Guan Yu

Guan Yu was a general of the warlord Liu Bei who was executed by a rival in 220 and has been worshipped as a god for most of the fourteen hundred years since. The historical record in the Records of the Three Kingdoms is comparatively thin: he joined Liu Bei in the fighting that followed the collapse of Han authority, was captured by Cao Cao and treated with honour, killed the enemy commander Yan Liang in battle and then returned to Liu Bei rather than accept Cao Cao's service, which is the episode on which his entire later reputation for loyalty rests. He held Jing province for Liu Bei and in 219 besieged Fancheng, where he flooded the enemy camps and captured a relieving army. He then lost everything at once: Sun Quan, nominally an ally, sent Lu Meng to take Jing province behind him, his own subordinates surrendered the cities, his army dispersed, and he was captured and beheaded. Sun Quan sent his head to Cao Cao, apparently to spread the blame. The novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms, written over a thousand years later, made him the pattern of righteousness and gave him the red face, the long beard and the halberd he is always shown with, along with episodes that are not in the histories. Successive dynasties promoted him: duke, then prince, then emperor, then a god of war under the Ming and a full state cult under the Qing. He is worshipped today by Chinese police and by triad societies alike, by merchants as a god of wealth, and in Buddhist and Daoist temples both. That a middling general of a losing side became the most widely venerated figure in Chinese popular religion is a matter of literature rather than of history. Temples to him stand across east and southeast Asia wherever Chinese communities settled. His supposed birthplace at Yuncheng in Shanxi has a temple complex covering several hectares.

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