At the end of October, the weather turned cold rapidly, and nights in Hebei began to freeze.
On the twenty-sixth, early in the morning, with the cold biting hard, Zhang Shiyu, Governor of Bohai, stationed south of Leling, rose early, put on leather armor, and draped a cloak over it. Then he personally accompanied Xue Wanbi, a general of the Hejian Grand Camp, north of the city to meet the Hejian generals in the northern camp and the commander of the Hejian Grand Camp, who had arrived in haste the previous night: Xue Changxiong, Northern Hebei Campaign Commander, Grand General of the Left Martial Guard and concurrently Governor of Hejian.
Now, Leling had not been completely encircled... with sixty or seventy thousand men and a city this large, a mere thirty or forty thousand could not surround it even if they wanted to... instead, two camps had been established along the southwest-to-northeast courses of the rivers north and south of the city, providing only a rough blockade.
Of these, the ten thousand-odd Bohai Commandery troops led by Zhang Shiyu and the ten thousand Hejian Army troops under the three Palace Gentlemen, Xue Wanbi, Wang Changhe, and Guo Shiping, were deployed to the south. Xue Wannian, Xue Wanquan, Zhang Shirang, Wang Fubei, Wang Changxie, Chen Bin, Wang Yu, and the other generals commanded twenty-five thousand Hejian Army troops to the north.
Of course, with Xue Changxiong's hurried arrival the previous night, the northern camp-and indeed the entire battlefield-had acquired a new commander.
Thus, Governor Zhang arrived at the northern camp, but rather than entering a military stockade, he turned into a residence-the area around Leling was the heart of Bohai, with settlements everywhere outside the city, and both the government armies to the north and south and the Righteous Army beneath