The emperor's planter of stratagems, ennobled six times for counsels the record says were kept too secret to be heard. At Baideng what it will let him say is an order of march: crossbows strung, two arrows nocked to the outside, and walk.
The Hu are armed to a man. Let every strong crossbow carry two arrows to the outside, and we walk out slowly.Chen Ping's order of march out of the ring at Baideng, 200 BCE, recorded in the memoir where he held the post of Protector of the Army; Shiji, juan 93, Memoir of Han Xin and Lu Wan (the same walk in juan 110)
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Relations
- Liu Bang commander — The emperor's planter of stratagems, ennobled six times for counsels the record says were kept too secret to be heard by anyone in the age.
- Modu enemies — Against the ring what the record will let him say is a march-order; the part of the escape it credits to him it then refuses to describe.
Myth vs record
He broke the encirclement with a marvel: a painter's picture of the beauties of Han, sent through the lines to make the Chanyu's wife jealous so that she would beg her husband to loosen the ring.
The Shiji credits him with a marvellous device, says the Chanyu's wife was reached with it and the ring opened by it — and then states plainly that his devices were largely secret, so that nobody in the age ever heard them; the Hanshu annal is content with one clause, that he got out by Chen Ping's secret plan (Shiji, juan 56; Hanshu, juan 1). The jealous-beauty version is a guess made four centuries later by Huan Tan, preserved only because commentators quoted a lost essay. What the records will actually show is a bribe carried through the lines, a rendezvous the Han defectors failed to keep, a heavy fog coming up, and the march-order on this card. Late in life, holding the chancellorship under the new emperor, he said of himself that he had taken too many dark counsels, and that this is what the teachers of the Yin and Yang forbid (juan 56).