Cai Jing
In 1125, Imperial Academy official Chen Dong submitted a report to Emperor Huizong, denouncing six "traitors" in the imperial court, deemed responsible for the government's decline. The six were Cai Jing, Wang Fu (), Tong Guan (), Zhu Mian (), Li Yan (), and Liang Shicheng (), with Cai as the group's leader. Cai Jing was stripped of his official post and banished to Lingnan (present-day Guangdong) after Emperor Qinzong came to the throne. Song Scholar Ebrey devotes an appendix in her biography of Huizong reporting how it "is not uncommon to find modern historians who portray Cai Jing as a strong supporter of the alliance" and hence a traitor. She concludes, however, that this was untrue and the result of An Yaochen's 1118 memorial directed against Tong Guan and Cai Jing. Later, "Huizong told the eunuch Liang Shicheng that Cai Jing was the only one who consistently had argued against the northern campaign." Cai Jing starved to death along the journey at Tanzhou (present-day Changsha, Hunan) "as merchants reportedly refused to sell him food. Ill and over eighty, he died within ten days on his way to his site of banishment. On the same day, it was ruled that no future amnesties would lighten the exiles of twenty-three of [his] sons and grandsons [who had also been banished]."