Cao Cao

As the Han dynasty disintegrated in the late second century CE, Cao Cao fought his way from minor official to master of northern China, ruling in the name of a powerless emperor. He laid the foundations of the state of Wei, which his son proclaimed in 220, opening the Three Kingdoms period. A capable general, administrator and poet, he is also one of the most famous villains of Chinese fiction, a reputation owed far more to later storytelling than to the historical record.

The core account of his life is his biography in the Records of the Three Kingdoms, written by Chen Shou in the third century and expanded in the fifth by Pei Songzhi with material from other works. Some of those were written under his own dynasty and flatter him; one anonymous collection from the rival state of Wu is openly hostile. The fourteenth-century novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms, attributed to Luo Guanzhong, mostly follows the history but casts Cao Cao as a cruel, suspicious schemer set against the virtuous Liu Bei and his adviser Zhuge Liang, and that image has dominated popular culture ever since.

Born around 155 in Qiao county, in today's Anhui, Cao Cao was the son of Cao Song, adopted son of a powerful palace eunuch. After entering the civil service at about nineteen, he served as a security officer in the capital, Luoyang, and in 184 commanded imperial troops against the Yellow Turban Rebellion.

When the warlord Dong Zhuo seized the court in 189, Cao Cao fled, raised an army with his family's money and joined the coalition formed against Dong in 190. Around 192 he took over Yan province, absorbing more than 300,000 surrendered Yellow Turbans and forming a new corps from the toughest of them. His invasions of neighbouring Xu province in 193 and 194, partly to avenge his murdered father, were marked by the massacre of thousands of civilians.

In 196 he took the young emperor Xian under his protection and moved the court to Xu, today's Xuchang. From then on he governed in the emperor's name. He also set up military agricultural colonies, the tuntian system, to feed his armies and resettle refugees. In 200, at Guandu, he defeated his strongest rival, Yuan Shao, after a raid led by Cao Cao himself with 5,000 horsemen burned Yuan's supply depot at Wuchao. Over the next seven years he destroyed Yuan's heirs and their Wuhuan allies, reuniting most of northern China.

In 208, newly appointed imperial chancellor, he marched south to conquer the Yangtze region but was defeated at the Battle of Red Cliffs by the allied forces of Sun Quan and Liu Bei, while disease ravaged his army. He never managed to cross the Yangtze in force. He beat a northwestern coalition at Tong Pass in 211 and took Hanzhong in 215, only to lose it to Liu Bei by 219.

The emperor made him Duke of Wei in 213 and King of Wei in 216, with privileges previously reserved for emperors. Cao Cao died in Luoyang on 15 March 220. Later that year his son Cao Pi forced Emperor Xian to abdicate, founding the Wei dynasty and naming his father Emperor Wu. A tomb found near Anyang in 2008 was announced as his in 2009; doubts followed, but the formal excavation report of 2016 largely settled the identification.

Cao Cao lived frugally and wrote a commentary on Sun Tzu's Art of War that survives. With his sons Cao Pi and Cao Zhi he led the Jian'an school of poetry, which influenced Chinese verse for centuries. Chen Shou called him an extraordinary man, while later moralists condemned him as a usurper; modern writers, from Lu Xun to Mao Zedong, have argued for a more favourable verdict.

Our 200 map shows the last years of Han rule in China, when Cao Cao was its real ruler; our 300 map shows the Jin dynasty that succeeded Wei.