A surrendered prefect of five walled counties who became the army's model of good order, brought a bowl of hot bean porridge at Raoyang, and was nicknamed the Tree General because he stood aside under a tree while the other officers sat and argued about their credits.
Twenty years later the emperor was still reciting the debt: the porridge of the urgent days at Wulou and the wheat at the Hutuo had gone long unrepaid.The emperor's own words about him, preserved in his biography; the meal itself is the memoir's — Hou Han shu, juan 17, Biography of Feng Yi
Appears in
Relations
- Emperor Guangwu commander — He was a surrendered prefect of five walled counties who became the army's model of good order, and the man who put a bowl of hot bean porridge into the hands of a fugible prince of the blood at the Raoyang post-house in the cold.
- Wu Han colleagues — The two northern commanderies are where the flight across Hebei ended: the cavalry that arrived in the winter of 24 CE came under Wu Han and Kou Xun, and Feng Yi's memoir keeps the meals that got him there.
Myth vs record
The great generals of the restoration were the men who shouted loudest over their credits, and the historian's nickname for the quiet one is a polite way of calling him weak.
The nickname is the army's own and it is the opposite of an insult. When the officers sat together arguing their credits, he stood aside under a tree, and they called him the Tree General; the same book has to record that he was the model of good order in an army of wanderers, and that the emperor was still reciting the porridge and the wheat twenty years later. It is the minor officers of Xinhe and Shanggu and Yuyang who saved the flight across Hebei, and the record does not hide the fact that the man who fed him was a prefect who had surrendered five walled counties.