Chu–Han Contention

The Chu–Han Contention was a war for control of China between 206 and 202 BC. It was fought between two rebel leaders who had helped destroy the Qin dynasty: Xiang Yu, who called himself Hegemon-King of Western Chu, and Liu Bang, the King of Han. Its name comes from their two states, Chu and Han.

It is the second act of a larger drama. The first act was the rising of rebels across China against the Qin from 209 BC; the second was the struggle among the victors over who would inherit the empire. Liu Bang won, and in 202 BC he became the first emperor of the Han dynasty, known to history as Emperor Gaozu.

Because the Han dynasty became one of the formative eras of Chinese civilisation, the story of how it was founded has been told and retold ever since, in histories, poems, operas, novels, films and even board games.

In 221 BC the state of Qin completed its conquest of the other Warring States and created the first unified Chinese empire. Its ruler took the new title of emperor and is known as Qin Shi Huang, the First Emperor. Qin standardised writing, weights and measures, and ruled through a centralised system of commanderies and counties. But its laws were strict, and millions of people were conscripted for armies and for vast projects such as walls, roads, palaces and the emperor’s tomb.

The First Emperor died in 210 BC. His younger son became the Second Emperor with the help of the powerful officials Zhao Gao and Li Si, and political murders followed. In 209 BC two conscript leaders, Chen Sheng and Wu Guang, led a rebellion. According to the Shiji, they had been delayed by rain on the way to frontier duty and faced death for arriving late, so they chose to rebel. Chen Sheng is credited with the famous question: “Kings, lords, generals and ministers — are they a breed apart?”

Their revolt was soon crushed, but it lit a fire. Across the east, rebels revived the old kingdoms Qin had destroyed. In the south, Xiang Liang and his nephew Xiang Yu raised an army and set up a descendant of the old Chu royal house as King Huai of Chu. Among the many local leaders who joined the Chu cause was Liu Bang from Pei county.

Xiang Yu (c. 232–202 BC) came from a family of Chu generals; his grandfather Xiang Yan had died fighting Qin. The Shiji describes him as unusually tall and strong, able to lift a bronze cauldron, and he was a brilliant battlefield commander. He was also proud, quick to anger and, according to the sources, capable of great cruelty.

Liu Bang (256 or 247–195 BC) came from a farming family and had served as a minor local official, the head of a small post station in Pei. The historians portray him as coarse, fond of wine and women, and sometimes cowardly, but generous, good at judging people and willing to follow advice. His followers included the administrator Xiao He, the strategist Zhang Liang, the schemer Chen Ping, the soldier Fan Kuai and, later, the great general Han Xin.

King Huai of Chu promised that whoever first entered the Qin heartland of Guanzhong, “the land within the passes”, would become its king. Liu Bang was sent west; Xiang Yu went north to face the main Qin army. This promise would shape the whole later quarrel.

In 207 BC Xiang Yu led the Chu army across the Yellow River to relieve the besieged city of Julu. The Shiji says he ordered his troops to sink their boats and smash their cooking pots, keeping only three days of rations, so they had to win or die. They routed the Qin forces, and the Qin general Zhang Han later surrendered. At Xin’an, however, Xiang Yu had the surrendered Qin soldiers killed; the Shiji gives the figure of over 200,000, a number historians cannot verify but which shows how the massacre was remembered.

Meanwhile Liu Bang entered Guanzhong first. At the end of 207 BC the last Qin ruler, Ziying, surrendered to him. Liu Bang sealed the treasuries and palaces, and, according to the Shiji, replaced the Qin laws with a simple “three-article code”: murder would be punished by death, and injury and theft would be punished according to the offence. This won him local support.

Xiang Yu arrived with a much larger army and was furious. At the famous Feast at Hong Gate (Hongmen), his adviser Fan Zeng urged him to kill Liu Bang, and Xiang Zhuang performed a sword dance intended to end in murder. Liu Bang apologised humbly, was protected by Zhang Liang and Fan Kuai, and slipped away. Xiang Yu then entered Xianyang, killed Ziying, and burned the Qin palaces.

In 206 BC Xiang Yu divided the empire into eighteen kingdoms for his generals and allies, and took for himself the title Hegemon-King of Western Chu, with his capital at Pengcheng (modern Xuzhou). Instead of making Liu Bang king of Guanzhong as promised, he gave him the remote lands of Ba, Shu and Hanzhong in the south-west, with the title King of Han, and split Guanzhong among three surrendered Qin generals. King Huai was given the empty title of Emperor Yi, sent away, and killed on Xiang Yu’s orders.

