James Baquet Rare is the Chinese citizen unfamiliar with the “Si Da Ming Zhu,” the “Four Great Masterpieces” of Chinese literature. The oldest of these, “The Romance of the Three Kingdoms,” attributed to Luo Guanzhong, is a novel set in the period of the Three Kingdoms (220-280). Those kingdoms were Cao Wei, Shu Han, and Eastern Wu (often referred to simply as Wei, Shu and Wu). The essence of the novel is the historical struggle of these three for dominance, which ended with a country unified under the Jin, successor to the Wei. One of the most important battles in that period was the Battle of the Red Cliffs, a naval battle fought on the Yangtze River in a location perhaps somewhere near modern Chibi (“Red Cliff”) City, Hubei Province, on the Yangtze River, in the winter of the years 208-209. (Note that this date was near the end of the Han Dynasty, a few years before the official start of the Three Kingdoms period, which had been brewing since perhaps 184, as the Han disintegrated.) In the battle, the southern warlords Sun Quan (later Emperor of Eastern Wu) and Liu Bei (who became Emperor of Shu Han) were allied against the northern warlord Cao Cao, chancellor of the declining Han, who had been trying to take a stretch of the Yangtze in order to access and control southern territories. The battle involved 50,000 on the southern side against as many as 800,000 (as claimed by Cao Cao) or perhaps more like 230,000 (according to Sun Quan’s general Zhou Yu), making it one of history’s largest naval battles. The first skirmish took place on the river. Cao Cao then withdrew his force to the north, as Sun Quan’s general Huang Gai destroyed the remaining ships of Cao Cao by subterfuge. Feigning surrender, he approached the fleet and pushed fire ships toward them. On the north side of the river, Cao Cao’s troops — already weakened by sickness, including seasickness and tropical diseases, to which the southerners were immune — fled north, pursued by the Sun-Liu alliance, and were defeated during their disastrous retreat on the Huarong Road. Cao Cao never fully recovered, though the kingdom was united. Vocabulary: Which word above means: 1. prime minister, premier 2. trick, ruse 3. not susceptible to 4. pretending, faking 5. developing 6. brought together as one 7. from the region near the equator 8. growing weaker, deteriorating 9. fell apart |