mongol army failed to conquer Vietnam three times
The rise of the Mongol Empire in the 13th century can be said to be an anomaly in the history of the world, and almost no one would have thought that a nomadic people of the last century is still unknown, but can quickly conquer half of the Eurasian continent. Mongolia's tough cavalry like wolves roaring through the desert steppe and the central plains, finally came to the far south, unexpected, in the small Annan, Mongolia army but three times in a row, sinking sand halberd ......
Three times defeated Mongolian army
1252, Mongolia's army from Gansu, through the western Sichuan plateau expedition to the Daxing River. Dali expedition via the western Sichuan plateau. These men and horses from the dry steppes of the north were able to cross the fast-flowing Jinsha River into Yunnan in triumph, clutching inflated leather pouches and crouching on rafts that had been swept up by the rapids. The war itself was not worth mentioning, and the following year, the great general Uliang Hetai led an army to capture Duan Zhixing, the king of Dali.
Yunnan's separation from the central government since the Tianbao years of the Tang dynasty came to an end. The capture of Dali was a major step in the Mongol Empire's strategic encirclement of its most implacable foe, the Southern Song, which, with the incorporation of Yunnan into the Mongol domain, was already surrounded by a C-shaped encirclement on land, with only its border with Annam remaining out of Mongol control.
And so, Annam became the next target of the Mongol army, and after sending an envoy to persuade them to surrender, in 1257, Ulaanbaatar led an army of 30,000 men to invade Annam, kicking off a fierce battle between the Mongol Empire and the Chen Dynasty.
The Mongols and the tiny Chen dynasty
This was the first time that an Annamese army had faced the world's most powerful Mongol army on the battlefield, and despite a mixed infantry, elephant, and cavalry formation, it was routed by Ulaanbaatar. The Mongolian army took advantage of the situation to enter the capital of Annam, Shenglong (now Hanoi), but only to get an empty city, only stayed for nine days, to the unbearable heat and food has been exhausted, forced to withdraw, and on the way to Annam was attacked by the local powerful armed and defeated, along the way, exhausted, and did not dare to loot wherever they went, so people called "Buddha thief". This was a great victory for the small Chen Dynasty, and the later Chen Renzong wrote a poem about it: "The white-haired old man was a soldier, and he often talked about Yuanfeng."
For the next two decades, the Mongols were too busy fighting against the Song Dynasty to worry about the isolated Annam. After the destruction of the Southern Song Dynasty and the unification of China, Kublai was determined to annex Annam, and at the beginning of 1285, the Yuan army attacked the Chen Dynasty in six different directions. In view of the experience of the first war, the army added some senior generals who had participated in the conquest of the Southern Song Dynasty and were accustomed to fighting in the south of China, such as Li Heng, who had served as Zhang Hongfan's deputy during the Battle of Yashan, who was under the command of the King of Zhennan, Dahuan (the ninth son of Kublai Lied), who was the commander in chief.
The number of Yuan troops was also greatly increased, according to "The Complete Historical Records of Dai Viet", there were half a million of them (this is of course an exaggeration). On the battlefield, the Yuan army once again routed the Tran army and occupied Shenglong, but the Annamese army "was defeated and dispersed, but the increase in troops turned more", the Yuan "army is tired, dead and wounded, and the Mongolian army and horses can not perform their skills", Tuo Huan was then in the May of that year
Kublai was not satisfied with the defeat, and then concentrated on Jianghuai, Jiangxi and Huaihe, and the Mongolian army. Failure, and centralized Jianghuai, Jiangxi, Hubei and Hunan provinces, Mongolian and Han army 70,000, with 500 ships and Yunnan soldiers 6,000 people, Li soldiers 15,000 people come back. 1287 December, the Yuan army led by Tuo Huan, three-way attack Annan for the third time. Two routes were infantry and cavalry from Guangxi and Yunnan, in addition to an additional force of sailors who attacked from the sea along the Bai Teng River (adjacent to the mouth of Halong Bay in northern Vietnam). Once again, the Chen army abandoned Shenglong and stood firm, forcing the Yuan army to retreat in March of the following year when they ran out of food.