Liu Bang did not stay in Han for long. On Xiao He’s recommendation he made Han Xin his chief general, and in 206 BC the Han army broke back into Guanzhong by a surprise route through Chencang and defeated the three kings Xiang Yu had placed there. Xiang Yu’s murder of Emperor Yi gave Liu Bang a moral pretext: he proclaimed mourning and called on the kings to punish the killer.

In 205 BC, while Xiang Yu was fighting in Qi in the north-east, Liu Bang led a large coalition, said by the Shiji to number 560,000, and captured Pengcheng. Xiang Yu raced back with about 30,000 picked troops and crushed them; the Shiji says so many Han soldiers died in the Sui River that its flow was blocked. Liu Bang barely escaped, and his father and his wife Lü Zhi were captured.

The war then settled into a long struggle around Xingyang and Chenggao, fortified towns guarding the approach to Guanzhong near the Yellow River and a great granary. Xiang Yu won most of the battles, but Xiao He kept sending men and grain from Guanzhong, and Chen Ping’s intrigues sowed distrust between Xiang Yu and Fan Zeng, who left in anger and died in 204 BC. Peng Yue’s raids behind Chu lines and the defection of Ying Bu, King of Jiujiang, weakened Chu further. At one point Xiang Yu threatened to boil Liu Bang’s father alive; the Shiji has Liu Bang reply that since they had sworn brotherhood, Xiang Yu should share a cup of the soup.

In the north, Han Xin fought a brilliant independent campaign. He conquered Wei and Dai, and in 204 BC at Jingxing defeated the army of Zhao by deliberately drawing up his troops with their backs to a river, so they could not retreat — the origin of the idiom “fighting with one’s back to the water”. He then took Qi and in 203 BC destroyed a Chu relief army at the Wei River in Shandong. Han Xin demanded, and received, the title King of Qi. By now Chu was surrounded on several sides.

In 203 BC, both sides exhausted, Xiang Yu and Liu Bang agreed to divide China along the Hong Canal, with Chu in the east and Han in the west. Xiang Yu released Liu Bang’s father and wife. But as Xiang Yu’s army withdrew, Zhang Liang and Chen Ping persuaded Liu Bang to break the truce and pursue him. After an initial setback, Liu Bang promised generous lands to Han Xin and Peng Yue, and their armies joined him.

Late in 202 BC the combined Han forces surrounded Xiang Yu at Gaixia, in modern Anhui. The Shiji tells how, at night, Xiang Yu heard the songs of Chu rising from the enemy camp on all sides and cried out that Han must already have taken all of Chu. He drank with his beloved Consort Yu and sang a short song beginning “My strength could uproot mountains, my spirit overtopped the world”. The phrase “songs of Chu on four sides” (simian Chuge) still means being completely surrounded.

Xiang Yu broke out with about eight hundred horsemen and fled south, pursued by the Han cavalry. At the Wu River, a local official offered to ferry him to his home region east of the Yangtze to raise a new army. Xiang Yu refused, saying he could not face the elders who had sent their sons with him, all now dead. After a last stand he cut his own throat. Soon afterwards Liu Bang was proclaimed emperor, and the Han dynasty began.

The most obvious result was a new dynasty. The Han ruled, with an interruption under Wang Mang (AD 9–23), until AD 220, and gave its name to the majority Chinese people (the Han) and to Chinese characters (hanzi, Korean hanja, Japanese kanji). The Han kept much of the Qin system of centralised administration and even many Qin laws, as excavated legal texts show, but presented themselves as milder rulers.

The war also shaped Han politics. Liu Bang had won with the help of powerful allies who were made kings. At first the Han combined directly governed commanderies in the west with semi-independent kingdoms in the east. Within a few years Liu Bang removed almost all of the kings not of his own family: Han Xin was demoted in 201 BC and executed in 196 BC, and Peng Yue and Ying Bu were destroyed. The saying “when the cunning hare is dead, the hunting dog is cooked”, applied to Han Xin, expresses how later readers saw this.

The civilian cost of the years of rebellion and civil war was heavy, though no figures are reliable. Sima Qian wrote that at the beginning of the Han, the great cities were so depopulated that only a small fraction of their former households could be counted. Early Han rulers lowered taxes, reduced labour service and avoided major wars, a policy of recovery influenced by Huang-Lao thought. After a defeat by the Xiongnu at Baideng in 200 BC, Liu Bang adopted the heqin policy of marriage alliances and gifts with the nomadic empire to the north.

