"I just want to save the Buddhism of Dunhuang, because I am now a practitioner, and after entering the Sangmen, there is no longer any difference between Han and Tibetan!" Yuan Tongzhi looked at the sword blade that was getting closer and closer, and kept shouting and defending in simple Mandarin.

Nuqiong, who was standing there, covered her mouth in horror, thinking that she would soon have to watch the head of this walker from Tang Tu fall to the ground.

"Stop, Yuan Xing and the Dharma Realm of the Lotus Temple of Guizi have never been alive, and he came to the temple before to say that he wanted to save Dunhuang's Buddhism, which also came from his heart, and I and the Mahayana monk and Prince Mu Di can testify." Immediately, the lady in the robe. Ding Aizeng also interceded for Yuan Tongzhi.

The reason why he did this was not entirely out of sympathy for Yuan, the Niang family had been prominent in the early history of Xifan for a while, but since his ancestor Niang. After Shang Nang was punished by Songtsen Gampo, the family was very declining for a hundred years. Ding Ai Zeng has had the dream of reviving the power of the family since he was a child, and the nobles of Western Tibet regard the glory of the family as far higher than the face of the country, and Ding Ai Zeng is no exception - when he was recommended by Ma Chongying, he entered the Buddhist gate and was able to get close to Prince Mu Di, which was just a part of his plan.

"The safety of the monk is sacrosanct, even if the other party is a big deal", by rescuing Yuan Tongzhi to express this truth, this is the mother. The fundamental reason for Ding'ai Zeng's doing this, "The testimony of the monks is not to be questioned in the land of Dafan. ”

Hearing this, Mu Di and Mahayana also nodded together in agreement.

Angry, Ma Chongying put his sword back into the sheath, kicked Yuan Tong straight on the ground by the salt pond, and then glared at Prince Mu Di's eyes, which was very complicated, and stepped on the horse's back again and walked leisurely.

The cavalry of Xifan, when everyone passed by, would also look curiously at Yuan Tong, who was lying on the ground coughing and wheezing.

There is very little grass on the edge of the salt pond, and the sand is oozing with a grayish color, which is the salt soil that has turned into a hard shell, Yuan Tongzhi is now stained with this in his mouth and face, causing his wound to be as painful as he pulls, but after his tongue is dipped in the salty taste, it is offset by the loss of tears due to pain, and when he raised his eyes to see the calm salt pond under the clouds, Yuan Tongzhi's heart calmed down.

The thought in my heart became more and more firm......

Ma Chongying's siege of Dunhuang in Shazhou was a crushing defeat under the resolute resistance of the remaining Tang troops in Hexi and Anxi, as well as the resistance of the Tang people and Han people in Helong.

Years later, it was regarded as a turning point in the rapid decline of the Western Tibetan Empire.

Countries with such a system tend to have a much shorter time to win than to achieve victory.

Just as the later generation of thought, literary master Han Yu wrote the "Records of the Death of the Western Tibetan Police" said: "Xifan Qiangrong, this is not the road of benevolence and righteousness, although its people are simple but lost in ignorance, although brave but lost in greed, first worship Bon, but also Buddhism, the royal power is dark, people are unbearable, and recognize the heroes of the Helong Han people as aliens, no matter the virtuous and foolish, they dare not be appointed, they all think of slaves, and the people are bitter." Once the expansion is hindered by our Chinese heroic forces, it is bound to drown and even fall apart, so that the grass Ze Wen and the end of the rise and die, the royal corpse in the wild, the mausoleum is a fox squirrel-infested hole, it is a sigh, and it can be admonished! ”

Han Yu counted it very well, and the reasons for the demise of Xifan were nothing more than three points:

The inherent defects of the slave regime were that it did not show any sympathy for the serfs and Han people in their own country, regarded them as grassy mustards, brutally oppressed, and had no merit in economic policy, and finally led to the great rebellion of the slaves and collapsed;

The autocracy of the domestic aristocracy, once the momentum of expansion is stopped, the internal contradictions will immediately intensify, and it will be a situation of cannibalism;

In the newly occupied areas of Hexi and Longyou, they did not dare to recruit elite Han people to participate in the regime, and treated all Han people as slaves, missing the opportunity for the transformation and evolution of the regime, and finally being ruthlessly eliminated by history because of their stubborn barbaric backwardness.

