Battle of Kunyang

Thirteen riders out the south gate

In AD 23, at Kunyang in what is now Henan, roughly eight or nine thousand Han-aligned insurgents were still inside the walls as a much larger Xin army came up. Wang Mang's government had concentrated a major punitive expedition against the restored-Han movement.

Liu Xiu left Kunyang's south gate at night with thirteen mounted companions and went to gather reinforcements from Yan and Dingling.

A vanguard of a thousand, then three thousand at the center

On the traditional converted date of 7 July, Liu Xiu advanced with a vanguard of slightly more than a thousand infantry and cavalry and won the opening engagement.

He then picked three thousand men, crossed from west of the city and struck the Xin central formation. Wang Xun — the expedition's commander and Grand Minister over the Masses — was killed, and the formation collapsed.

Kunyang's defenders sallied out and joined the attack. A violent storm and an overflowing river compounded the rout, and the other commander, Wang Yi, escaped with a small mounted party.

Numbers the sources cannot reconcile

The army totals do not agree. One tradition reports 50,000 to 60,000; another has roughly 100,000 reaching Kunyang; a third gives 420,000 nominally mobilized. The Han-aligned side after reinforcements came to fewer than 20,000 — about 9,000 defenders and 10,000 who arrived with Liu Xiu.

The 7 July date is a modern conversion of the Hou Hanshu's jimao day in the sixth lunar month, and the Hou Hanshu was compiled under the dynasty Liu Xiu himself founded, in triumphalist and partly portentous language. The consulted sources also do not establish that the city had been under active siege for two full months.

What is clear is the outcome: the siege ended, Wang Xun was dead, and Wang Yi's shattered expedition withdrew toward Luoyang, leaving the Xin government without its principal field force.