One question. Is the halberd wielding warrior supposed to be Xue Ren Gui?
how do you know?! and yes
I m just fascinated after reading Tang chronics about the war against turks and arabas,
unlike how ancient europeans deal with calvary charging with walls of shelds and extreemly long pikes, the tang chinese, on the other hand, they line up in lose collums yet the front soldier didnt even equipted with shelds, but they holding up the unique Mo Dao (long saber) flat/slant pointing towards the charging calvaries. Mo Dao units always had the highest casualties of all chinese units (heavy infantry, light/heavy calvary, crossbow man and other units) however they brought devastating blow to those turkish heavy/light calvaries every single battle.
according to those chronic, the reason the ancient chinese chose this tactics against the turkish calvary was the fact that we knew those turkish barbarians were excellent horsemanship, they were fast, eager and extremely manoeuvrable against conventional infantry formations, so the only thing to inflict the maximun damage to them were to have them engaged in close quarter combat... this was kind of suicido tactics, but worked every time heroically,
when heavy calvary locked up with agile infantry with long, hard and lethal Mo Dao, they lost all their advantages against infantry. Once engaged Mo Dao soldiers wielding, slashing and chopping long two-handed sabers cut them (man horse) into pieces, literally pieces described in those historical records.