Zhuge Liang

Zhuge Liang was offered the throne of Shu Han by its dying founder and spent the next eleven years governing for the founder's incapable son instead. He was orphaned young, raised by an uncle, and lived as a farmer at Longzhong near Xiangyang, where he was known to a small circle as the Crouching Dragon. Liu Bei visited his cottage three times in 207 before he agreed to serve, and the interview he then gave - the Longzhong Plan - set out the strategy Liu Bei followed for the rest of his life: take Jing province and the Sichuan basin, ally with Sun Quan in the southeast, and wait for a division in the north. He was sent to negotiate that alliance in person in 208, and it produced the victory at Red Cliffs. As chancellor of Shu from 221 he ran a small, poor state on the edge of the empire with a reputation for exactness: he wrote out the laws, applied them to himself, demoted himself three ranks after the defeat at Jieting, and executed a commander he had promoted against advice. He pacified the south in 225 in a campaign Chinese tradition remembers for capturing the Nanman leader Meng Huo seven times and releasing him each time. From 228 he launched five northern expeditions against Wei, all of which failed on supply rather than in battle; he built repeating crossbows and a wheeled transport he called the wooden ox to feed them. He died in camp at the Wuzhang Plains in 234. His memorial to the throne before the first expedition, the Chushi Biao, is memorised in Chinese schools, and the Romance of the Three Kingdoms turned him into the model of the loyal strategist who can summon the wind. He is credited in Chinese tradition with inventing the wheelbarrow and improving the repeating crossbow. He was made Marquis of Wu and is worshipped at temples in Chengdu and elsewhere.

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