Zhuge Liang

Few figures in Chinese memory are as revered for wisdom as Zhuge Liang, the chief minister of the state of Shu Han during the Three Kingdoms period. Born in 181 as the Han dynasty was falling apart, he served the warlord Liu Bei as strategist, then as chancellor, and finally governed Shu as regent until his death on campaign in 234. The real statesman was able and austere; the wizard-like tactician of popular stories is largely a creation of later fiction.

His family came from Yangdu county in Langya, in present-day Shandong. Orphaned young, he was raised by a relative, Zhuge Xuan, who took him south and eventually to Jing province. After Xuan's death Zhuge Liang settled at Longzhong, near Xiangyang, farming, reading and keeping company with local scholars, who nicknamed him the "Sleeping Dragon".

Liu Bei, a warlord then living in Jing province as a guest of its governor, was urged to seek him out. The official history says only that he visited three times before they met, which the later chronicle Zizhi Tongjian places in 207. Zhuge Liang laid out what became known as the Longzhong Plan: take Jing and Yi provinces, ally with Sun Quan in the east, and then challenge Cao Cao, who held the north.

When Cao Cao invaded the south in 208, Zhuge Liang went as envoy to Sun Quan and helped forge the alliance that defeated Cao at the Battle of Red Cliffs that winter. Liu Bei then took southern Jing province and, between 211 and 214, Yi province in the southwest, roughly modern Sichuan.

After Cao Cao's son ended the Han in 220, Liu Bei proclaimed himself emperor of Shu Han in 221 and made Zhuge Liang his chancellor. Falling mortally ill in 223, after his defeat at Xiaoting the previous year, Liu Bei entrusted his son Liu Shan to him, adding an ambiguous remark that Zhuge Liang might decide for himself if the heir proved unfit. Zhuge Liang remained loyal. As regent he ran the government, restored the alliance with Wu, promoted officials by merit, and enforced strict but even-handed laws, blending Confucian and Legalist ideas.

In 225 he led an expedition into the Nanzhong region of the far south to put down rebellions, favouring conciliation with the local peoples. In 227 he presented to the emperor his memorial known as the Chu Shi Biao, explaining his reasons for war with the rival state of Wei; it is still admired as a model of Chinese prose. His first northern offensive, in 228, won over three Wei commanderies, until his subordinate Ma Su disobeyed orders and was routed at Jieting, forcing a retreat; Zhuge Liang had Ma Su executed. Several further campaigns followed, hampered by mountains and supply problems, for which he is credited with a transport device called the "wooden ox and flowing horse".

In 234 he led more than 100,000 men to the Wuzhang Plains, where his army farmed alongside local people while facing the Wei general Sima Yi in a standoff of over a hundred days. He fell ill and died in camp in the autumn of that year, aged 54 by Chinese reckoning, and was buried simply on Mount Dingjun as he had asked. Liu Shan honoured him as Marquis Zhongwu.

The fourteenth-century novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms made him a near-magical genius who summons favourable winds at Red Cliffs, builds an enchanted stone maze and bluffs an army with an empty fortress. These episodes are fiction or, in the case of the empty fortress, a story first told of other men, and several inventions credited to him, such as the repeating crossbow, actually improved on older designs. Even so, the historical record shows a remarkably capable and loyal minister, and temples to him still stand in Chengdu and elsewhere in China.

Our 200 map shows the last years of Han rule in which he rose; by our 300 map the Three Kingdoms have been reunited under the Jin dynasty.