Jingkang Incident
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In January 1127 Juchen steppe nomads captured the Chinese capital of Kaifeng and with it the Song emperor. What came to be known as the Jingkang Incident was a major event in Chinese political history, but it was also a turning point in military technology, being one of the earliest occasions on which gunpowder was used in battle.
A confederation of tribal horsemen, the Juchen had developed imperial ambitions, declaring the foundation of the Jin dynasty in 1115. From 1125 they began a war against the Northern Song dynasty, rulers of most of China. As so often in Chinese history, horsemen proved superior in open battle, but had difficulty taking walled cities.
The Liao emperor surrendered to the Juchen in 1125, ending that dynasty and leaving the Juchen to devote their full attention to conquering the remaining Chinese states, including the Song, which had allied with them against the Liao. The Juchen began their siege of Kaifeng, an ancient capital in east-central Henan, in December 1126. The Song had been experimenting with gunpowder, placing it on the tips of arrows as an incendiary device and bundling quantities of it in bamboo or paper, tied up with string, to make a primitive bomb. Hurling these “thunderclap bombs” from the walls shocked the Juchen—a Chinese source states that “many fled, howling with fright”—but the “bombs” were in truth no more than noisy firecrackers.
No relief army arrived to save the city, which fell to the Juchen in mid-January 1127. There followed an orgy of looting and wanton destruction. The fate of the population was grim: the survivors were subjected to rape and other cruelties, or sold into slavery. The imperial family was not spared. Song Emperor Qinzong was carried off into the Juchen heartland and lived the rest of his life there with the status and dress of a servant. A new Song emperor, Qinzong’s half-brother Zhao Gou, was chosen to rule southern China, but the north was lost to the Juchen, which ruled until the arrival of Genghis Khan’s Mongols in the early thirteenth century.
Losses: No reliable figures.