Cao Cao

To readers of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Cao Cao is the great villain: the schemer who held the last Han emperor captive. The real Cao Cao was something stranger. He was a reforming official who fought corruption, a general who reunited northern China after a generation of civil war, and one of the finest poets of his age.

He wrote of white bones lying in empty fields, of marching through snow over the Taihang Mountains, of the sea at Jieshi and an old warhorse still dreaming of a thousand li. In his poems a general speaks of war and power as one who has lived them.

This book tells his life in five parts, each followed by the poems and documents of those years. Inside:

• His poems, in simplified Chinese with ruby pinyin above every character
• Facing, line-by-line English translations
• Commentary on meaning and historical context
• Vocabulary tables for every text
• Three of his edicts, including his last testament

WK Ong has a lifelong interest in traditional Chinese culture and calligraphy. He is the author of an annotated edition of Zhi Yong's Thousand Character Classic and of the Entering the Verse series of classical Chinese poetry.