Yan Jiming

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Yan Jiming (顏季明; 730 – 756) was a Chinese official of the Tang dynasty. He was the son of Yan Gaoqing, who was serving as the Grand Protector of Changshan at the outbreak of the An Lushan Rebellion in 755. He was also the childhood sweetheart and husband to He Shi, who became a Hidden One.

In cooperation with the Hidden One Li E, Jiming and his father formed an army to resist An Lushan's forces. Jiming personally led his troops to attack Tumen Pass, occupying it after Li E assassinated three Yeluohe commanders there. He then waited for Tang reinforcements while Li E proceeded to Taiyuan to request them. However, both Jiming and Gaoqing were later defeated by An Lushan and sent to An's newly captured capital of Luoyang in chains, where they were summarily executed.

Biography

Yan Jiming was born in 730 and hailed from a lineage which had been employed in the Tang government for generations. By the time of his father, Yan Gaoqing, they were an established family which could relatively have been regarded as nobility although they were not particularly wealthy. Whereas his father served as Grand Protector of Changshan Commandery, his thirteenth uncle Yan Zhenqing—more precisely his first cousin once removed—was the Grand Protector of Pingyuan Commandery. Apart from his family's connections, Jiming grew up playing with a girl named He Hong'er, and the two fostered romantic affections in childhood.

A new friend falls from the sky

Because Gaoqing was preoccupied with his duties in that office, Jiming attended the Flower Banquet of 754 in Chang'an in his place, accompanied by Uncle Chen. The young man found the splendid bouquets of flowers which blanketed the city on this occasion to be mesmerizingly beautiful, and he felt that it was sad for so many of these to go to waste after the festival was over. He resolved to collect batches of them that were originally meant to be thrown away and donate them to children outside Chang'an. To that end, Jiming and Uncle Chen took a flower disposal wagon as their transport out of the Xingqing Palace grounds once they were ready to return home.

While they were moving down the avenue to the gate, a young man spontaneously fell right out of the sky, plunging directly through the wagon roof and landing on the floor in front of Jiming. Miraculously, he was unscathed although the same could not be said for the roof. Jiming stared in confusion at the mysterious stranger with his hand on his sheathed sword, asking who he was, but as soon as the man noticed him, he swiftly lunged at him with a wrist blade drawn towards his chin. With his other hand pressed against his sword-arm, the signal was clear that he was not to give him away.

In front, Uncle Chen called out from the driver's seat to check on the situation, and Jiming lied that he had accidentally destroyed the ceiling with a kick while practicing martial arts. Uncle Chen did not believe him, pointing out frankly that he lacked the skills for that, but he was relieved that they had not run anyone over and did not feel the need to question further. Per the stranger's command, Jiming shouted at Uncle Chen to resume driving, and he promptly complied.

This gave the stranger a reprieve which allowed him to relax, retract his blade, and settle into his seat. His hostility immediately subsided, and he apologized for his threat, remarking that he had mistaken this for an empty disposal wagon. Blushing, Jiming shared his reason for riding in one, and it was a motive that warmed the stranger's heart, causing him to reassure him that he would not harm him and that his only objective was to leave the palace grounds safely.

At these words, it dawned on Jiming that the stranger was an assassin, but their carriage was stopped at the gates at that moment. The guards informed Uncle Chen that they had orders to check every carriage moving in and out of the palace due to the infiltration of a criminal that night, and they shouted at the passengers to come out and report their identities. Pulling aside the curtain with the assassin still in hiding behind him, Jiming declared his name and his status as the son of Grand Protector Yan Gaoqing of Changshan.

Because the guards recognized his family name, they were embarrassed and tried to explain that they had mistaken him for a commoner by the plain carriage, to which Jiming affably corrected them that he really was a commoner. He almost panicked, however, when they asked if he had chanced upon any suspicious individual. Despite the stranger having threatened his life earlier, Jiming willingly lied to protect him, and their carriage was finally allowed to pass through unmolested.

