Red Cliffs, 208 CE: A Fire Attack Won by a South Wind

The problem

By the winter of 208 CE Cao Cao held the north, and the two powers of the south stood on either side of the Yangtze: Sun Quan in Jiangdong, Liu Bei in the west of Jing Province. His plan was simple and, on paper, cheap. He marched south in July intending to take Jing Province first and then move east along the river against Sun Quan. The reasoning was that Jing would fall without a fight, and that Jiangdong, faced with a force of that size, would negotiate rather than fight.

The record gives the army that marched south as 餘十萬 — over 100,000. The 八十万 (800,000) of later literature has no basis in any source from the period and is not used here. A force of that order suits the plan: an army that can take a province by manoeuvre and frighten a second one need not win a battle. The difficulty was that the strength was northern. These were infantry and cavalry who had spent years fighting on dry ground, and the discipline that held them together was cavalry discipline.

Then the river. Northern infantry and cavalry lose their advantage once the enemy can refuse to come down to their level; the fleet Cao Cao inherited with Jing Province was newly surrendered and unreliable; and disease broke out in the army (軍中大疫). The plan depended on the enemy negotiating rather than fighting, and every week on the bank weakened the case for negotiation. The army that was meant to look overwhelming arrived as an army of sick men on borrowed boats.

The movement

In July Cao Cao marched south from Wan (宛). In August Liu Biao, the Governor of Jing, died; in September his second son Liu Cong (劉琮) surrendered at Xinye (新野) without a fight, and the six commanderies of Jing changed hands in a week. The surrender was the hinge of the campaign. It handed Cao Cao the province, its stores, its river position and a fleet he had not built, and it produced the example that shaped every decision he took afterwards.

Liu Bei, based at Fancheng (樊城), withdrew south. Cao Cao’s cavalry overtook him and routed him at Changban (長坂); Liu Bei reached Xiakou (夏口) with what was left of his following. Zhuge Liang then went up the river to Chaisang (柴桑) to argue for resistance. Sun Quan appointed Zhou Yu (周瑜) and Cheng Pu (程普) as left and right commanders and Lu Su (魯肅) as zanxiaojiao (贊軍校尉), and sent 30,000 elite troops (三萬精銳) up the river. With Liu Bei’s forces the allied army numbered about 50,000.

Cao Cao withdrew to Wulin (烏林) on the north bank; the allied army held the south bank at Chibi (赤壁). The two armies now faced each other across the river, and the arrangement was the point: the allies needed only to refuse the crossing, Cao Cao needed to force it. He made his fleet fight on the water by ordering the warship sterns joined with iron chains and planking, so that the seasick northern soldiers could move and drill on the decks as if on land. The Sanguozhi and the Jiang Biao Zhuan both record the measure. It steadied the fleet, and it made the fleet one long target fixed in one place on the river.

The preparation was made on the allied side of the water. Zhou Yu approved the plan and took it over: several dozen mengchong doujian (數十艘蒙冲鬥艦) were loaded with firewood, oil and other combustibles, curtained over and flown with tall flags, with fast light skiffs (走舸) towed behind them. Huang Gai (黃蓋) sent a letter to Cao Cao offering surrender. That night a strong south-east wind rose (東南風大起). Huang Gai took ten light skiffs loaded with dry reeds and dead wood soaked in fish oil, covered with red cloth and flown with banners and dragon pennants, and pushed up the river with the larger fire ships towed behind. Mid-river the sails were raised, and Cao Cao and his officers came out of their camp to watch the surrendering general arrive.

The decisive moment

The proposal came from Huang Gai, and the record gives his words: 「今寇眾我寡，難與持久。然觀操軍船艦首尾相接，可燒而走也。」 — “The enemy is many and we are few; prolonged contest is hard to sustain. But look at Cao Cao’s ships, linked bow to stern — they can be burned and driven off.” The observation was geometric. Cao Cao had chained his fleet to make it stable, and in doing so had made it long, and a long line of ships with a fire at one end is a fire that travels. The manoeuvre that decided it also had to cross open water to a fleet anchored under the enemy’s camp.

