Yang Jia general, a famous military family in the Northern Song Dynasty, the prestige can be said to be a household name, in the "Yang Family General Yanyi", the Yang family is loyal and martyr, all of them are good men. However, Yang Laolinggong's seven sons who were wrapped in the corpse of Ma Ge actually had an element of fiction. The real history is that Yang Laoling had seven sons, and Yang Liulang was actually the eldest son in the family, a real warrior, a nemesis of the Khitans, and his five younger brothers were all civilian officials.
Yang Liulang, whose real name was Yang Tingzhao, was a native of Taiyuan, Shanxi, and was the eldest son of Yang Ye, a famous general of the Northern Song Dynasty, who had six brothers in the family. As a child, Yang Tingzhao was silent and taciturn, but he liked to play the game of fighting and killing the enemy very much, and as the father of the famous anti-Liao general, he was very fond of the eldest son and thought that this child would follow him. Therefore, every time Yang Ye went out on a campaign, he would be taken with him to see the knowledge of military combat. Unexpectedly, after Yang Tingzhao grew up, he also became a famous warrior, and it was really better than blue out of blue.
During the reign of Emperor Taizong of Song and Zhao Kuangyi, Yang Tingzhao was still a small officer, and when attacking Shuozhou, he was shot through the arm by random arrows, and he was replaced by an ordinary person, who had already lost his measure, but Yang Tingzhao, as the vanguard, was more and more courageous in the Vietnam War, and severely damaged the Liao army. Because Yang Tingzhao's official position was too small, even if he had military merit, he could not take his turn, and he was divided up by his superiors, and he could only silently wait for the opportunity to continue to make meritorious achievements.
In the second year of Xianping, the Liao army harassed the frontier, and at this time Yang Tingzhao was in Suicheng and was besieged by the Liao army. Suicheng was a place with low walls and insufficient troops, and after holding on to it for several days, it was about to break the city, and the Song army in the city panicked and prepared to abandon the city and flee. At this time, Yang Tingzhao stood up and used a move to make the Liao army obediently retreat.
It was a cold winter season, the weather was very cold, Yang Tingzhao took advantage of the dark night, gathered all the strong men in the city, took turns to take water and sprinkle the city wall, and the next day was over. The water of the city walls formed a thick block of ice. When the Liao army attacked the city again, it found that the ice on the city wall was hard and slippery, and it was really impossible to climb up, so it had no choice but to withdraw. Because of his meritorious service in defending the city, Yang Tingzhao was appreciated by Song Zhenzong, praised him for having the demeanor of his father, received a rich reward, and was named the Assassin of Mozhou and continued to guard the frontier.
After the martyrdom of his father Yang Ye and his second brother Yang Tingyu, Yang Tingzhao carried the banner of the Yang family general, and the most emblematic side of his military genius was his masterpiece "Yak Army". At that time, the Liao army invaded the north many times, and in order to skillfully destroy the enemy, Yang Liulang secretly bought more than 10,000 yaks, put scarecrows on the clothes of the Liao army, loaded feed on the scarecrow's belly, and then equipped the horn with a sharp knife to train the yak to cut the scarecrow's belly with its horn to eat feed.
After more than a hundred days of repeated training, the yak army finally achieved some results, and Yang Tingzhao thought that the time was ripe, so he ordered more than 10,000 yaks to starve for three days and three nights, and sent troops to the Liao camp to challenge and lure the enemy to come. As soon as the enemy came, Yang Tingzhao immediately released more than 10,000 yaks, and as soon as the yaks saw the Liao army's costume, they directly rushed into the enemy position, picked people when they saw them, and the Liao army suffered countless casualties, and the Song army easily won the victory.
In the third year of Xianping, the Liao army invaded the Song territory from the south, and Yang Tingzhao deployed elite troops to the west of Yangshan in Hebei Province, and then launched a surprise attack on the Liao army in the north, fighting and retreating, luring the enemy to pursue. After leading the enemy to the Western Mountains, the ambushed elite troops launched an attack, resulting in countless casualties of the Liao army, and the general of the Liao army was also killed. In the first year of Jingde, Yang Tingzhao's army reached 10,000 people, and he had become a general guarding the border pass in the town, and when engaging the Liao army, he used cavalry to contain the enemy army, and he led his troops to the Liao Territory, attacked Gucheng, and captured a large number of Liao.
Soon after this incident, the Liao state and the Song Dynasty negotiated peace, the two countries had much less wars, and Yang Tingzhao's prestige spread throughout the Liao state, making the enemy feel frightened, and the Khitan people regarded Yang Tingzhao as a nemesis, and regarded him as the six lang star in the sky (general star), and the name "Yang Liulang" also came from this. It was only later that the author of the novel, mistakenly believing that he was the sixth in line, wrote him as the sixth son of the Yang family.
Moreover, Yang Tingzhao, as the son of Yang's family, had a total of six younger brothers, and the second brother Yang Tingyu was a military general, but he had already been martyred early. As for the five younger brothers, they had a passion for serving the country and killing the enemy, but the Song Dynasty was an era of heavy martial arts and light literature, and extreme precautions against non-concubines, and they were not reused, so all five of them served as civilian officials and almost never went to the battlefield.
Yang Tingzhao was brave and good at war, defeated the Liao army many times, was the nemesis of the Khitan people, guarded the border defense town for more than twenty years, dedicated his life to the country, and finally died of illness at the border pass at the age of fifty-seven.