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Great Daring Moments From History

Khalid Elhassan September 28, 2020 31 min

Josip Broz Tito - World War II — Yugoslav partisans wading across a river. Wikimedia

11. A Wily Chinese Strategist

Zhuge Liang (181-234) was a wily chancellor and military strategist during China’s Three Kingdoms Period. One of his exploits took place in 208 during the buildup to a climactic battle between rival armies that were separated by the Yangtze River. Zhuge Liang’s rivals maneuvered him into committing himself to furnish 100,000 arrows within a few days.

It was a seemingly impossible task, but after mulling it over, Zhuge Liang came up with a daring plan to pull it off. He gathered a flotilla of riverboats, lined them up with bales of wet straw, and instructed the crews what he expected from them.

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.