Xiang Yu

Xiang Yu destroyed the Qin dynasty in the field and then lost the empire to Liu Bang, a former village constable, in the four-year contest that produced the Han. He came from a line of generals of the state of Chu that Qin had conquered, and joined the risings that followed the death of the First Emperor in 210 BC. His reputation was made at Julu in 207 BC, where he crossed the river, sank his boats and broke the cooking pots so that his men had three days of rations and no way back, and destroyed the main Qin field army; the phrase for burning one's boats in Chinese still refers to it. He entered the Qin capital after Liu Bang had already accepted its surrender, massacred the surrendered garrison, killed the last Qin ruler and burned the palaces. Rather than take the empire he partitioned it into nineteen kingdoms and styled himself Hegemon-King of Western Chu, an arrangement that collapsed within months. The Chu-Han contention that followed turned on his inability to hold what he won: he was the better commander in almost every engagement and steadily lost ground, because Liu Bang had Xiao He organising supply and recruitment behind him and Xiang Yu alienated the advisers he had. He drove away Fan Zeng, the only one who had told him to kill Liu Bang when he had the chance at the Hongmen banquet. Surrounded at Gaixia in 202 BC and hearing Chu songs sung by the enemy camp to convince him his homeland had gone over, he broke out with a few horsemen and killed himself at the Wu River rather than cross to safety. Sima Qian gave him a chapter reserved for rulers, and Chinese opera and poetry have treated him as the model of the magnificent loser ever since. His concubine Yu is said to have killed herself in the camp at Gaixia, and the scene became the Peking opera Farewell My Concubine. Liu Bang buried him with the honours of a duke.

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