Grand commander of Wu at thirty-nine. Waited six months against his own generals' contempt, then burned four hundred li of stockades in a night.
I am only a scholar, and I hold my charge from the lord. The reason the state has bent you all to look to me is that I have an inch of worth: I can bear humiliation and carry weight.Lu Xun to his resentful generals, 222; Sanguozhi, Wu shu 13
Appears in
Three Kingdoms 3 · panel 7Three Kingdoms 3 · panel 8Three Kingdoms 3 · panel 10Three Kingdoms 3 · panel 11Three Kingdoms 3 · panel 15Three Kingdoms 8 · panel 11Three Kingdoms 8 · panel 12Three Kingdoms 9 · panel 5Three Kingdoms 9 · panel 9
Relations
- Sun Quan commander & king — Sun Quan's trust made him grand commander at 39; Sun Quan's anger over the succession broke him in 245.
- Liu Bei opponents — Yiling, 222 CE. He burned the line, then refused pursuit — Wei was the real enemy.
Myth vs record
The story you may know
The young scholar who pursued too far, lost his way in Zhuge Liang's stone maze of the Eight Trigrams, and was led out by a father-in-law.
What the sources say
No history knows the maze. The sources give a commander who refused battle for six months, burned the line in a night, and then stopped at the border on purpose because Wei's armies were massing behind him.