Cao Cao received the messenger and answered: 「蓋若信實，當授爵賞，超於前後也。」 — “If Huang Gai is sincere, I shall reward him above all who came before.” The record explains why he believed it. He had taken Jing Province by surrender and a rapid march; the capitulation of Liu Cong, and of Kuai Yue (蒯越) and Zhang Shao (張昭) with him, had convinced him that another surrender was on its way. The Jiang Biao Zhuan says plainly that this run of successes blinded him to the deception. It was not credulity about Huang Gai. It was a general rule about how campaigns ended, formed in six weeks and applied without checking.

One man checked. Cheng Yu (程昱) noticed that the approaching ships were light and floating (來船輕而浮) — not the heavy grain ships a surrendering general would bring, but something else — and warned Cao Cao that a ruse was likely. The warning was not acted on. The ships kept coming, the officers came out of the camp to watch them, and at two li from the camp the fires were lit on every vessel at once: 「火烈風猛，船行如箭」 — “the fire fierce, the wind strong, the ships moving like arrows.”

The outcome

The fire reached the camp on the shore. The Sanguozhi’s sentence is short: 「頃之，煙炎張天，人馬燒溺死者甚眾」 — “in a moment the smoke and flames filled the sky, and a great many men and horses were burned or drowned.” The allied army attacked. Zhang Liao and Xu Huang fought off attacks in the chaos around the camp, and Liu Bei’s forces struck the flanks and the rear with Zhang Fei and Zhao Yun.

Cao Cao’s army broke up and left by the Huarong road (華容道). There was rain and wind, the mud was deep and the road blocked, and the exhausted soldiers filled the ruts with brushwood and were trodden down — 「嬴兵為人馬所蹈藉，死者滿地遍野」 — “the weakened soldiers were trampled by men and horses, the dead covering the ground everywhere.” Liu Bei had an ambush ready with brushwood to burn and fired it late. Cao Cao afterwards said that had it been sprung earlier, not one of his men would have escaped.

Cao Cao burned his remaining ships and withdrew. The Sanguozhi’s account of the ruler of Wu records: 「公燒其餘船引退，士卒饑疫，死者大半」 — “he burned his remaining ships and withdrew; the soldiers were hungry and diseased, more than half of them died.” Zhou Yu had also sent Gan Ning (甘寧) to raid Yiling (夷陵) and cut the road back to Jiangling. The immediate result was political: the river stayed in the alliance’s hands, and the campaign left the Han state with an army it had to feed and a southern command it had to give up. The same men fought a sequel in 222 CE, when Lu Xun (陸遜) used fire against Liu Bei.

What the record cannot tell us

The place is not settled. The Chibi area of present-day Hubei and the Wulin site on the north bank at Honghu are both in the tradition, and the geography of a short encounter on a wide river is not the kind of ground a later reader wants. The scale of the fleets is not recoverable either: the record gives numbers of men and a handful of ships, and no count of the vessels Cao Cao chained or of the fire ships that burned them.

How much of the defeat was disease and how much was fire cannot be settled. Pei Songzhi’s commentary on the passage reads: 「至於赤壁之敗，蓋有運數。實由疾疫大興，以損厲厲之鋒，凱風自南，用成焚如之勢。天實為之，豈人事哉？」 — in substance, the defeat owed much to fortune: the epidemic had blunted the army’s edge, the south wind made the burning, and Heaven did it rather than human effort. Cao Cao’s own letter says something similar for a different reason: 「赤壁之役，值有疾病，孤燒船自退，橫使周瑜虛獲此名。」 — “In the battle of Red Cliffs there was disease; I burned my ships and withdrew, and thereby let Zhou Yu falsely take the credit.” Read as advocacy, written to explain a defeat to a court that needed an explanation, the letter disagrees with the narrative of the fire. Read as evidence of how contemporaries accounted for the disaster, it shows that the two causes were already in tension while the event was still fresh.

And the record does not contain the story most people know. Zhuge Liang did not borrow the east wind, there were no straw boats borrowing arrows, there was no chain of deception answered by counter-deception, and the record says nothing about personal antagonism between Zhou Yu and Zhuge Liang. Modern scholarship reads the historical battle as a short encounter on the river in which the only attested special element is the fire attack. Everything else belongs to the Romance of the Three Kingdoms — a novel, and a very good one, but not a source.