Yue Fei – A Real Chinese Hero

A hero cannot be a hero unless in a heroic world.

- Nathaniel Hawthorne

It’s probably for the best that today’s heroes are spandex-clad cyclists, or TV characters with superhuman abilities. The greatest heroes are born in times of real tribulation. Real heroism has to do with challenging power and authority for a noble cause. So we have that guy in Lanzhou throwing bricks at red-light runners , and probably some other anonymous heroes in Africa and Afghanistan.The mass media would never find it profitable to celebrate such heroes, thus we commemorate Yue Fei.

Before Yue Fei was a teenager, a new kingdom to the North threatened the Chinese way of life he and his Song people treasured. The Jin, Jurchen nomads, ancestors of the Manchus who would rule China five hundred years later, had taken much of North China, and were making incursions into Northern Song territory. A humble peasant of the Southern Song empire, his mother nonetheless had the pride to tattoo on her son’s back “serve the country with utmost loyalty”. Patriotism thrives best when it is threatened.

Thrives best among the common folk, that is. At the dawn of the year 1127, the Jin stormed Kaifeng, capital of Northern Song, and captured both Emperor Qinzong and his father Huizong. The two had quit the palace at the prospect of battle, making the seizure of Kaifeng little more than a military drill for the Jin.

By this time, Yue Fei had already been in the Song army a year, and been promoted to the rank of marshal. Legendary accounts ascribe to Yue Fei all manner of supernatural powers, but we may well assume it was Yue’s selfless devotion to the Song cause which led to his early advancement. Much scholarship also credits Yue Fei with accomplished martial artistry, particularly with the bow. On top of that he tried to pattern himself after the ideal Confucian scholar, delicate in his personal conduct to the point that he foreswore alcohol until the Jin had been driven from China.

Such refinement did not hamper his prowess on the battlefield, however. Until his untimely demise, he compiled a perfect record of 126 battles without a single defeat. Head of his own “Yue Battalion”, he played a key role in driving the Jin back across the Yangtze River in 1129, and repelling repeated incursions into Southern Song from 1133-35. By this point, Jin soldiers had a grudgingly laudatory slogan to the effect that, “It’s easier to topple a mountain than to topple Yue Fei.”

Not that Yue Fei derives his supreme heroic status in China simply from being a great warrior. For that, he would have to pay the supreme price, and with his martyrdom in the face of treason win eternal fame.

Throughout the 1130s Yue Fei enjoyed success after success, pushing north and re-occupying fallen cities like Luoyang and Shangzhou. Yet each hard-won victory was soon neutralized by the cowardly diplomacy of the Song court, which much preferred the profitable path of compromise with the Jin to the sacrifice that would have been the price of driving them from China.

Matters came to a head in 1140, when Jin General Wuzhu led a mighty force south in a decisive attempt to crush the Song. It was Yue Fei and his battalion that not only held off the advance, but penetrated north to within shouting distance of occupied Kaifeng. Those who doubt such a feat have only to read a sample of his bloodthirsty poetry, reportedly written on that drive North:

The Whole River Red

Rage bristling under the cap,

I lean against the railing;

The rushing rain has ceased.

Lifting my eyes,

Towards the sky I let out a battle cry;

My blood is boiling.

Thirty years: rank and honor, just so much dust;

Eight hundred leagues: travelling with the moon and clouds.

Do not let it slip away;

When a young man’s head turns grey,

Regret will be too late.

The national insult

Is yet to be avenged;

Your servants’ shame:

When will it be erased?

Let us ride the long chariots

To crush those mountain strongholds.

Glorious quest: to feast on the flesh of the invaders.

We laugh and chat and quench our thirst with Tartar blood.

Let us start

To take back our rivers and mountains,

And report to the Heavenly Palace.

Hours before he was to finally enjoy his long-awaited Tartar feast, word arrived from the palace: he was to quit the field and return to HQ posthaste, so that the Song court could sue for peace. The choice words Yue Fei spoke at the news are not suitable for wholesome websites; they were deemed sufficient excuse to have him immediately dismissed from his post, and soon thereafter imprisoned as a rebel. Rebel with a cause, while the cause of the Song royalty was utterly contemptable. Song emperor Gaozong feared that a final victory over the Jin would lead to the release of emperor-in-captivity Qinzong, who could challenge his claim to the throne.

Court officials Zhao Gou and Qin Hui had much to lose personally from the defeat of the Jin, and were instrumental in Yue Fei’s imprisonment. It was they who later broke the news that the Jin would only agree to a peace treaty on the condition that Yue Fei be put to death. Knowing, however, that such a request would be met with umbrage by less insidious members of the Song elite, Qin Hui had Yue Fei strangled, most likely while he still languished in prison.

Loyal troops took Yue Fei’s body from its shallow grave and reinterred him on the shores of Hangzhou’s West Lake. Later, a temple was built around the site to honor one of China’s greatest heroes. Once full of crab, those who find themselves in the neighborhood can still visit the place, rather small and unprepossessing as temples go. They can gaze on a statue that totally misrepresents the man, physically, a tall and lanky casting of one described by contemporaries as short and stocky. Most interestingly, they can follow the tradition of spitting on a the kneeling statue of Qin Hui, forever imprisoned behind an iron fence. China remembers its villains as tenaciously as its heroes.

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