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Originally Posted by SaintessHeart
Zhou Yu was a capable strategist, but the only thing is that he lacked the age and wisdom equivalent of Zhuge's. His main gift is his sharpness, that even a saying goes by that he can tell the error in a musical piece.
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Of course, that's how the novel wrote him. Intelligent, but not wise, and always second to Zhuge Liang. "Having born Yu, wherefore also Liang?"
But I was talking about what the historical records actually said, however. And the chroniclers of the time acknowledged Zhou Yu as the overall commander of the whole affair, while Zhuge Liang apparently played only a minor diplomatic role. In other words, Zhou Yu's victory.
Rather, Zhuge Liang's genius would be shown
after the victory at Chibi, when the Liu camp swept in and rapidly occupied Jingzhou while Sun Quan's forces were bogged down fighting Cao Cao's lieutenants. Suddenly the refugee warlord with little resources became the master of one of China's richest provinces, well-populated and far less war torn than the bloodied North, and this time Cao Cao was in no shape to uproot them. So I guess in a way you would be right -- Zhou Yu won the battle; Zhuge Liang took the spoils and gave Liu Bei a lasting base of power.
Now, the reason why Wei -- or technically its successor Jin -- achieved unification was
Cao Cao's genius. When you consider in context how governments in far better circumstances fared so much worse, Cao Cao's brilliance as an administrator was absolutely astonishing. The novel didn't pay much attention to it at all, but what Cao Cao "inherited" (i.e. wrested from one rival warlord after another) were regions with probably millions of displaced refugees suffering from decades of constant warfare and repeated natural disasters. It wrote him as the archetypal villain, but even so it couldn't make him out to be anything less than brilliant to be able to do all that he did and restored order and economic prosperity to the heartlands and cementing Wei's eventual dominance.
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Looks like the saying "Speak of the devil" in Chinese (direct translation would be "Speaking of Cao Cao, here he comes.") really has its true sense to it after all these years of people discussing the Three Kingdoms.
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Well, it *is* world class literature, and its influence in Asia is beyond compare...except perhaps by the Ramayana, which was adopted as a "national" epic by many more cultures than just Indian ones.
Your very usage of the proverb shows how much it meant to Chinese civilization after all. When Luo Guanzhong wrote it down during the Ming Dynasty he was relying on far more than just the historical records, he had centuries' worth of popular literature to rely on -- dramas and plays, oral legends, etc.