Treaty of Shaoxing and the execution of Yue Fei

After 1127 the Song court fled south before the Jin armies and from 1138 settled at Lin'an (Hangzhou). A first peace in 1138–1139 returned Henan and Shaanxi to the Song, but in 1140 the Jin commander Wanyan Zongbi (Wuzhu) broke it and reoccupied them. Song armies fought back: Liu Qi won at Shunchang, and Yue Fei defeated Wuzhu's cavalry at Yancheng and Yingchang and advanced to Zhuxian, 45 li from Kaifeng. The emperor and Qin Hui, intent on peace, recalled him; the History of Song tells that in a single day he received twelve gold-lettered tablets ordering his return.

In 1141 the court took the armies away from their commanders, appointing Han Shizhong, Zhang Jun and Yue Fei to the Bureau of Military Affairs. Yue Fei was dismissed in September, and on 13 November he and his officer Zhang Xian were thrown into the prison of the Court of Judicial Review on a charge of plotting rebellion. In the eleventh lunar month the Jin envoys Xiao Yi and Xing Juzhan came to Lin'an, and on 17 December the peace oath was agreed: the frontier was to run along the middle of the Huai River and, in the west, through the Dasan Pass; the Song ceded the prefectures of Tang and Deng and later half of Shang and Qin; the Song emperor would call himself a subject of the Jin and be invested by it, and would deliver 250,000 taels of silver and 250,000 bolts of silk every spring. On 27 January 1142, with the case still unproven, Yue Fei was put to death in prison, and his son Yue Yun and Zhang Xian were executed in the market. The History of Song claims that Wuzhu had written to Qin Hui that there could be peace only if Yue Fei was killed, and it records Qin's reply to Han Shizhong, who asked what the crime was: that it ‘perhaps’ existed — mo xu you, ever since a byword for a trumped-up charge.

In 1142 the Jin sent back the coffin of Emperor Huizong and Gaozong's mother, the Empress Dowager Wei, who reached Lin'an in September, and in October Jin envoys received at Lin'an confirmed the treaty. The Huai River frontier, confirmed by later treaties, divided the Jin north from the Song south until the Mongol conquest of the Jin in 1234. Emperor Xiaozong rehabilitated Yue Fei in 1162, and he became one of China's most revered national heroes; at his tomb by the West Lake in Hangzhou iron statues of Qin Hui, his wife and two accomplices kneel in penance. Historians note that much of the Yue Fei legend goes back to the biography compiled by his grandson Yue Ke, and that the allegation that Qin Hui acted in collusion with the Jin has never been proven.