Huang Zu

Huang Zu killed Sun Jian, executed the most famous insulting scholar of the age, and was hunted for sixteen years by the son of the man he had killed. He was Liu Biao's Administrator of Jiangxia, holding the middle Yangtze where the Han river joins it, which made him the frontier commander against the rising Sun family downstream. In 191, when Yuan Shu sent Sun Jian against Liu Biao, Huang Zu was beaten in the field and withdrew into the hills near Xiangyang; Sun Jian pursued him with a small escort and was killed there, by an arrow or by rocks rolled down from above, and the accounts differ on which. That death made Huang Zu the standing target of Sun Ce and then Sun Quan. He received the scholar Mi Heng, who had already been passed from Cao Cao to Liu Biao because nobody could tolerate his insults, and had him executed when he was insulted in turn at a banquet; Mi Heng was twenty-five, and the episode is the one every literate Chinese reader knows him for. Sun Quan attacked Jiangxia repeatedly from 203. In 208 the attack succeeded: Huang Zu's fleet was broken on the river, the city fell, and he was caught fleeing and beheaded, his head taken to be offered at Sun Jian's shrine. Cao Cao moved south in the same year, and Red Cliffs followed. Sun Quan's attacks on him were the making of Gan Ning, who served Huang Zu first, was slighted, and defected to fight against him. The campaign of 208 is the first in which the Sun forces are recorded using massed river warfare of the kind that decided Red Cliffs a few months later. His dates of birth are unrecorded, as they are for most men of his rank in the period.

• Nationality: Chinese
• Roles: military