Battle of Xiaoting

The Battle of Xiaoting, also known as the Battle of Yiling and the Battle of Yiling and Xiaoting, was fought between the state of Shu Han and the vassal kingdom of Wu in 222 CE in the early Three Kingdoms period of China. The battle is significant because Wu was able to turn the situation from a series of initial losses into a defensive stalemate, before proceeding to win a decisive victory over Shu. The Wu victory halted the Shu invasion and preceded the death of Liu Bei, Shu's founding emperor.

Background

In late 219, Lü Meng, one of Sun Quan's generals, led an army to invade Liu Bei's territory in Jing Province (covering parts of present-day Hubei and Hunan). Guan Yu, the general appointed by Liu Bei to guard Jing Province, was away at the Battle of Fancheng and did not know about the invasion until after he returned from the battle. He was surrounded by Sun Quan's forces in Maicheng (麥城; present-day Maicheng Village, Lianghe Town, Dangyang, Hubei) and captured in an ambush while trying to break out of the siege. Sun Quan had him executed in Linju (臨沮; in present-day Nanzhang County, Xiangyang, Hubei).

Dynasty Warriors

Dynasty Warriors (真・三國無双, Shin Sangokumusō, literally translated as "True ・ Three Kingdoms Unrivalled") is a series of tactical action games created by Omega Force and Koei. The award-winning series is a spin-off of Koei's turn-based strategy Romance of the Three Kingdoms series, based loosely around the Chinese historical text Records of the Three Kingdoms, from which it derives its name in Japanese.

The first game titled Dynasty Warriors, Sangokumusō in Japan, is a fighting game and different from the rest of the series. All English titles are a number ahead of their Japanese counterparts due to the English localization of naming Shin Sangokumusō, a spin-off of the previously mentioned Sangokumusō game, as Dynasty Warriors 2.

It is Koei's most successful franchise. Including its many spin-offs, 18 million copies of the Dynasty Warriors series have sold worldwide by 2011.

Main series

The first Dynasty Warriors (Sangokumusō) is a traditional one-on-one fighting game, released in 1997 for the PlayStation. Its gameplay style is reminiscent of Virtua Fighter and Tekken with the addition of weapons and some exotic moves.

Liu Bei

Liu Bei (Mandarin pronunciation: [lju peɪ]; 161 – 10 June 223),courtesy name Xuande, was a warlord in the late Eastern Han dynasty who founded the state of Shu Han in the Three Kingdoms period and became its first ruler. Despite early failings compared to his rivals and lacking both the material resources and social status they commanded, he gathered support along disheartened Han loyalists who objected to Cao Cao's reign over the emperor and relied heavily on this support. Liu Bei overcame his many defeats to carve out his own realm, which at its peak spanned present-day Sichuan, Chongqing, Guizhou, Hunan, parts of Hubei, and parts of Gansu.

Culturally, due to the popularity of the historical novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms by Luo Guanzhong, Liu Bei is widely known as an ideal benevolent, humane ruler who cared for his people and selected good advisers for his government. His fictional counterpart in the novel was a salutary example of a ruler who adhered to the Confucian set of moral values, such as loyalty and compassion. Historically, Liu Bei like many Han rulers were greatly influenced by Laozi, Liu Bei was a brilliant politician and leader whose skill was a remarkable demonstration of a Legalist. Liu Bei's somewhat Confucian tendencies were dramatized also because compared to his rival states' founders Cao Pi and Sun Quan, both of which ruled as pure Legalists. His political philosophy can best be described by the Chinese idiom "Confucian in appearance but Legalist in substance" (simplified Chinese: 儒表法里; traditional Chinese: 儒表法裡; pinyin: rú biǎo fǎ lǐ; Wade–Giles: ju² piao³ fa³ li³), a style of governing which had become the norm after the founding of the Han dynasty.

Yi Ling

Yi Ling (born 1928, Jiaxing, China), formerly known as Qian Jinfan, is the oldest known transgender person in China. She started living as a woman at age 80, and had sex-reassignment surgery in 2010. She works as a calligrapher and an art critic, and was once a government official. In 2009 she submitted a declaration letter to the Foshan Culture and Media Bureau, where she had worked before retiring; at that time she was starting to take hormones to enlarge her breasts and to wear women's clothes. The government did not lower her pension or refuse to allow her to attend conferences. In 2010 she wrote another letter to inform the authorities that she was a woman. Yi Ling has a son, and has been married to a woman, Liang, since the age of 54.

She first came out publicly as a transgender woman in 2012.

References

Zhao Yun

Zhao Yun (died 229), courtesy name Zilong, was a military general who lived in the late Eastern Han dynasty and early Three Kingdoms period. Originally a subordinate of the northern warlord Gongsun Zan, Zhao Yun later came to serve Liu Bei and had since accompanied Liu on most of his exploits—from the Battle of Changban (208) to the Hanzhong Campaign (217–219). He continued serving in the state of Shu Han in the Three Kingdoms period, participating in the first of Zhuge Liang's Northern Expeditions, until his death in 229. While many facts about Zhao Yun's life remain unclear due to limited information in historical sources, some aspects and activities in his life had been highly dramatised or exaggerated in folklore and fiction, most notably in Luo Guanzhong's historical novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms, in which he was lauded as a member of the Five Tiger Generals under Liu Bei.

Historical sources on Zhao Yun's life

Zhao Yun's original biography in the Records of the Three Kingdoms (Sanguozhi), written by Chen Shou in the third century CE, is only 346 Chinese characters long. In the fifth century, Pei Songzhi added annotations from the Zhao Yun Biezhuan (趙雲別傳; Unofficial Biography of Zhao Yun) to Zhao Yun's biography in the Sanguozhi, providing a relatively clearer, though still incomplete picture of Zhao's life.