Attacks
When Empress Dowager Wu heard of Li Chong's rebellion, she commissioned the general Qiu Shenji (丘神勣) to attack Li Chong. Meanwhile, Li Chong gathered some 5,000 men and was preparing to attack Ji Prefecture. In preparation, he first attacked Wushui (武水, also in modern Liaocheng). Guo Wuti (郭務悌), the magistrate of Wushui County, fled to Wei Prefecture (魏州, roughly modern Handan, Hebei) to seek aid, and one of Wei Prefecture's county magistrates, Ma Xuansu (馬玄素) the magistrate of Shen County (莘縣, also in modern Liaocheng), took 1,700 men, initially intending to confront Li Chong, but then felt that he had insufficient strength, and so entered Wushui to defend it. Li Chong took up position south of Wushui and placed wagons filled with straw near Wushui's south gate, preparing to set it aflame so he could charge in, but as soon as he ignited the fire, the wind shifted from the south to the north, instead cutting off Li Chong's attack. Meanwhile, one of Li Chong's officers, Dong Xuanji (董玄寂), started telling his colleagues that Li Chong was committing treason. Li Chong beheaded Dong, but this made the soldiers even more fearful, and they began to desert, to the point that Li Chong only had his servants and guards with him. He was forced to flee back to the capital of Bo Prefecture, and when he arrived there on September 22, he was killed by the guards of the city gate.
Read more about this topic: Li Chong (Tang Dynasty)
Famous quotes containing the word attacks:
“Stupidity is something unshakable; nothing attacks it without breaking itself against it; it is of the nature of granite, hard and resistant.”
—Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880)
“Leadership does not always wear the harness of compromise. Once and again one of those great influences which we call a Cause arises in the midst of a nation. Men of strenuous minds and high ideals come forward.... The attacks they sustain are more cruel than the collision of arms.... Friends desert and despise them.... They stand alone and oftentimes are made bitter by their isolation.... They are doing nothing less than defy public opinion, and shall they convert it by blows. Yes.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)
“There exists, at the bottom of all abasement and misfortune, a last extreme which rebels and joins battle with the forces of law and respectability in a desperate struggle, waged partly by cunning and partly by violence, at once sick and ferocious, in which it attacks the prevailing social order with the pin-pricks of vice and the hammer-blows of crime.”
—Victor Hugo (1802–1885)