Bai Teng River, the Chen Dynasty army beforehand from the forest to cut trees, sharpened and inserted into the river, when the Yuan warships in a row into the Bai Teng River, the tide is falling, the Chen army unexpectedly attacked the Yuan ships to the dark stakes of the waters, when the tide fell, most of the Yuan ships crashed into the stakes, the Yuan naval forces, is the Bai Teng River victory, the Chen Dynasty Confucian Zhang Hanchao in the famous piece of Vietnamese Hanfu The victory was called the Bai Teng River Victory, and Truong Han Chao, a great scholar of the Tran Dynasty, called it "the success of reconstruction, which has been praised for ages.
At the beginning of March 2016, Vietnamese media reported that Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung recently approved a bill to build a protected area for the relics of the Battle of Baito River.
The Battle of Bai Teng River was decisive: once again, tiny Annam defeated the vast continental empire. News of the Yuan defeat even reached as far away as Persia, where Rasht, the historian of the Ilkhanate, recorded in his Collected Histories that "their (the Chen Dynasty's) armies suddenly came out of ambushes at sea, in the forests and on the mountains, and routed the armies of the Tuoi Tre, who were busy looting."
The feats of the "Great King of Xingdao"
The Chen Dynasty was really a difficult foe for the Mongols (Yuan Dynasty). The court of the Chen Dynasty even ordered that "all domestic counties should fight to the death if foreign invaders arrive; or if they are unable to defeat them, they are allowed to run away in the mountains and swamps, and are not allowed to surrender". Although there were some rebels who surrendered to the Mongol Yuan, such as one of Chen Renzong's younger brothers and the author of Annan Zhiliu, Li Kao, the overall will to resist of the ruling group of the Chen Dynasty was extremely strong, almost as strong as the Kamakura Shogunate of Japan at the same time.
But while the Kamakura Shogunate relied more on "kamikazes" that descended from the sky to win battles, the Chen Dynasty had to fight the Mongols on the battlefield.
The Tran dynasty itself was a relative who usurped the throne that had belonged to the Ly dynasty, and one of the results of that to this day is that it forced all Vietnamese with the surname Ly to change their surname to Nguyen, making the latter the number one surname in Vietnam. To prevent himself from making the same mistake, Emperor Tran Taizong (1218-1277) ensured the loyalty of the clan to the emperor by appointing the prime minister and important ministers to the clan. Under the system of congregational vassalage, the royal nobles who owned territories were required to work to repel foreign invaders not only for the sake of their state, but also for the sake of their own fiefdoms.
The most prominent of these was naturally the great king of Xingdao, Chen Guojun (? -1300). From a personal point of view, he had every reason to be a "road-carrying party". Chen Guojun's father, Chen Liu, was the brother of Chen Taizong. Chen Shoudu, the actual founder of the Chen Dynasty, forced Chen Liu to give up his wife to Chen Taizong, and Chen Liu, unable to bear the hatred of wife-grabbing, told his son, Chen Guojun, on his deathbed that he must avenge his wife's death. As a result, when the Yuan army attacked, Chen Guojun, who held military power in his hands, put aside his personal grudge and did not heed his father's last words to seize the throne.
He not only vowed to "cut off my head before surrendering", but also wrote the famous "Diatribe Against the Generals" ("谕诸裨将檄文"), a diatribe full of allusions to loyal and brave figures in Chinese history (from Yu Jean, who avenged the death of Zhi Bo, to Wang Jian, the Song general who defended the Diaoyu Castle). "Meng Tartar is not **** Dai Tian's "and warned his subordinates that "you are not quiet not to snow shame as the idea, not to get rid of the murder as the heart, but also do not teach the soldiers, is to fall back to meet the surrender of the enemy with empty fists, so that the peace of the captives after the shame of ten thousand generations, but how to face the face of the sky and earth between the overlay of the yea"! Under his encouragement, many ordinary soldiers of the Chen Dynasty tattooed the word "kill Tartar" on their arms and vowed to resist to the end.
Besides boosting morale, Chen Guojun's more important contribution was to find a way for the weak Chen Dynasty to win. The so-called "they rely on the long array, I rely on the short army, short to control the long, the law of war is also common", "if the use of nibbling and slow, do not care about people's money, do not seek a quick victory, then pulling with good generals, to see the power of its change, such as the Wei Weiqi like, at any time to suit the situation, to get the father and the son of the army, and then also available." In this kind of thinking, in the front battlefield can not resist the Meng (Yuan) army of the Chen Dynasty army every active retreat, to delay and wait for change; and in the enemy's logistical supply force is not caught when the momentum of the counterattack and win.
