Romance of the Western Han

Two men are left standing over the corpse of the Qin empire. Only one of them

can read the ground.

About the Book

This is the Ming novel of the Chu Han contention, the war that produced the Han

dynasty and half the proverbs in the Chinese language. It is the first half of a

matched pair. The companion volume, Romance of the Eastern Han, is also in this

series, and between them the two books run from the Warring States to the eve of

the Three Kingdoms.

The novel does not begin with Liu Bang. It begins two generations earlier, in

Zhao, with Lian Po baiting Wang Jian into an ambush on the Zhang river and

capturing a Qin prince named Yiren, who is then kept in Handan as a hostage while

the two courts trade letters about what to do with him. Readers who know where

that hostage's son ends up will see the whole engine of the book being wound up

in chapter one.

From there it moves through the destruction of the six states, the burning of the

books, the Qin collapse, and then settles into its real subject: Xiang Yu against

Liu Bang. The banquet at Hongmen. Han Xin abandoned and recalled. Fan Zeng

advising a man who will not listen. The feint at Henei, where Han Xin empties his

camps, marches his soldiers away in silence with the drums stopped and the

banners down, and plants cooks in a village inn to be overheard saying the army

has been recalled to defend the capital. The reader is shown the trick being set

before the victim walks into it, and that is how the book generally works.

It does not stop at Gaixia or at the founding of the dynasty. The last stretch is

colder than the war. Sui He is sent to Han Xin as a friend, with a warning that

is really an instruction to murder a guest. Zhong Li Mo tells Han Xin exactly

what will happen to him once the protection is gone, and is right. Chen Ping

advises that Han Xin cannot be beaten by force and must be taken by cunning. The

final chapter is a quiet one: Xiao He dying, naming Cao Shen as his successor,

and Cao Shen governing by changing nothing at all, until the people put it in a

street song.

About This Edition

This complete English translation presents all 101 chapters, rendered directly

from the Chinese. Memorials, letters between courts and battlefield dispatches

are translated in full rather than paraphrased, personal and place names are

rendered consistently with the companion Eastern Han volume, official ranks are

handled uniformly, and the chapter closing formulas are preserved. Nothing is

abridged.

Themes and Legacy

• The founding war of the Han dynasty, told at full novel length
• Xiang Yu and Liu Bang, strength against patience
• Han Xin as the greatest general in the book and its most doomed man
• Stratagem, deception and intelligence work treated as the decisive weapon
• First half of a pair that carries Chinese history up to the Three Kingdoms

For Readers Who Love

Romance of the Three Kingdoms . Records of the Grand Historian . The Water Margin .

Chinese historical novels . Military history . Han dynasty history

"He won the empire in five years and spent the rest of his reign taking it back

from the men who won it for him."

Rediscover the great epics, mysteries and chronicles of dynastic China: gods and generals, swindlers and scholars, courtesans, ghosts and emperors, in complete English translations.