As soon as they were free, Jiming released his pent-up anxiety, and the assassin could not help but remark on his mannerisms being unlike that of other noble scions. Jiming repeated that his family were not really nobles, and then, swept up by euphoria like he was fresh from an adventure, he suddenly leapt on his feet to ask the assassin if he could teach him the "art of flying across eaves and running on walls". Much to his dejection, the assassin lightly teased that Uncle Chen was right about him not being "martial arts material", but he added as he climbed out of the carriage that he owed him a debt that he would be sure to repay given a future opportunity. Jiming did not neglect to make sure he got his name before he left, and he happily replied, "Qinghe'ren, Li E!"

Occupation of Changshan

At the end of 755, the jiedushi An Lushan revolted in late 755 from Fanyang with a force of at least 150,000 soldiers. Under the false pretense of rescuing the Tang from the corruption of Prime Minister Yang Guozhong, he began his inexorable march southwest towards Chang'an, and Changshan laid directly on this path of conquest. At around the turn of the year, his army arrived before the gates of Changshan.

Jiming was flabbergasted watching below from the ramparts with his father, but he dared not to entertain the real implications of this massive force. His father ordered him to accompany him as he descended to personally greet Lushan—and to silence all questions and keep his wits open lest they invite doom. With only a small group of guards, they opened the gates and presented themselves before the entire sea of intruders. Lushan's greeting was to present the mutilated Vice Regent Yang Guanghui of Hedong on a flagpole and summarily execute him with a hail of arrows. Despite this act of intimidation, Gaoqing kept up formalities and tried to politely dissuade him from proceeding further by reasoning that public misunderstandings would not be beneficial to Lushan. This impressed the warlord, who thereupon decided to play along with the charade of pleasantries by honouring Gaoqing with a purple cloak and then offering to leave behind two lieutenant generals, Gao Miao and Li Qincou, to protect him—a thinly veiled euphemism for a hostile occupation.

That night, Jiming shared a counter-perspective while alone with his father out in a courtyard, preparing to ritually destroy the cloak bestowed by Lushan. He mused out loud that, given Yang Guozhong's heinous crimes and the wrongs wrought against his uncle, Yan Zhenqing, Lushan's military plot might possibly a blessing in disguise. He could not contain his rage at an unjust society where corrupt people could enjoy fortune and honour over virtuous ones. His father was quick to correct him that whether or not Guozhong deserved death had no relevance to this matter, for if the Emperor wished to crackdown on corruption, he would not need to invite frontier troops to the capital to achieve this. Therefore, the secret edict authorizing Lushan's campaign was fraudulent, and the jiedushi was committing treason.

Jiming's father proceeded to lecture him not to cling tightly to grace and enmity but rather to recognize how fortunate their family already was for being able to live affluently, lifestyles which were enabled through government salaries and the common people's taxes. With that, he dropped a candlestick onto the purple cloak and incinerated it. As Jiming watched the priceless robes burn away, Gaoqing expressed that although he had not achieved much of a reputation, he was content that he had lived his life being "broad-minded and open-hearted", without bringing shame to his ancestors. Even so, he thought the same could not be said for Jiming, for Jiming was still young and only recently married. He believed that his son still had a future before him, where he could be whoever he wished to be.

Then came Jiming's earnest response: "I wish to be the same kind of person as my father." Gaoqing grimly reminded him that Gao Miao and Li Qincou had five thousand elite troops stationed at the nearby Tumen Pass surveilling their every move and that they only had a paltry militia of 10,000 villagers opposed to the Lushan's 150,000-strong grand army. Jiming admitted that he was fearful and yet the same could be said for those villagers, many of whom were the same age as him. His voice imbued with resolve, he asserted that his father's leadership would forever be in question should they flee and that the Yan family did not produce defectors. Finally, he added that he also wished to live a "broad-minded and open-hearted" life.

It took a moment for Gaoqing to take in his son's words, but once he did, he turned to him with fierce determination and issued the order for him to covertly contact all twenty-four commanderies of Hebei Circuit to deliver a call-to-arms for a counter-rebellion.

Appearances

• Assassin's Creed: Dynasty