Fan Zeng

Fan Zeng told Xiang Yu to kill Liu Bang at a banquet, was overruled, and Chinese tradition has treated the refusal as the moment the Han dynasty became possible. He was an old man from Juchao, said to have been over seventy when he attached himself to the rebellion against the Qin, and he advised Xiang Liang to put a grandson of the old king of Chu at the head of the rising in order to give it legitimacy, which was done. After Xiang Liang was killed he served his nephew Xiang Yu, who called him Yafu, second only to a father. At the Hongmen banquet in 206 BC, with Liu Bang in the camp and at his mercy, Fan Zeng raised his jade pendant three times as the signal to strike and Xiang Yu would not give the order; he then arranged a sword dance to have Liu Bang killed during it, and that failed too. He is recorded afterwards smashing a jade cup and saying that the young man was not worth planning for and that they would all be Liu Bang's prisoners one day. During the siege of Xingyang in 204, Liu Bang's adviser Chen Ping spent gold on spreading the story that Fan Zeng was negotiating separately with the enemy, and Xiang Yu believed it and stripped him of authority. Fan Zeng asked leave to go home and died of an abscess on the road. Xiang Yu was destroyed at Gaixia two years later. Sima Qian's Records of the Grand Historian is the source for almost everything known about him. The Hongmen banquet has been dramatised in Chinese opera, fiction and film continuously for two thousand years. Liu Bang himself is recorded as saying afterwards that Xiang Yu had one Fan Zeng and could not use him, and that this was why he lost.

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