Echoes of the Abandoned: Legends of the Ghost Army

It details two distinct historical narratives of "Ghost Armies," contrasting the tragic reality of abandoned frontier soldiers with the supernatural legends of a usurper's secret forces. In the first account, General Guo Xin and his men were cut off from the Tang Dynasty in Kucha for forty-two years, minting their own crude coins and aging into a "phantom" force that held the line until their eventual annihilation by the Tibetan Empire. Conversely, the second account describes how the "Pig Lord" (Liu Yu) allegedly employed a mysterious, invulnerable army—speculated to be a secretly trained unit of mute soldiers wearing rattan armor—to defeat a coalition in Nanjing and seize the imperial throne.