Choosing the Bai Teng River as the battlefield is also from the plan of the king of the Xing Dao, at that time, Vietnam's naval forces can be said to be the only military type of victory over the enemy, even the Yuan people also admitted that the Tran Dynasty warships, "the ship is light and long, the boards are very thin, the tail is like a mandarin ducks wings, the boat string on both sides is very high. Each boat has thirty people rowing oars, up to more than a hundred people. The boat traveled like flying". The boat is a very good boat, but it is a very good boat.
Timing-Location-Humanity
Removing the resistance of the Chen Dynasty itself, it can be said that the Mongol army also lost Timing, Location, and Humanity. Even western historians have found this point, "Dosan Mongol History" recorded that the first invasion, the Yuan Dynasty army due to "heat can not be, the division"; the second invasion, "the summer rains and floods, the army disease, deaths and injuries"; the third invasion is again The second invasion was "the summer rains, the army was sick, many dead and wounded"; the third invasion was again "the army of the generals by the epidemic can not enter".
Annan is a tropical monsoon climate, high temperature, high humidity, wind and rain, dry and rainy season is obvious, most of the areas from May to October for the rainy season, November to April for the dry season. Most of the Yuan soldiers came from the north, so the Yuan troops were mostly deployed in the second half of the year, just when Annam was in the winter dry season. Once dragged to the rainy season, the plague was rampant, the Mongolian (Yuan) army was really in the "ghost weather" suffered enough. Although it can not be said that the Mongolian army is completely defeated by the weather, after all, has already conquered the summer rain and epidemic plague Lingnan region, but the invasion of Annan, to a certain extent, is indeed against the "sky".
On the other hand, Annam's terrain is complex, with mountains, plateaus and rivers intertwined, and few flat plains. Even the Yuan generals themselves realized that such terrain "could not be used by Mongolian horses", making the Yuan army in the expedition to Annam not a single cavalry, but mainly infantry. The war against Annam was also more of a traditional Chinese-style war: there were no conditions to rely on the accompanying sheep and horses and hunting to solve the problem of sustenance, nor could they rely on the "food in the enemy" method of obtaining sustenance.
The army could only rely on the domestic supply of food and provisions before the troops moved, and could not rely on the "sheep and horses, without the need to pay". The long and fragile supply line did become the "Achilles' heel" of the invasion of Annam.
The so-called "timing is not as good as location, location is not as good as people and". Kublai Lie "within the use of convergence of ministers, depending on the people's wealth as a map of clover, outside of the nameless division, killing and maiming people's lives as grass", is really militaristic, the people have been extremely cruel. Perennial foreign war makes "veterans taste the taste of war, heard of Annan sad face"; soldiers food more gather, conscripts from the army more lead to fields uncultivated, Jiangnan belt "group of sad sigh, four people waste industry, the poor abandon their children to steal a living, the rich sell their property and should be service, the suffering of the inverted suspension, the day more than a day! "The poor are in a state of mourning, and the rich are in a state of mourning.
To Yuan 20 years (1283), Jiangnan "support each other and rise" of the uprising "where more than 200", to Yuan 26 years (1289), the surge to "more than four hundred places! By the 26th year of the reign of Emperor Yuan (1289), the number had increased to "more than four hundred", covering almost the entire south of the Yangtze River. In the face of so many revolts, the Yuan court had to deploy part of the military force to suppress, thus weakening the strength of the Yuan army's southern expedition, therefore, although Kublai was still reluctant, successively three times to conquer Annam, but finally unable to do so, the domestic opposition to day by day. When Kublai died in 1294, the Yuan court immediately issued an edict to stop the conquest of Annam.
In this way, in the Mongolian army to other areas of the force of conquest of the momentum of the autumn wind sweeping down the leaves, but in Vietnam after three times of intense military confrontation with the Yuan army, although its domestic is also a "past years, the army in this, burned down the house, the development of the graves of the ancestors, the skeletons of the bones of the zero exposure" of the tragic situation, but basically stopped the Yuan army offensive, and retained its autonomy, and the army of the people. However, it basically prevented the Yuan army from attacking and preserved the autonomous rule, so much so that Chen Shengzong (?), who was already the emperor at that time, was able to protect the throne. -1290, 1258-1278 reign) in the visit Chen Taizong mausoleum wrote such a proud poem: "Jikji two back to labor stone horse, the mountains and rivers thousands of years to lay the golden ou."