Belligerents
Background
In 234 Zhuge Liang committed his whole army — a hundred thousand by the records — to his fifth and final campaign. Against the grain shortages that had doomed every previous march, he had stockpiled for three years, ran supplies on his "wooden oxen," and even opened farms at Wuzhang Plains for a long war. Wu had promised a simultaneous offensive; Sun Quan’s thrust broke early at Hefei.
Course
Sima Yi walled himself in south of the Wei River and refused battle against every provocation. Zhuge Liang sent him women’s clothes and hairpins in mockery; Sima Yi muzzled his furious officers behind the formality of an imperial prohibition and held out a hundred days. His only question, to a Shu envoy, was how much the Chancellor ate and how hard he worked — and the answer told him the man was dying. In the eighth month Zhuge Liang died in camp at fifty-four. Under Jiang Wei the army wheeled its banners as if to attack, drove off the pursuit, and withdrew in perfect order — whence "dead Kongming routed living Zhongda."
Outcome & impact
The age of Zhuge Liang’s campaigns closed, and the Shu–Wei frontier fell quiet until Jiang Wei’s day. Wei Yan died in the withdrawal’s power struggle; command passed in time to Jiang Wei. Touring the abandoned Shu camps, Sima Yi paid his enemy the final tribute: "a prodigy of the age."
History vs. the novelHistoryvsNovel
The seven-star lamp ritual to extend his life, the wooden statue that routs Sima Yi, Wei Yan bursting in to snuff the flame — all the novel. The saying about dead Kongming, however, is genuine, recorded by the Han Jin Chunqiu; and Wei Yan’s death, in the histories, reads as factional strife rather than treason.