Red Cliffs: The Flesh-Wound Ruse and the Fire Attack
Facing Cao Cao’s army, claimed at 800,000, Zhou Yu took his officer Huang Gai’s advice and staged a feigned surrender with a self-inflicted beating: Huang Gai pretended to defect, then by night drove fireships laden with kindling into Cao’s chained fleet, and with the southeast wind set it ablaze. Cao’s ships, linked bow to stern, had nowhere to flee, and were nearly all destroyed in a single night. This classic victory of the few over the many set the basic shape of nearly a century of three-way division.
"Why Also Zhuge Liang?" — A Line Pinned on the Wrong Man
To set off Zhuge Liang’s brilliance, the Romance invents Zhou Yu being provoked to vomit blood three times, dying at last of a reopened arrow wound, crying "why, having made Zhou Yu, did heaven also make Zhuge Liang?" In the histories Zhou Yu was a decorated, broad-minded commander — Cheng Pu said "to keep company with Zhou Gongjin is like drinking fine wine: you grow drunk without knowing it," almost the opposite of the novel’s petty figure. His early death was from illness, not from being "provoked to death."