Few episodes in Chinese history have produced so many sayings still in use: “break the cauldrons and sink the boats” (pofu chenzhou) for total commitment; “a Hongmen banquet” for a feast that is really a trap; “fighting with one’s back to the water” (beishui yi zhan); and “songs of Chu on four sides”. These idioms are used across the Chinese-character world, including Korea and Japan.

Poets argued over Xiang Yu’s choice at the Wu River. The Tang poet Du Mu suggested that he could have gone home and come back again “rolling up the dust” to fight another day. The Song statesman Wang Anshi replied that the people of Jiangdong would never have fought for him again. The Song woman poet Li Qingzhao, writing when the Song court had fled south before the Jurchen, praised him as one who in life was a hero among men and in death a hero among ghosts, who would not cross back to Jiangdong — an implicit rebuke to her own rulers.

The story of Xiang Yu and Consort Yu became the Peking opera Farewell My Concubine (Bawang bie ji), famous through the performances of Mei Lanfang, and gave its name to Chen Kaige’s 1993 film. Ming-period popular novels retold the whole war, and in Korea the story is widely known through novels called Chohanji. On the Chinese chessboard the central river is labelled “Chu River, Han Border”, and in Korean janggi the two generals are marked with the characters for Chu and Han.

Modern memory has taken political forms too. In twentieth-century Chinese Marxist historiography, the Chen Sheng–Wu Guang uprising was celebrated as the first great peasant uprising in Chinese history, and Liu Bang’s humble origins were sometimes contrasted with Xiang Yu’s aristocratic background. Because the war was fought within China, the main divisions in memory are not between nations but between admiration for Xiang Yu’s heroism and for Liu Bang’s political skill.

Almost everything we know comes from the Shiji (Records of the Grand Historian), completed by Sima Qian around 91 BC, roughly a century after the war. Its chapters on Xiang Yu, Emperor Gaozu, Han Xin, Xiao He, Zhang Liang and others overlap, so the same event is often told from several angles. Sima Qian drew on earlier writings, including the Chu Han chunqiu attributed to Lu Jia, a participant in the events, which is now lost, as well as on court documents and oral stories he collected on his travels.

The Book of Han (Hanshu), begun by Ban Biao and largely written by his son Ban Gu in the first century AD, covers the same period, often copying the Shiji closely but with changes in arrangement and emphasis. Later syntheses such as Sima Guang’s Zizhi tongjian (1084) organise the events chronologically, but add little independent evidence for this period.

Archaeology provides context rather than narrative. Qin legal and administrative texts on bamboo slips, such as those from Shuihudi and Liye, and early Han laws from Zhangjiashan, show how the Qin state actually worked and how much of it the Han kept. Some scholars note that Qin statutes prescribe fines rather than death for certain kinds of lateness, which may cast doubt on the story that Chen Sheng’s men faced execution — though the kind of service involved may have been different. Such findings remind us that Han historians had reasons to portray the fallen Qin as cruel.

Sima Qian gave Xiang Yu a chapter among the “basic annals” (benji), the section normally reserved for rulers, recognising that for a time he had effectively ruled the realm. Ban Gu, writing as a Han court historian, moved him to an ordinary biography alongside Chen Sheng. This difference reflects a debate about legitimacy that has continued ever since.

Sima Qian was not a simple propagandist for the Han. He recorded unflattering episodes about Liu Bang, such as pushing his own children out of his carriage to escape faster at Pengcheng, and his closing judgement on Xiang Yu is complex: he admires his rise but criticises his reliance on force and his claim, at the end, that “Heaven is destroying me, not any fault in my fighting”, which Sima Qian calls absurd. Many modern readers see in the Shiji’s portraits a literary artistry that shaped the characters for moral effect.

That artistry raises questions of reliability. Scenes like the Feast at Hong Gate, full of dialogue and dramatic gestures, cannot have been recorded word for word, and scholars debate how much is dramatisation. Troop numbers such as 560,000 at Pengcheng or 200,000 killed at Xin’an are almost certainly exaggerated or symbolic. Modern historians also reinterpret the war structurally: as a clash between Xiang Yu’s attempt to restore a multi-state order of kingdoms, reminiscent of the Warring States, and Liu Bang’s eventual rebuilding of a centralised empire on the Qin model, or as a contest in which regional identities, especially that of Chu, played a major role.