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Zuo Ci

Courtesy nameYuanfang

The Immortal Adept Who Toyed With Cao Cao

Masters of the Iconic Scene · Small Roles, Famous Names

Occult ArtsDaoismLegend

Who they are

A magus of the late Eastern Han, said to have mastered the "arts of the six jia," able to scatter beans into soldiers and vanish from sight. In the novel he toys with Cao Cao again and again, conjuring delicacies from every land and vanishing before the assembly to escape execution, till Cao Cao, in fury, has the whole city searched to no avail. The histories record him with the same air of the miraculous — one of the few figures of markedly supernatural cast in Three Kingdoms tales, and an important figure in later Daoist legend.

Primary sourcesFan Ye, Book of the Later Han, Biographies of the MagiLuo Guanzhong, Romance of the Three Kingdoms (the contests of magic are the novel’s embellishment)

Key stories

Toying With Cao Cao

The Book of the Later Han and the Romance record that Zuo Ci once worked magic before a banquet, conjuring a live perch from an empty basin and fetching ginger from Shu a thousand li away in an instant; Cao Cao, shocked and angry, meant to have him killed, but Zuo Ci vanished into thin air amid the surrounding executioners, and thereafter toyed with Cao Cao by illusion again and again and escaped each time, so that Cao Cao could do nothing to him — such "contests of magic" clearly bear the heavy color of folk legend, lending a touch of the fantastic to sober Three Kingdoms history.

Relationships

Nemesis

🦅Cao Cao　Toyed with him again and again by occult arts

Echoes today

Below are how modern works borrow or reinterpret this name or story — not the original material. The two differ, so keep them apart.

A figure of Daoist legendZuo Ci was further deified in later Daoist texts and folk legend as a representative "alchemist-magus," his link to sober Three Kingdoms history now relatively faint.

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