Cao Cao

Cao Cao held the Han emperor and ruled in his name for twenty years without taking the throne, and Chinese tradition has argued ever since about whether he was a statesman or a usurper who lacked the nerve. He came from a family adopted into eunuch influence at court, which the aristocracy never let him forget, and rose through the campaigns against the Yellow Turban rebellion. In 196 he took the fugitive Emperor Xian under his protection at Xu, which gave every order he issued the appearance of imperial authority. At Guandu in 200 he destroyed the much larger army of Yuan Shao by burning the supply depot at Wuchao, and the north was his. At Red Cliffs in 208 the alliance of Sun Quan and Liu Bei destroyed his fleet by fire and fixed the division of China into three. He settled soldiers on state farms to feed his armies, promoted men on ability rather than birth in edicts that said so explicitly, and was a considerable poet - his Short Song Style is still anthologised. He accepted the title King of Wei and refused the imperial one, saying that if heaven meant it for his house he would be as King Wen of Zhou. His son Cao Pi deposed the emperor within a year of his death. The Romance of the Three Kingdoms made him the great villain of Chinese fiction. In 193 and 194, avenging his father's murder, he devastated Xu province in campaigns his own historians describe as slaughtering the population of whole districts. He built his capital at Ye rather than at the imperial city, and the court he kept there produced the Jian'an style of poetry, his son Cao Zhi being the finest writer of it. He advised that he be buried plainly and without treasure, and a tomb identified as his was excavated near Anyang in 2009 amid a long public argument about whether it was really his. He was posthumously made Emperor Wu of Wei by the son who took the throne he had declined.

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