Red Cliff

After watching the first part last year, the much anticipated movie Red Cliff 2 is finally out. I was a little disappointed due to the lack of fighting scenes throughout most of the movie but the final battle was really well elaborated with the decisive naval battle which crippled Cao's navy and a 2-pronged attack by Zhou Yu and Liu Bei crushed Cao's forces in the middle leaving them with no escape.

3 factors which led to Zhou's success in the battle

• change in wind direction in their favour for a fire attack on the ships
• poor choice of base camp by Cao which renders the navy useless
• finally the intelligence of Zhuge Liang in devising the military strategy

This was a remarkable feat considering that Zhou's forces were heavily outnumbered in terms of troops as well as warships.

The movie also depicts Zhuge Liang (takeshi kaneshiro) as a know-it-all whether it comes to farming, delivering a horse, playing zither, predicting the weather and of cause coming up with surefire military strategies.

One of the things he did which impressed me was how he manage to create 100 000 arrows in 3 days.

Using straw boats to borrow arrows

Before the Battle of Red Cliffs, Zhuge Liang went to visit the Wu camp to assist Wu strategist Zhou Yu. Zhou Yu saw Zhuge Liang as a threat to Eastern Wu and was also jealous of Zhuge Liang's talent. Therefore, he assigned Zhuge Liang the task to make 100,000 arrows in ten days or face execution. Zhuge Liang, however, swore he would finish this seemingly impossible task in three days. He requested 20 large boats, each manned with many straw men and a few soldiers. Before dawn, Zhuge Liang ordered his soldiers to beat war drums and shout orders, to imitate the noise of an attack.

Zhuge Liang sat with Lu Su inside one of the boats drinking wine. The Wei soldiers, unable to see in the fog, fired many volleys of arrows at the sound of the drums. The straw men were soon filled with arrows, and Zhuge Liang returned to Wu having fulfilled his promise.

Other strategies not in the movie ...

Stone Sentinel Maze

In Chapter 84, as Lu Xun pursued the fleeing Liu Bei after the Battle of Yiling, he felt a strong enemy presence near Baidicheng and cautioned his army for possible ambush. He sent scouts ahead, who reported that the area was empty except for some scattered piles of stones. Bewildered, he asked one of the locals, who answered that Qi started to emerge from the area after Zhuge Liang had arranged the stones there. Lu Xun himself then inspected the area, and determined that the array was only a petty display of deception. He led a few cavaliers into the array, and as he was about to come out, a strong gust blew. Soon, duststorms were shadowing the sky and the stones became swords, mountainous piles of dirt emerged while the waves of the Yangtze River sounded like swords and drums. Lu Xun exclaimed, "I fell into Zhuge's trap!" and attempted to exit to no avail.

Suddenly, Lu Xun saw an old man standing before his horse, who then asked if Lu needed assistance out of the array. Lu Xun followed the man and exited the maze unharmed. The old man revealed himself to be Zhuge Liang's father-in-law Huang Chengyan, and explained that the array is constructed using the ideas of the Bagua. Huang Chengyan said that Zhuge Liang had predicted that a Wu general would stumble across this maze as he constructed the structure, and asked Huang Chengyan not to lead the general out when that happens. Lu Xun immediately dismounted from his horse and thanked Huang Chengyan, and when he returned to his camp, he exclaimed that he could never top the genius of Zhuge Liang.

Empty Fort Strategy

During the first Northern Expedition, his efforts to capture Chang'an were undermined by the loss at the Battle of Jieting. With the loss of Jieting, Zhuge Liang's current location, Xicheng (西城), was in great danger. With the army deployed elsewhere and left with only a handful of civil officers in the city, Zhuge Liang decided to use a ploy to ward off the advancing Wei army.

Zhuge Liang ordered all the gates to be opened and had civilians sweeping the roads while he sat high up on the gates calmly playing his zither with two children beside him. When the Cao Wei commander and strategist Sima Yi approached the fort with the Wei military, he was puzzled by the scene and ordered his troops to retreat.

Zhuge Liang later told the bewildered civil officers that the strategy only worked because Sima Yi was a man of suspicion, the latter having personally witnessed the success of Zhuge Liang's highly effective ambushing and misdirection tactics many times before. Furthermore, Zhuge Liang had a reputation as a keen but extremely careful military tactician who rarely took risks. Zhuge Liang's well-known carefulness, coupled with Sima Yi's own suspicious nature, led Sima Yi to the conclusion that entry into the apparently empty city would have drawn his troops into an ambush. It is unlikely the same strategy would have worked on someone else, and indeed Sima Yi's son Sima Zhao saw through the ruse immediately and counseled his father against retreat.