Lu Meng

Lu Meng took Jing province from Guan Yu in 219 in one of the best-executed deceptions in Chinese military history, and died within months of doing it. He came from a poor family in Runan, followed his brother-in-law into Sun Ce's army as a teenager, and was for years the type of officer who was brave and unlettered; Sun Quan told him to read, and the transformation was complete enough to produce a proverb about the scholar one has not seen for three days. He succeeded Lu Su as commander in the west, inheriting a policy of alliance with Liu Bei that he did not believe in, and argued to Sun Quan that Jing province mattered more than the friendship. The method was patience. He made a show of illness and withdrew, so that Guan Yu - then besieging Fancheng in the north - felt safe stripping his southern garrisons; then he moved his troops upriver hidden in merchant vessels, took the watchtowers without alarm, and entered the cities almost without fighting. He forbade looting and had a soldier from his own county executed for taking a farmer's hat, and treated the families of Guan Yu's men so well that the army dissolved as the news reached it. Guan Yu was captured and beheaded. Lu Meng was rewarded enormously and fell ill at the celebration, dying at forty-one. The novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms, written to make Guan Yu a saint, has Lu Meng killed by his ghost, which is a measure of how thoroughly literature reversed the verdict on a campaign that succeeded completely. Sun Quan named him with Zhou Yu and Lu Su as the three commanders who made Wu possible. He was forty-one when he died, and the campaign that made his reputation had ended weeks earlier.

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