Cao Cao

Chinese politician, military strategist, and soldier-poet

• Born: 155
• Birthplace: Qiao County (now Hao County, Anhui Province), China
• Died: 220
• Place of death: Luoyang, China

Cao Cao unified North China at the close of the Later Han Dynasty, popularized agricultural colonies, and wrote poems that intiated the Jian An literary period.

Early Life

Cao Cao (tsow tsow) was born in the last days of the tottering Eastern, or Later, Han Dynasty (25-220 c.e.). China was on the verge of its second disintegration after a more than four-hundred-year unification of the Qin and Han Dynasties since the period of the Warring States (475-221 b.c.e.). This period witnessed merciless power struggles between court eunuchs and external relatives of the consort families, rampant political corruption, strategic obfuscation in dealing with territorial insurrections and autonomies, successive dynastic usurpations, continuous barbarian invasions, widespread famine and pestilence, and destructive civil wars.

In this political chaos, Cao Cao’s father Cao Song (Ts’ao Sung)—a son of a Xiahou (Hsiahou) family and an adopted son of Cao Teng (Ts’ao T’eng), an influential eunuch during the reign of Emperor Shun (r. 126-144 c.e.)—held the position of minister of finance and, through influence and bribery, the position of commander in chief during the reign of Emperor Ling (156-189 c.e.). Cao Cao himself held several middle-range positions in the reign of Emperor Xian (Hsien; 181-234 c.e.). Despite their ranks, Cao Cao belonged to neither the literati nor the consort families of the Han house, so when the Yellow Turbans Uprising broke out in 184 c.e., he sought to strengthen his position at the expense of the insurgents and then of the military generals who cracked down on the peasant insurrections. Several officials and landlords also sought to expand their own forces in the insurrection-suppressing turmoil and developed into new territorial sovereigns, notably Liu Bei (Liu Pei; 161-223 c.e.) and Sun Quan (Sun Ch’üan; 182-252 c.e.), both of whom were to become Cao Cao’s major rivals.

The year 192 saw Cao Cao’s small army take the prefecture of Yan in the west of today’s Shandong Province. In the prefecture of Qing, the east of Shandong, he was able to lure 300,000 Yellow Turbans into surrender and restructure them into his Qing Prefecture Army. With this military success, Emperor Xian appointed him East-Guarding General. Thereafter Cao Cao was able to take an independent position in the face of the ongoing political turmoil.

Life’s Work

Political disorder evolved to its peak in Cao Cao’s age. Its roots could be traced back to 107 c.e., when Emperor An was enthroned at the age of thirteen as Empress Deng’s puppet and was worsened all the way through the reigns of successive emperors Shao, Shun, Chong, Zi, Huan, and Ling, some being mere infant-emperors whose power lasted no more than a year. In 189 c.e., General He Jin (Ho Chin) was murdered by eunuchs, and General Yuan Shao (Yüan Shao) avenged him by assassinating more than two thousand eunuchs overnight. This was immediately followed by a military coup d’état. Dong Zhuo (Tung Cho), a frontier general, led troops into the capital Luoyang (Lo-yang) and dethroned Emperor Shao, whom He Jin had newly put on the throne. He then enthroned a puppet emperor, a boy of eight known as Emperor Xian (Hsien; 181-234 c.e.), and proclaimed himself regent, leaving the legitimate Later Han Dynasty to continue in name only until its final ruin.

Later, Dong Zhuo burned the capital and relocated the court to Changan (now Xi’an), a move that met nationwide resistance. Cao Cao, allied with Yuan Shao, the most powerful general at the time, launched a punitive expedition again the usurper. Dong Zhuo did not hold his power long and was assassinated by his own adopted son, General Lü Bu (Lü Pu), a victim of personal father-son discord sowed by Prime Minister Wang Yun (Wang Yün). A scramble to control the emperor ensued, and fighting among the old and new warlords resumed.

The year 196 c.e. witnessed a critical turning point in Cao Cao’s political career. That year, Emperor Xian was obliged to leave Changan and take refuge in Luoyang. Cao Cao was able to win the emperor’s confidence and invited him to Cao Cao’s territory Douxu (now Xuchang, Henan Province), thus gaining the advantage of managing the court in the emperor’s name. Cao Cao reduced penalties and taxation and popularized large-scale agricultural colonies known as tuntian to support his growing army and keep the state under his control. His administration provided soldiers and peasant refugees with cattle and seeds for them to cultivate war-ravaged land and build irrigation projects; in return, they received about half of the harvest. Meanwhile, Cao Cao launched a series of campaigns to eliminate rival powers. He first defeated Lü Bu’s separatist army and several weak rival powers and then was challenged by the powerful general Yuan Shao, who had a jurisdiction of four prefectures—Ji (Chi), Qing (Ch’ing), Yu (You), and Bing (Ping)—covering virtually the whole north of China. Capitalizing on his strong military force, Yuan Shao led his army of more than 100,000 soldiers southward in 199 c.e. and made war with Cao Cao. Cao Cao’s army, one fifth the size of Yuan Shao’s, resisted the enemy at Guandu (Kuantu, now the northwest of Zhongmu County, Henan Province). Cao Cao took advantage of Yuan Shao’s arrogance, twice mounting sneak attacks on the enemy’s logistics services and burning their grain supply centers, which greatly shook the enemy’s morale. Cao Cao’s army then advanced on the crest of the victories, put the enemy to rout all along the line, and wiped out Yuan Shao’s crack troops. The Battle of Guandu set up a brilliant example of pitting the few against the many. In the following years, Cao Cao swept out the remaining powers of Generals Yuan Shu and Yuan Tan, defeated the barbarian invasions at the northern and western frontiers, and eventually unified northern China.