After reading this work of Han Yu, Gao Yue personally used his pen to add a more sobering note at the end: "Xifan has no time to mourn itself, and other countries mourn it, and other countries mourn it without learning from it, and it also makes other countries mourn other countries again." ”

Of course, the turning point was not only the failure of the Western Tibetan attack on the Western Regions, but also the brilliant victory of the Tang army in the southwestern Shanzhou.

On June 16, at the foot of Hulang Mountain in the northeast of Shanzhou, we arrived at the Feishan Battalion of the Dingwu Army, and in the exclamation of the Dongchuan soldiers in the camp, on the mountain road that was not easy to walk, a piece of wooden planks was laid to form a passage from the camp to the mountain, and then the wooden planks were smeared with cattle and sheep fat, and then the calves, mules and horses were driven with whips, and the dense ropes like spider webs were pulled on both sides, and two large-caliber copper cannons weighing ten stones (about 500 kilograms in total) were pulled up!

This large bronze cannon took a month and a half to complete in the "casting furnace" of Li Wu City, and the sisters who were "born" at the same time as the two of them, there are four more, two of which are located on the Bald Pine Mountain on the northwest side of Taideng City, and two gun emplacements are located at the camp Tushan in the east of the city.

Wei Gao couldn't wait to give each of the six cannons a unique and ornate name, and was ready for the craftsman to inscribe on them.

But Gao Yue said that the name is ordinary and concise, which is easy to remember.

So the two gates of Hu Lang Mountain are called "Hu Lang Yi" and "Hu Lang Er"; The nature of Bald Pine Mountain is "Bald Pine Three" and "Bald Pine Tree", as for the east gate, it is "Dongfeng Wu" and "Dongfeng Lu".

This name was so anxious that Wei Gao's obsessive-compulsive disorder almost committed it.

When the large bronze cannon was moved to a fixed gun position, the soldiers of the Feishan battalion dug a pit behind it, and fixed it on all sides with thick iron chain hooks, which is said to prevent the recoil and divine thunder of the cannon from hurting people when it is fired.

Then looking at the opposite side, the clearly visible city walls and outer fortresses of Taideng City, as well as the towering shooting tower at the corner, the horse-faced enemy platform, and the war tent winding on it, the soldiers of the Feishan battalion unloaded barrels of nitrate, charcoal, and sulfur from the back of the mules and horses, carefully stacked them in the dug cellar, sorted and placed, and then under the operation of skilled gunsmiths, took out the three ingredients, mixed them together, stirred them evenly with butter lard in appropriate proportions, and filled them into the bulging medicine room, and the cold and reflective huge bronze cannon muzzle was aimed at the direction of Taideng City.

There are also many stonemasons on the side, carefully polishing the stone projectiles.

The Xifan garrison in the city was panicked, and begged to hide and cover up the rejection of the Tang army's persuasion to surrender three times in a row, and wrote a farewell letter to his father Shang Jiezan and Zampu on wooden tablets with a pen.

In the letter, the beggar denounced the two people.

One is the prince of Mu Ru, who is said to have brought reinforcements from the Dongdai forbidden army, whose army stopped and patrolled before he crossed the Xugong River;

He heard that the reinforcements from Saigon, Lacheng, and Shugong to Taideng City in his jurisdiction had been defeated, and the news that the two city defense envoys had died, he shrank and did not dare to fight, and secretly accepted the bribes of Wei Gao and Gao Yue through the chiefs of the eight countries of Xishan as an intermediary, and acquiesced in the other party's "I don't take Victoria, only take Weizhou, and Erbi can watch it", and found various reasons to resist Zampu's order.

"What a shame!" The tip of the begging pen made a knife-edge sound on the wooden tablet.