Battle of Fei River

By 381 the Former Qin of Fu Jian had conquered the Former Yan, the Former Liang and Dai and taken Sichuan and Xiangyang from the Jin. Against the advice of many ministers Fu Jian resolved to conquer the south — his army was so large, he is supposed to have boasted, that if every soldier threw his whip into the Yangtze its flow would stop. In the eighth month of 383, according to the Zizhi Tongjian, he sent his brother Fu Rong ahead with 250,000 foot and horse and set out from Chang’an with more than 600,000 infantry and 270,000 cavalry. The Eastern Jin court, led by Xie An, entrusted the defence of the Huai river to his younger brother Xie Shi and his nephew Xie Xuan with 80,000 men, whose core was the trained Beifu (Northern Headquarters) army.

The Qin vanguard took Shouyang on the Huai, and Fu Jian hurried there with 8,000 light cavalry, leaving his main force at Xiangcheng. Zhu Xu, a captured Jin commander whom he sent to demand surrender, secretly advised the Jin to strike before the whole Qin host arrived; Liu Laozhi with 5,000 picked men then crossed the Luo stream and killed the Qin general Liang Cheng, and 15,000 Qin soldiers perished. Watching the orderly Jin ranks from the walls of Shouyang, Fu Jian took even the grass and trees on Mount Bagong for enemy soldiers. The armies faced each other across the Fei. Xie Xuan asked the Qin to draw back so that his men could cross and fight; Fu Jian agreed, meaning to attack them in mid-crossing, but the withdrawal turned into panic when Zhu Xu shouted behind the lines that the Qin army was beaten. Fu Rong was killed when his horse fell, Fu Jian was wounded by an arrow, and the fugitives, hearing “the wind and the cry of cranes”, thought the enemy was upon them; seven or eight in ten of them, says the chronicle, died of hunger and cold.

Xie An, told of the victory while playing weiqi (go) with a guest, is said to have remarked only that “the youngsters have beaten the bandits”. Fu Jian regrouped more than 100,000 men at Luoyang, but of his armies only Murong Chui’s 30,000 had come through intact; in 384 Murong Chui and other Xianbei and Qiang leaders rebelled, Fu Jian was killed by his former general Yao Chang in 385, and the Former Qin, split into the Later Yan, the Later Qin and other states, ended in 394, while the Jin advanced to the Yellow River. The date is uncertain: the Book of Jin places the battle on the yihai day of the tenth lunar month — 30 November 383, only two days after the fall of Shouyang in the Zizhi Tongjian — while the Zizhi Tongjian puts the fighting at the Luo stream and on the Fei in the eleventh month (11 December 383 – 9 January 384). The editors of the modern edition of the Book of Jin find the later dating more consistent with the course of events, but the Zizhi Tongjian itself dates Xie Shi’s return to Jiankang to the dinghai day, 12 December 383, which fits the earlier date better.

Modern historians consider the chronicles’ figures greatly exaggerated: a 2012 study by Thilo Diefenbach concluded that the battle did take place but that its scale was probably “dramatically exaggerated”, and a 1968 paper by Michael Rogers, never widely accepted, doubted the whole episode apart from Liu Laozhi’s initial sortie.