Battle of Changping

The Battle of Changping was a long campaign fought from 262 to 260 BC between Qin and Zhao, the two strongest military powers of China's Warring States period, in the hills north-west of present-day Gaoping in Shanxi province. It ended in a decisive Qin victory followed by the mass killing of surrendered Zhao soldiers. Zhao never recovered its strength, and the battle cleared the way for Qin's later unification of China.

In 265 BC Qin attacked the state of Han and cut off its northern commandery of Shangdang, in the area of modern Changzhi, from the rest of the Han kingdom. As Qin troops seized the passes around it, Shangdang's governor, Feng Ting, chose to hand the region to Zhao rather than surrender it to Qin. Shangdang lay just west of the Zhao capital, Handan, and King Xiaocheng of Zhao accepted, sending his senior general Lian Po to hold it.

In 262 BC a Qin army under Wang He invaded Shangdang. After early defeats Lian Po stopped offering battle in the open and dug in behind fortified lines along the Dan River, reasoning that Qin's long and difficult supply routes through the mountains would wear its army down. The plan worked well enough to produce a stalemate across the river that lasted for about two years, while both sides poured in reinforcements.

According to the traditional account, Qin agents spread rumours in Zhao that Lian Po was old and timid. King Xiaocheng, already impatient with the costly deadlock, replaced him with Zhao Kuo, son of the celebrated general Zhao She. Zhao Kuo was well read in military theory but had no experience of command, and his mother and the minister Lin Xiangru are said to have warned the king against him. Qin, meanwhile, secretly put its most feared general, Bai Qi, in charge of its army.

In 260 BC Zhao Kuo abandoned the defensive approach and attacked across the river. Bai Qi's forward troops fell back to prepared hill positions, drawing the Zhao army after them, while separate Qin detachments, 25,000 men and 5,000 light cavalry according to the account, moved round to cut its supply lines and split it from its base. The Zhao army was trapped. Qin's King Zhaoxiang raised further troops to tighten the ring, and Zhao, having alienated its neighbours through shifting alliances, received no help from other states.

The surrounded army held out for 46 days, by which time its men were starving. Zhao Kuo was killed by Qin archers while leading a last attempt to break out, and the remaining Zhao troops surrendered.

Bai Qi judged that the prisoners were too many to feed or guard and too dangerous to release. He ordered them put to death, traditionally by burying them alive, sparing only 240 of the youngest, who were sent home. The Han dynasty historian Sima Qian, writing more than a century later in the Records of the Grand Historian, the main source for the battle, put the Zhao dead at about 450,000 and Qin's losses at about 250,000. Whatever the true numbers, scattered bones and mass graves are still being found at the site.

King Zhaoxiang refused Bai Qi's request to press on at once against Handan. When a Qin attack came, Zhao obtained help from Chu and Wei, and Qin suffered a heavy defeat at the Battle of Handan. Bai Qi, who had refused to lead that campaign, was ordered to take his own life. In the long run, however, Zhao had lost the army that made it Qin's most capable rival. In 221 BC, under King Zheng, later known as Qin Shi Huang, Qin completed its wars of unification and founded the first imperial dynasty of China. Zhao Kuo's failure gave Chinese the idiom "talking about war on paper", for someone strong in theory but weak in practice.

Our 300 BCE map shows Qin and the other Warring States of the late Zhou dynasty a generation before the battle; the 200 BCE map shows the unified empire under the Han dynasty.