Xiang Yu

Xiang Yu the Chinese military leader and warlord of the late Qin and early Han period (232-202 BC) who overthrew the Qin dynasty and fought a long civil war against Liu Bang for mastery of China. A general of legendary courage and personal strength, he is remembered as a tragic hero whose brilliant victories were undone by political misjudgement and whose death ended the struggle for the empire.

Origins and the Fall of Qin

Xiang Yu was born in 232 BC into a family of Chu military commanders in what is now northern Jiangsu. His grandfather Xiang Yan had been a famous general of the state of Chu who died resisting the armies of Qin, and the desire to avenge that defeat and restore the state of Chu shaped the young man's ambitions. He was raised by his uncle Xiang Liang, who trained him in arms and taught him the traditions of the old aristocracy.

According to the historian Sima Qian, the boy was uninterested in scholarship or in learning to write, and when his uncle rebuked him he replied that writing was useful only for recording names and that he wished instead to learn the art of commanding ten thousand men. It is said that when he saw the procession of Qin Shi Huang during one of the emperor's tours he declared that the man could be replaced, a remark that revealed the audacity of his ambition.

When rebellion broke out against the harsh rule of the Qin in 209 BC, Xiang Yu joined his uncle in raising an army in the name of the restored state of Chu. After Xiang Liang was killed in battle, the young man took command and, in a famous campaign at the battle of Julu in 207 BC, defeated the main Qin forces in the north. He crossed the river, destroyed his own boats and cooking pots to show his troops that retreat was impossible, and won a victory that broke the Qin's military power and made him the leader of the anti-Qin coalition.

Hegemony and the Partition of the Empire

After the fall of the Qin capital in 206 BC, Xiang Yu commanded the loyalties of most of the rebel leaders and claimed the authority to reorganise the empire. Rather than take the imperial title himself, he declared himself Hegemon King of Western Chu and divided the realm into eighteen kingdoms, assigning territories to his allies and to his rivals. The arrangement reflected the older order of the warring states, in which a hegemon presided over a group of vassal kings, and it deliberately weakened the authority of the former Qin state.

In making the partition Xiang Yu gave the remote western regions of Hanzhong and Shu to Liu Bang, a rival leader whom he distrusted, and awarded the fertile central lands to his own supporters. This settlement, intended to contain Liu Bang, instead gave him a defensible base from which to rebuild his strength. The settlement also alienated many of the leaders who felt that their contributions had been slighted, and it sowed the resentments that soon broke into open war.

His conduct in the aftermath of victory damaged his standing. He ordered the execution of the surrendered Qin king and the destruction of the Qin palaces at Xianyang, and the killing of many members of the Qin royal family. These acts, and the harsh treatment of the able Qin general Zhang Han and others, were judged as acts of vengeance rather than of governance, and they denied him the support of the former Qin bureaucracy and population.

The Chu-Han Contention

The civil war known as the Chu-Han Contention lasted from 206 to 202 BC. Xiang Yu was the superior battlefield commander and repeatedly defeated Liu Bang's forces in open combat, but he was unable to convert his victories into a decisive end to the war. Liu Bang avoided pitched battles where possible, held the strategic passes, cultivated the loyalty of the population in the west and sent able subordinates such as Han Xin and Peng Yue to attack Xiang Yu's flanks and supply lines.

In 203 BC the two sides agreed to a truce, dividing the empire along a line between their territories and exchanging hostages. Xiang Yu withdrew his forces eastwards in accordance with the agreement, but Liu Bang, urged on by his advisers, broke the truce and attacked. In the campaigns that followed Xiang Yu was gradually surrounded and cut off from his bases, his able counsellors having died or fallen out with him, and his army dwindled.

The decisive battle came at Gaixia in 202 BC, where Liu Bang's forces encircled the Chu army and, according to tradition, sang songs of Chu through the night so that Xiang Yu's troops believed their homeland had fallen. Xiang Yu is said to have composed a lament for his beloved consort Yu and then led a desperate cavalry charge that broke through the encirclement. He was pursued to the banks of the Wu River, where, refusing to return home in disgrace, he fought on and took his own life.

Character and the Sources

The main account of Xiang Yu's life comes from the Records of the Grand Historian by Sima Qian, who devoted a full chapter to him and judged him harshly for his cruelty and his failures of statesmanship. Sima Qian records his personal courage and his extraordinary strength, his loyalty to his soldiers and his generosity to those who served him well, but also his suspiciousness, his impatience with advice and his tendency to reward and punish according to passion rather than principle.

His treatment of enemies was notorious. He is said to have burned cities, massacred populations and ordered the killing of prisoners, acts that alienated the very regions he needed to govern. He distrusted the scholars and administrators who might have given him the machinery of a stable state, and he relied too much on his own judgement and on the sword. His refusal to take advice from his one truly able adviser, Fan Zeng, became a proverbial example of the general who loses an empire through pride.

Yet he was also admired for his honour and his personal valour. In the accounts of his last hours he is shown as generous to his followers, refusing to flee alone and fighting to the end with his characteristic bravado. Later tradition and popular literature, from the historian's pages to the classical novel and the theatre, preserved the image of the tragic hero, and the story of Gaixia and the song of Chu became among the most evocative scenes in Chinese culture.

Legacy and Historical Meaning

Xiang Yu's defeat by Liu Bang marked the end of the old aristocratic order and the beginning of the imperial Han dynasty. His attempt to restore a world of many kingdoms under a hegemon proved unable to survive against the centralised empire that Liu Bang would build, and in this sense his failure charted the future of Chinese government. The contest between the two men became a classic study of the difference between military genius and political wisdom.

The phrase of farewell at Gaixia and the imagery of the besieged hero entered the language and literature of China. The lament that Xiang Yu sang for his consort, the dance of Yu, and the songs sung by the encircling army all became emblems of loyalty, loss and the reversal of fortune. Scholars and poets for two thousand years returned to the story to reflect on ambition, honour and the fragility of power.

Historians have drawn contrasting lessons from his career. Some see him as a man of great gifts destroyed by a lack of self-knowledge and by the inability to build institutions, others as a noble relic of an older heroic age outmatched by the cunning of a new political order. His tomb was later maintained, and his name remains one of the most vivid in the Chinese historical imagination, the very image of the warrior who staked all on his own strength and lost a world by it.

See also

• Chu-Han Contention
• Liu Bang
• Han Xin
• Records of the Grand Historian