When Zhao Xu, who was only nine years old at the time, inherited the throne of the Great Song Dynasty, Song Shenzong, the most pioneering reform emperor in the last years of the Northern Song Dynasty, had already driven to the west. Because the new emperor was too young, the empress dowager in the palace, Empress Gao, finally waited for the opportunity.
The first thing the empress dowager, who was very disgusted with the change of law and trying to be strong, did was to transfer Sima Guang, a 67-year-old anti-reform leader who was far away in Luoyang, back to the imperial court.
Sima Guang
Sima Guang had been away from the court for 15 years, and for 15 years he had been with Zizhi Tongjian every day, but he had never slackened off for a moment about opposing the change of law. During his years in Luoyang, he wrote into the book all his denigration of the change and his personal attacks on Wang Anshi to vent his dissatisfaction.
When the opportunity came, he could not wait to leave for The Beijing Division kaifeng. His return is not to prove how great he is, but to tell the people of the world that to change the fa and try to be strong is nonsense, how can Wang Anshi be compared with sima Guang?
After arriving in Kaifeng, Sima Guang's first thing was to visit the empress dowager Gao Shi, and finally reached a consensus, and the next day cai was labeled as disrespecting the divine sect, and another leader of the reform faction, Zhang Yu, was framed for assassinating the empress dowager, and the two were imprisoned one after another.
Subsequently, the other members of the law-changing faction were also dismissed and investigated on various sensational charges, and just when the remaining law-changing factions were preparing to fight back, there was an unexpected storm in the sky, and the great drought that had brought Wang Anshi down came again.
Empress Gao
Sima Guang complied with the law and put the charge of the great drought on the head of the law-changing faction's nonsense. Sima Guang's nemesis, Empress Dowager Gao, immediately took advantage of this rare opportunity to expel the members of the Change faction. As a result, the Court of the Great Song Dynasty was completely occupied by the conservatives, and Sima Guang completely expelled the Reformers.
Then, he began to frantically formulate a policy of abolishing all new laws, and Wang Anshi, who was idle in Jinling City, received the news of the abolition of the law, and he did not believe to his death that this former friend would do such a desperate thing.
Sima Guang's hatred of the new law had risen to the point of personal hatred, and he not only completely abolished all the new laws, but even planned to return to Western Xia the land of Longyou that Wang Shao had seized in seven years when the Xihe River was opened, only because What Wang Shao had done in those years was arranged by Wang Anshi.
Five months after Wang Anshi's death, Sima Guang followed suit, and he spent the last part of his life to abolish Wang Anshi's legacy to the public. Ironically, until his death, he did not offer even the slightest opinion that would be beneficial to the future development of the Great Song.
Song Zhezong
After Sima Guang's death, although the conservatives split, their strategy to suppress the reformers remained unchanged, and they frantically created rumors and slandered Cai Qi, the leader of the reformers, and finally relegated him to Lingnan on the charge of literal prison.
This ended the Song Dynasty's century-old practice of not abusing Wen Chen, and Cai Qi died within two days of arriving in the vast wasteland of Lingnan. Cai Qi's death caused fear among the reformers, who were no longer worried about the future of the Great Song Dynasty, while the conservatives did not learn from this incident and became more and more rampant, and finally eliminated all the reformers in the remaining places.
Without an enemy, they create enemies, and as soon as the law-changers leave, a struggle begins within the conservatives. Fast forward two years, the little emperor Song Zhezong, who was deliberately forgotten by the empress dowager Gao and the conservative ministers, was 17 years old, and there was not even a shadow of pro-government affairs.
The empress dowager was unwilling to delegate power, and the conservative ministers were attached to Gao's side, and did not do a single thing to benefit the country and the people behind their backs. To the greater concern of Gao and his conservative ministers, the new emperor held his father, Song Shenzong, highly regarded him.
Just when they tried their best to change Song Zhezong's mind, Gao Shi, who had occupied the imperial power of the Northern Song Dynasty for eight years, fell ill and died. The 18-year-old Song Zhezong has been waiting for this day for a long time, and Song Zhezong, who holds state power, is not as unkind as Sima Guang.
He first handed out olive branches to the conservatives Fan Chunren and Su Shi, hoping that they could help them restore the new law and recreate the glory of the Great Song Dynasty.
However, what he did not expect was that Fan Chunren and others rejected his kindness and criticized Wang Anshi and the new law. From this moment on, these ministers, who represented the interests of the conservatives, completely lost the opportunity to reconcile with Song Zhezong.
First of all, Su Shi's younger brother Su Rui rebuked his father Emperor Shenzong in front of Song Zhezong, and then was directly demoted from the capital. Subsequently, the core of the conservative factions such as Fan Chunren and Lü Dafang were released one after another, and most of the reformers who had previously been relegated to other places were recalled to the court and reactivated, especially Zhang Huan's return to the imperial renxiang.
The first thing to do when returning to the reformers in Beijing is to fully restore the new law regulations and then liquidate the conservatives. As for the dead Sima Guang and others, they withdrew the previous wind sealing, and all the descendants were implicated, and even planned to exhum Sima Guang's body for whipping, but was urgently stopped by Song Zhezong.
Although the law changers are like the conservatives in the court and engage in party strife, compared with the incompetence of the conservatives, the law changers are indeed much stronger.
While restoring the new law, they corrected the problems existing in the reform of the law during the Song Shenzong period, further expanded the content of the change, ensured the people's livelihood and people's interests, and raised the economic strength of the Great Song Dynasty again, getting rid of the backwardness and poverty brought about by the conservatives' eight years in power.
In the military field, it even reversed the situation in which the conservatives were only beaten and did not fight back, completely abandoned Sima Guang's strategy of "retreating as long as there was a struggle on the border," began to take the initiative to attack, and relied on strong comprehensive national strength to implement a strategy of gradual encroachment on Western Xia. Eventually, it forced the Western Xia to make peace, and achieved temporary peace on the Song and Xia borders.
However, Song Zhezong did not give up his long-cherished wish to annex Western Xia, and he longed to bring strong national strength through the transformation of the law, and then continued to use troops against Western Xia, and eventually erased it from the map. Unfortunately, the sky did not wait for him, and the 25-year-old Song Zhezong died after 8 years of pro-government, and the fate of the Great Song also ushered in a turning point.