A rapid-fire look at a bunch of supporting players in the novel.

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Welcome to the Romance of the Three Kingdoms Podcast. This is a supplemental episode.

So from time to time, listeners would write in and ask if I can do a supplemental episode on this or that side character. Alas, the answer in most cases is that I just don’t have enough historical material about those characters, or their historical lives do not differ enough from their characters in the novel, for me to do a whole supplemental episode on any one of them. But, now that the show is winding down, I would like to use this episode to do a rapid-fire look at a number of side characters. But instead of doing their life stories, I’m going to do is to give just one interesting tidbit about each of these characters.

So let’s start with the characters in the kingdom of Wei, and I’m going to expand this to include people served under Cao Cao, which was technically before the founding of the Wei, and people who served in the successor kingdom of Jin, which seized power from the Wei in the final pages of the novel.

 

Alright, here we go. First up is Xiahou Dun, Cao Cao’s kinsman and veteran general who lost an eye in a battle and proceeded to swallow that eyeball. Not surprisingly, he was very sensitive about having just one eye. He got saddled with the nickname “blind Xiahou,” and it’s said that whenever he looked in a mirror, he would become so displeased with his cyclopic countenance that he would push the mirror over. So, keep your mirrors away from Xiahou Dun.

 

Next, we have Xiahou Yuan, who was also Cao Cao’s kinsman and a trusted general under Cao Cao. Now, remember that he got chopped in two by the Shu general Huang Zhong in a showdown at Dingjun (4,1) Mountain in the region of Hanzhong. In the novel, Huang Zhong had laid a clever trap, luring Xiahou Yuan into complacency before charging down the mountain to catch him off guard for the easy kill.

In real life, however, Xiahou Yuan’s death went a bit differently. He and his comrade Zhang He were attacking Shu camps at Dingjun Mountain. He and Zhang He were each defending one end of their camps. Liu Bei devised a scheme where he had his men burn the barricade of brambles that defended Xiahou Yuan’s camp and then attacked Zhang He’s side of the camps, putting him in some danger. Xiahou Yuan responded by sending part of his troops to help Zhang He. Meanwhile, Xiahou Yuan personally led the clean-up effort over at his own camp. But while he was busy helping to rebuild the barricades, the Shu general Huang Zhong attacked, caught Xiahou Yuan isolated and flat-footed, and killed him.

When Cao Cao got word of Xiahou Yuan’s death, he lamented how Xiahou Yuan was always personally sharing his soldiers’ burdens by doing basically grunt work alongside the rank-and-file troops. In fact, Cao Cao said, “As a commander, you should not even personally go fight, much less go help rebuild the barricade.”

And there’s also an interesting postscript here. After he was killed, Xiahou Yuan got a proper burial, not from Cao Cao, but from Liu Bei. Remember that in the supplemental episode about Zhang Fei, we mentioned how Zhang Fei abducted Xiahou Yuan’s niece for his wife. That niece now went to beg Liu Bei to give her uncle some dignity in death, and Liu Bei concurred.

 

Moving on, we come to the general Xu Huang, the guy who wielded a big battle axe. In real life, much like in the novel,