A warlord had to call three times before Zhuge Liang would see him
Around 207 AD the warlord Liu Bei heard of a brilliant recluse nicknamed the Sleeping Dragon, farming quietly near Xiangyang. Advised that such a man must be visited rather than summoned, Liu Bei went to him in person and, as the story goes, only got a meeting on his third try. The visit changed Chinese history.
Zhuge Liang, born in 181, was orphaned young and raised by a relative who took him south to Jing Province. After that guardian died he settled at Longzhong, living as a farmer, reading, travelling and reciting folk songs from his ancestral Shandong. Local scholars mocked him for likening himself to famous statesmen of the past. Friends noticed that he skimmed books for their essentials while they memorised details, and when he told them they would become governors, then was asked his own ambition, he merely laughed.
At that famous meeting he laid out what became known as the Longzhong Plan. China, he argued, would split three ways. Liu Bei should take the provinces of Jing and Yi in the south and west, ally with Sun Quan in the east, and together resist Cao Cao, who held the north and the Han court. Liu Bei was so taken that his sworn brothers Guan Yu and Zhang Fei grumbled; he told them that with Zhuge Liang he felt like a fish that had found water.
The plan worked for a time. In 208 Cao Cao marched south and routed Liu Bei, who sent Zhuge Liang to negotiate an alliance with Sun Quan, the partnership that defeated Cao Cao at Red Cliffs. When Liu Bei founded the state of Shu Han, Zhuge Liang became chancellor in 221 and, after 223, regent for the young emperor Liu Shan, controlling both government and army. He governed through clear laws, merit-based appointments and farming, mixing Confucian benevolence with firm Legalist rules.
He led repeated campaigns north against the rival state of Wei, and died on one of them at the Wuzhang Plains in 234. His letter of loyalty to Liu Shan is still admired as great Chinese prose, and the novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms turned him into a near-magical sage with a white feather fan.
Source: Zhuge Liang
