Yue Fei

Few figures in Chinese memory stand for loyalty as completely as Yue Fei, a general of the Song dynasty who fought to win back northern China from the Jurchen Jin in the twelfth century. At the height of his success he was recalled, imprisoned on charges now accepted as fabricated, and put to death in 1142, aged thirty-eight. Rehabilitated twenty years later, he became a national hero, although much of his popular story is the work of admiring descendants and later novelists.

Yue Fei was born on 24 March 1103 in Tangyin, in present-day Henan, into a poor farming family. His given name, Fei, means "to fly"; the official biography says a large bird landed on the roof when he was born. He is said to have learned archery from a teacher called Zhou Tong and to have loved the military classics of Sun Tzu. He joined the army in 1122, left to mourn his father, and returned in 1126, the year the Jin invaded the north. In the Jingkang incident that followed, the Song capital, Kaifeng, fell in 1127 and the emperor Qinzong was carried into captivity. A new emperor, Gaozong, re-established the dynasty in the south, the start of the Southern Song.

Yue Fei fought in the defence of Kaifeng and then in the armies holding the line of the Yangtze, which stopped the Jurchens from reaching the river in 1129. His reputation grew quickly. By 1133 he commanded the largest army on the middle Yangtze, and in 1134 and 1135 he struck at Qi, a puppet state set up by the Jin, recovering lost ground. His troops were known for hard training and strict discipline; he was said to share their food and to punish soldiers who took anything from peasants. He was one of several capable Song generals, not the lone saviour of later legend.

In 1140 the Jin prince Wuzhu invaded again. Yue Fei marched north from Ezhou and defeated him at Yancheng, near modern Luohe, and again at Yingchang. Accounts of the numbers vary widely: old records speak of 100,000 Jin infantry and 15,000 horsemen, while modern estimates are far smaller. Zhengzhou and Luoyang were retaken, and his army came within about twenty kilometres of Kaifeng. But Gaozong and his chief minister, Qin Hui, wanted peace. Tradition says twelve orders, written on gold plaques, called the general back. He obeyed.

In 1141 Yue Fei was arrested and charged with treason. Asked what crime he had committed, Qin Hui is reported to have answered that there might be one; the phrase "mo xu you", "perhaps there is", became a Chinese byword for a trumped-up charge. In the same year the Treaty of Shaoxing gave up the Song claim to all land north of the Huai river and required yearly payments of silver and silk to the Jin. Yue Fei died in prison in January 1142; sources disagree on whether he was executed outright, strangled or poisoned. His son Yue Yun and his officer Zhang Xian were killed with him. A prison officer, Wei Shun, is said to have hidden his body and buried it secretly.

In 1162 the new emperor, Xiaozong, cleared his name, and his remains were reburied beside West Lake in Hangzhou. He later received the posthumous name Wumu and, in 1211, the title King of E. Kneeling iron statues of Qin Hui and his wife were placed before the tomb, and for centuries visitors spat at them. Popular tradition credits Yue Fei with the slogan "serve the country with utmost loyalty" tattooed on his back, with the poem Man Jiang Hong and with several martial arts; historians doubt much of this, and some date the poem to the sixteenth century. He remains a symbol of patriotic sacrifice in China.

Our 1100 map shows the Song empire at its widest, before the Jurchen conquest of the north drove the court south of the Huai and the Yangtze. Our 1200 map shows the divided China that his campaigns could not undo, with the Jin north of the Huai River and the Southern Song beyond it.