Meanwhile, Liu Bei (Liu Pei), a collateral branch of the Han house, had refused to submit to Cao Cao and had built up a regime known as the Shu in the Prefecture of Yi (I, now Sichuan and the south of Shaanxi and Gansu provinces) and most of Hunan and Hubei Provinces. To the southeast of the Yangtse River, Sun Quan had set up a third regime, known as the Wu. This triangular political situation prompted numerous seesaw battles. In 208 c.e., Cao Cao’s supporters proclaimed him prime minister of the Later Han, and together they made war with the Wu, who then allied with the Shu at the Red Cliff by the Yangtse River (now the Red Rocky Mountain to the west of Wuchang County, Hubei Province). Cao’s soldiers and generals, however, were not good at naval battles, so they chained all their warships together for short-term military training. This turned out to be a fatal decision. The allied forces lost no time, launched a fire attack, burned Cao Cao’s warships, and defeated his troops. In the ensuing years, Cao Cao never ceased his goal of unifying the Later Han and launched several wars with Liu Bei and Sun Quan, but none succeeded due to the natural barrier of the Yangtse River and the long distance from the Yi Prefecture.

Cao Cao died in 220 c.e. at the age of sixty-six. In the same year, Cao Cao’s son Cao Pei (Ts’ao P’ei) deposed Emperor Xian. He named Cao Cao’s territory the Kingdom of Wei, conferred on his father the posthumous title of Emperor Weiwu, and proclaimed himself Emperor Weiwen, establishing his capital in Luoyang, thus formerly ending the Later Han. In 221 c.e., Liu Bei proclaimed himself emperor, naming his kingdom Han or Shu-Han—Sichuan was also styled Shu. In 229 c.e., Sun Quan also proclaimed himself emperor, naming his kingdom Wu, with its capital in Jianye (Chienyeh, now Nanjing). Thus China was split into three spheres of political influence, called the Three Kingdoms, which would only be reunified under the Jin Dynasty about forty years later.

Cao Cao showed versatile talents. As a brilliant administrator, he selected his associates by ability but not birth, thus recruiting an increasing number of virtuous advisers and brave soldiers under his banner. As a military strategist, he wrote Sunzi Luejie (late second-early third century c.e.; an annotation of the art of war by Sun Zi) and Bingshu Jieyao (late second-early third century c.e.; essentials of the art of war). As a soldier-poet, he managed to compose many memorable poems and essays. For example, his “Xie Lu Xing” (dew on the shallots) depicts the ruin of the Han and condemns those responsible. His “Duan Ge Xing” (a short song) reveals his innermost feelings about the transience of human life, like the morning dew, with a sense of creeping pessimism, which only drinking and singing can dispel. In “Gui Sui Shou” (though the tortoise lives long) he compares himself to a horse in stall, which, though now aging, still dreams of galloping mile after mile for glory and for the unification of China.

Significance

For nearly two thousand years, Cao Cao has remained a household word in China, and he is an important figure in the novel San guo zhi (third century; San Kuo: Or, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, 1925) and the many plays based on it, portrayed as one of the most dynamic personalities in Chinese history. He was the first to have annotated Sunzi Bingfa (probably 475-221 b.c.e.; Sun Tzu: On the Art of War, 1910), which was his constant companion. As an extremely successful soldier and commander, he never hesitated to kill but always avoided massacres. His flexible strategies and tactics have long given rise to the saying, “Talk of Cao Cao, and he is here,” the Chinese equivalent of “Speak of the devil.” His agricultural colonies helped restore production after the destruction of war and promoted the economic development of North China.

As a soldier, politician, and poet, his poems played a pioneering role in initiating a new literary period called Jian An, after the reign-period name of Emperor Xian. This literary school represented a serious philosophical departure from the declining Han Confucianism at that time, especially from the two Confucian ideals of xiao (filiality) and lian (incorruptibility). The departure found expression not only in Cao Cao’s casting off of the old hereditary system and advocating a merit-based promotion policy but also in his poetry of self-awareness, capturing what a poet saw, did, and aspired to accomplish as well as the consciousness of the misery of the people in ceaseless warfare. Cao Cao, along with his sons Cao Pei and Cao Zhi (Ts’ao Chih), was recognized as “Three Caos,” playing a groundbreaking role in Jian An literature. For the first time, Chinese literature began to reveal the writer’s own voice, expressed at his discretion, without external direction.

Bibliography

Ch’en, Shou-yi. Chinese Literature: A Historical Introduction. New York: Ronald Press, 1961. An account of Chinese literature from a Chinese point of view, beginning with its earliest records and ending in the mid-twentieth century, with brief explanations of philosophical backgrounds in Chinese literary periods.

De Crespigny, Rafe. Man from the Margin: Cao Cao and the Three Kingdoms. Fifty-first George Ernest Morrison Lecture in Ethnology. Canberra: Australian National University, 1990. Poses and answers, from the perspective of a serious historian, the question of what it is that has made Cao Cao, his associates, his rival heroes, and the entire history of the Three Kingdoms so special.

Hall, Eleanor J. Ancient Chinese Dynasties. San Diego, Calif.: Lucent Books, 2000. Focuses on early Chinese civilization up to the fall of the Eastern Han Dynasty and provides a helpful time line of early Chinese dynasties and a short but useful glossary.

Mair, Victor H., ed. The Columbia History of Chinese Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001. Contains two chapters that discuss the Jian An literary period and the novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms: Chapter 13, “Poetry from 200 b.c.e. to 600 c.e.,” and Chapter 35, “Full-length Vernacular Fiction.”

Yap, Yong, and Arthur Cotterell. The Early Civilization of China. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1975. An abridged account of Chinese history from earliest times (500,000 b.c.e.) up to the Yuan Dynasty (1279-1368 c.e.), illustrated by a wide range of photographs, maps, and drawings.