Wanted a diversion for his wife's brother's army, took a boast for a promise, then suspected the man who made it. He wished the defeated general dead on the steppe, killed his mother and wife on a misreport, and admitted later that he had been wrong about the relief.
Zhao Xin has always taught the Chanyu that our troops cannot cross the desert and hold there. Now we send out massed infantry — the shape of it is that we get what we want.Emperor Wu in council before the desert campaign of 119 BCE, reading his old enemy's adviser; Shiji, juan 111, Biographies of the General and the Brilliant Rider
Appears in
Relations
- Zhang Qian patron — He asked the questions Zhang Qian answered from thirteen years of absence, believed the answers, and paid for the western road out of the empire's own census.
- Wei Qing commander — He raised a household rider to General-in-Chief, gave him half the empire's hammer in 119 BCE, and then let him go on without a single increase of fief.
- Sima Qian enemies — He asked one clerk what he thought of a defeated army, heard a slur on his wife's brother in the answer, and the sentence that followed was paid in currency.
Myth vs record
Emperor Wu is the throne at the top of Han strength: he broke the Xiongnu, opened the west, and made the empire what it was.
His own books set the bill beside the triumph. Of a hundred and forty thousand horse counted out at the passes in 119 BCE, fewer than thirty thousand came back; the year after the great strike, rewards and gifts came to five hundred thousand jin of gold, and the treatise says the treasury was empty and the fighting men rather went without their pay (Hanshu, juan 24). The chapter that describes the Mobei states that no further strikes were made because Han's horses were few. Late in the reign he admitted he had been wrong about the Li Ling relief — that he should never have written Lu Bode into the edict at all — and sent an envoy to reward the survivors of a broken army, which is the only public reversal the histories record for him in this affair.