Historical Figures

She escaped a locked shed as a girl, reached the far south of Hainan, and spent thirty years learning cotton weaving from the Li women of the island. When she came home she rebuilt the tools, taught the whole district, and made cotton cloth cheap enough for ordinary people. This is the story of Huang Daopo.

When an emperor was captured and half a million men were destroyed, the court wanted to run south. Yu Qian stopped them with one sentence, put a different emperor on the throne, and held the walls of Beijing with a patched together army. Eight years later the man he had brought home from captivity had him killed. This is his story.

He failed the highest examination, spent ten years in the capital living on scraps, came home to find his youngest son starved, and was taken prisoner by rebels in the fall of the dynasty. Out of all of it he made poems so exact that later ages gave him two names: the Sage of Poetry and the Historian of Poetry. This is the story of Du Fu.

He copied documents in the capital for a living, then threw down his brush and rode west. With thirty-six men he burned a Xiongnu camp in the night, killed a shaman, seized a king, and spent thirty-one years holding the western regions for Han. In the end he sent the emperor one line: I only hope to enter the Jade Gate alive. This is the story of Ban Chao.

He was sixteen when he took the throne and seventy when he died, and in between he doubled the size of the Han empire, broke the Xiongnu, opened the road to the west, and buried a fortune in wars. Then, near the end, he fought his own crown prince in the streets of the capital, lost him, and wrote an edict admitting that he had been wrong. This is the story of Han Wudi.

Born in a foreign capital while his father lived there as a hostage, Ying Zheng became King of Qin at twelve, took power in his own hands at twenty-one, and by thirty-eight had destroyed the last of the six rival states. He invented the word emperor, cut the realm into commanderies, and ordered the roads, the writing and the weights made one. He died on a tour in 210 BC, and the empire he built lasted three years. This is his story.

In 195 Cai Wenji, the daughter of the great Han scholar Cai Yong, was carried off by raiders and taken north to the steppe. She lived there twelve years and bore two sons. In 207 Cao Cao bought her back with gold, and she had to leave the children behind. She came home, married again, and one day walked barefoot into the Chancellor hall to save her second husband life. This is her story.

A farmer of twenty-six laid out the future of a divided empire for a general who had nothing. It was the last time in his life he was an unknown man. For the next twenty-seven years Zhuge Liang kept that conversation, through a broken alliance, a deathbed promise, five marches through the mountains, and an army camp on the Wuzhang Plains where he read every punishment case himself until he worked himself to death. This is his story.

In 1079 Su Shi was arrested on a charge of mocking the government in his poems. He spent one hundred and three days in prison, expecting to die. He was not executed. He was sent to Huangzhou instead, and then, over the next twenty years, exiled farther and farther south, until he reached an island in the far south of the empire. He wrote his finest work on the way down. This is his story.

In 119 BC a Han cavalry column rode north for more than a thousand miles. The man leading it was twenty-one years old. Before he turned twenty-four he had driven the Xiongnu out of the Hexi Corridor, performed a sacrifice to heaven on a sacred enemy mountain, and became Grand Marshal of the Han armies. Then he died, and the histories recorded it in a single word. This is his story.