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Fake Vampires, Wailing Ghosts, and Other Fascinating Psy-Ops and Military Deceptions

Khalid Elhassan January 29, 2020 33 min

North Vietnam - Viet Cong Fighter — Viet Cong. Wikimedia

21. The Empty Fort Strategy

Another of Zhuge Liang’s deceptions became proverbial in China as the “empty fort strategy“. It occurred when he was tasked with defending a walled city with a severely undermanned garrison. A vastly superior enemy army approached – one against which Zhuge’s miniscule garrison stood no chance.

Rather than barricade the gates, he threw them open, then grabbed a musical instrument and played it nonchalantly atop the entrance. When scouts informed the enemy commander what they saw, he rode to the gates to see them wide open, looked up at the walls and saw them unmanned, and heard Zhuge playing music above. Suspecting a trap, the enemy commander turned his army around and left.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.