Who won the Battle of Red Cliffs?
The southern allies Sun Quan and Liu Bei won a decisive victory at Red Cliffs in the winter of AD 208-209, turning back the warlord Cao Cao's far larger army and fleet on the Yangtze with fire and cunning. One of the most famous battles in Chinese history, it prevented the reunification of China and seeded the Three Kingdoms era.2
In late AD 208, the warlord Cao Cao brought an enormous army and fleet down the Yangtze, intending to crush the southern lords and reunite a collapsing China under his control. On the river near the Red Cliffs, a much smaller allied force turned him back with fire and cunning, in one of the most famous battles in Chinese history and the seed of the Three Kingdoms era. Even the battlefield is uncertain: historians still debate where along the river the Red Cliffs stood.3
A dynasty falling apart
By the end of the second century the Han dynasty, which had ruled China for four hundred years, was a shell. The Yellow Turban rebellion of 184 had been put down, but the generals who crushed it became warlords, and the empire broke up among them. Cao Cao, the son of an adopted son of the court's chief eunuch, rose as a general against the Yellow Turbans, took the young emperor Xian under his protection in the mid-190s and ruled in his name. In 200 he beat his great northern rival Yuan Shao at Guandu, and by 207 he controlled the North China Plain.4 › Sun Tzu
Later Confucian historians and the popular novel made Cao Cao the archetypal shrewd and ruthless villain of the age. Britannica notes that modern historians see him rather as a skillful general and a pragmatic politician. In 208, with the north secure, he turned south to finish the job.5
Cao Cao's grand design
The key was Jing province, the rich middle Yangtze. Its governor Liu Biao died in the autumn of 208, and his younger son and heir Liu Zong surrendered to Cao Cao without a fight, so that the great river fleet based at Jiangling fell into Cao Cao's hands. Liu Bei, a wandering lord with a claim to imperial descent who had been living under Liu Biao's protection, fled south. Cao Cao chased him with 5,000 horsemen, covering, it was said, more than three hundred li in a day and a night, caught his column at the Chang Slope near Dangyang and scattered it.6
Cao Cao then wrote to Sun Quan, the young ruler of the lands south of the lower Yangtze, boasting of a fleet carrying 800,000 men and announcing that he was coming "to go hunting in Wu." Many of Sun Quan's advisers urged surrender. Lu Su, and then the general Zhou Yu, urged war. Zhou Yu argued that Cao Cao's men were tired and far from home, inexperienced on water, short of winter fodder and likely to fall sick in the southern marshes. Sun Quan drew his sword, struck the desk in front of him and declared that anyone who spoke of surrender again would end like the desk.7
That night, the chronicles say, Zhou Yu did the arithmetic for his lord. Cao Cao had brought no more than 150,000 to 160,000 men from the north, worn out by long campaigning, and had taken over at most 70,000 to 80,000 of Liu Biao's soldiers, of doubtful loyalty. Sun Quan gave Zhou Yu 30,000 picked men with their ships, and with Cheng Pu as joint commander they sailed up the Yangtze in the tenth month of the Chinese calendar (late November or early December 208) and joined forces with Liu Bei and with Liu Qi, a son of Liu Biao.8
Two armies at the cliffs
The allied fleet moved up the Yangtze past the mouth of the Han River to the Red Cliffs, near present-day Jiayu in Hubei, where it ran into the leading units of Cao Cao's army. Cao Cao's ships had come down the river from Jiangling, and much of his army probably marched east by land to meet them. After a first clash, in which the allies had the better of it, Cao Cao pitched camp at Wulin, on the north-west shore, while the allies took up position facing him below the cliffs.9
The northern army's weakness
Cao Cao's soldiers were mostly northerners, unused to the boats and the diseases of the south, and sickness spread through his camp. His ships were moored close together, bow to stern (the novel later turned this into iron chains to cure his men's seasickness), making a stable platform, but also a single vulnerable mass. The southern commander Zhou Yu and his officers saw the opening.10
Fire on the water
The plan came from Huang Gai, an officer under Zhou Yu, who wrote to Cao Cao offering to come over to his side. He prepared a squadron of warships, ten or several tens depending on the text, packed them with dry reeds and brushwood soaked in oil, covered them with tent cloth and hoisted banners, with a small boat tied to the stern of each. The squadron sailed toward the northern bank as if coming to surrender. In midstream the crews set the ships alight, climbed into the small boats, and let the wind carry the burning hulks into Cao Cao's fleet and camp.11
The flames leapt from hull to hull and spread to the camp on shore. Zhou Yu followed up at once with lightly armed troops, and Cao Cao's army, struck by fire, disease and the attack, broke and retreated north. The chronicles tell of sick and wounded men trampled in the mud of the road to Huarong, and of Cao Cao burning his own remaining ships so the enemy could not take them.12
Rafe de Crespigny, the leading Western historian of the period, warns that the scale of the slaughter may have been exaggerated. In a letter to Sun Quan, Cao Cao himself insisted that it was only because of sickness in his army that he burned his ships and withdrew, and that Zhou Yu had no right to the credit. He left strong garrisons at Jiangling and Xiangyang and kept the north of Jing province. But his armies would never again reach so far south.13
Three kingdoms from the ashes
The defeat ended Cao Cao's chance to reunify China in his lifetime. Sun Quan and Liu Bei secured the south and west, and within a dozen or so years China settled into three rival states, Wei, Shu and Wu. When Cao Cao died in 220, his son Cao Pi took the throne from the last Han emperor and proclaimed the Wei dynasty; Liu Bei claimed the imperial title for himself in 221, and Sun Quan followed in 229. China was not reunited until 280.14
History and legend
Retold in the novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms and countless films and games, Red Cliffs became one of the most celebrated battles in East Asian culture. The novel devotes eight chapters, 43 to 50, to the campaign, and a whole cycle of traditional plays grew up around it. Some of its best-known episodes, such as Zhuge Liang gathering enemy arrows with straw-laden boats or summoning the east wind by magic, come from the novel and the stage tradition, not from the early histories.15
The early histories tell a different story. In Chen Shou's Records of the Three Kingdoms the decisive contribution came from Sun Quan's forces under Zhou Yu and Cheng Pu, the critical blow was Huang Gai's fire attack, and disease among Cao Cao's troops counted for much. The romantic tradition shifted the glory to Liu Bei and his adviser Zhuge Liang and turned Zhou Yu into a jealous rival. Even the east wind needed no magic: de Crespigny notes that although the winter wind there usually blows from the north-west, southerly or easterly winds do occur from time to time.16 › Battle of Talas, 751
Where were the Red Cliffs?
The site has been argued over for centuries. De Crespigny follows the traditional commentators and modern Chinese historical atlases in placing the battle near Wulin, opposite the Red Cliffs close to Jiayu in Hubei, upstream of today's Wuhan. Other traditions put it elsewhere: the eleventh-century poet Su Shi, in his famous rhapsodies on the Red Cliffs, imagined a site further downstream, and a local tradition in Wuhan places the battle where the Han River joins the Yangtze. The battle took place in the winter of the thirteenth year of the Jian'an era, which de Crespigny dates to about the end of 208 in the Western calendar.17 › The Greatest Naval Battles in History
