Military Preparedness Manual, Volume 39

Strategic Studies

Tang Dynasty, Part 3

...attacking from the north and south in a pincer movement pincer maneuver (jijiao) to take Fanyang The rebels' primary base and political center.. We shall overturn their very nest. If the rebels retreat, they will have nowhere to return to; if they stay, they will find no peace. Then, our great armies will converge from all four sides to attack them, and they will surely be captured.

Shi Siming and his associates led a force of one hundred thousand to invade Taiyuan. At that time, the elite troops under Li Guangbi's command had all been dispatched to Shuofang A military district in the north where the Emperor was gathering forces., leaving him with a remaining force of fewer than ten thousand men. All his generals were terrified and proposed repairing the city walls to prepare for the onslaught.

Guangbi said: "The perimeter of Taiyuan is forty li Approximately 13 miles or 20 kilometers.. The rebels are nearly upon us; to begin such a massive labor project now would only be to entrap and exhaust ourselves first."

Instead, he led the soldiers and civilians outside the city to dig a deep moat to secure their defenses. They constructed trenches on such a scale that although hundreds of thousands of workers original: "shu shi wan zhong," implying a massive labor force of soldiers and locals. were employed, no one understood what their ultimate use would be.

When the actual attack on the city began, Guangbi used the earth excavated from these trenches to reinforce the ramparts. Whenever a section of the wall was destroyed by the enemy, it was immediately patched and repaired using the prepared earth. A month passed, and the city still had not fallen.

Shi Siming then selected his most valiant and sharpest elite troops to serve as mobile skirmishers roving troops (youbing). He warned them: "I will attack the north; you shall secretly hasten to the south. If there is an opening, take advantage of it."

However, Guangbi's military discipline was strict and orderly, and though...