#11 Red Cliff
Hello and welcome to History in Film, I’m Rich Simmons.
Today we’re discussing the 2009 John Woo epic Red Cliff. Though even that sentence comes with some qualifiers. Red Cliff was originally released as a nearly 5-hour long monster in two parts, the 1st in 2008, the 2nd in 2009. The combined version I just watched on Netflix was just under 2.5 hours. I had seen Red Cliff before, but couldn’t remember initially which version I had seen, but after finding the version on Netflix far less satisfying than I remembered and looking at a rundown of the plot online, I realized I watched the longer version the first time and do recommend it over the reduced version. That said, if you have to choose between the Netflix version or not watching it at all, I definitely encourage you to go ahead and watch the shorter version.
All right, I apologize again in advance for my horrible pronunciation of Chinese names. A name I’m going to have to say a LOT is Cao Cao. C-A-O repeated twice. I think it’s supposed to be a kind of T and S sound combined at the beginning, but I’m sure I’m butchering it every time.
When we last left China for Rome, China had just been unified for the first time under the Qin dynasty. The Qin dynasty lasted just four years after the death of its 1st emperor. The 1st Han emperor, Liu Bang had actually been born a peasant. He seized power and forced the surrender of the weaker heir of the Qin dynasty. It took another four years to fend off other rivals to the throne, but the four hundred year reign of the Han dynasty was established. Later, during the 54-year long reign of Han Emperor Wu, China officially embraced Confucianism, a policy that would last for 2000 years. The Han dynasty was one of innovation and economic prosperity. I mentioned a few weeks ago that paper was developed during this time, but also the wheelbarrow, steerable rudders on ships, crop rotation, improvements in steel production, the use of negative numbers in math and that’s just a few.
Basically, the decline and fall of the Han Empire was due to a hundred years’ worth of young and weak emperors who were manipulated by ambitious advisors, family members, and warlords. And that’s where our movie begins today, in the court of the last Han emperor in the year 208… CE. Prime Minister Cao Cao [sowt sow] has spent the last several years securing his power in the north. We see him trying to convince the Emperor to declare war on the warlord Liu Bei [loo bay] in the south. It’s clear that Cao Cao is the real power and the Emperor is just his puppet. He wants the Emperor’s authorization in public to justify his actions. The Emperor is obviously afraid of him and reluctantly agrees. This was Emperor Xian [szhee-ahn] also known as Liu Xie [Loo zsee]. He had been placed on the throne nineteen years earlier when he was 8 years old by another warlord who had deposed his half brother. Again, that was the game–install the Emperor you could control and then you rule China. The Emperor here is of so little importance, we don’t even see him the rest of the movie.
The subsequent battles don’t line up perfect with the historical record but they definitely are in the same spirit. And most of the named characters in the film are historical figures. They also simplify things by leaving out certain people or combing them with others. The first small battle in the movie shows Cao Cao’s forces overrunning the capital controlled by Liu Bei. A little subtext that I don’t believe they mentioned in the movie is that Liu Bei had once been an ally of Cao Cao’s but was involved in failed plot to assassinate him. The main focus of Liu Bei’s men basically becomes just to protect the fleeing civilians.
Again, remember, Cao Cao has painted Liu Bei as rebel against the emperor, but his only crime is failure to submit to Cao Cao’s dominance of China.
Liu Bei’s chief strategist is Kongming, a figure who plays a large role in the movie and drew comparisons to Sun Tzu in real life (the author of The Art of War). Kongming says they need to request the help of Sun Quan, the leader of the Southlands–I have no functional knowledge of Chinese geography. I know we said Liu Bei was in the south, at least compared to the northern area where Cao Cao had control. The Southlands were south of that, along the Yangtze River.
Cao Cao hears of the possibility of Liu Bei forming an alliance with Sun Quan and is actually happy about it. He’s not that nervous of their combined force and it gives him an excuse to paint Sun as a traitor to the people of north.
In the Southern capital, Kongming tries to convince Sun Quan to join with Liu Bei against Cao Cao. He says if Cao Cao conquers the Southlands, he’ll be able to just straight up usurp the throne. Sun says he’ll have to think about while Cao Cao is already send his ships south.
I’m trying not to confuse you with these Chinese names, but we have one more character to introduce by name. While Kongming is hanging out in the south, waiting in Sun’s decision, he goes to meet a viceroy of Sun’s who is camped at Red Cliff. Director John Woo gives us very gradual reveal of this viceroy as he oversees troops and stops to fix the flute of a young boy playing for the men before we finally see his face. The slow reveal is because the viceroy is played by Tony Leung, a huge star in Hong Kong, who I’ve mentioned before as my favorite non-English-speaking actor. Now, I don’t know to what extent Tony speaks English or not, but I mean I’ve only ever seen him in Chinese language films. Tony plays Zhou Yu, the commander of Sun Quan’s army.
So, let’s recap real quick the five names you need to know. Cao Cao is the bad guy in the movie, controlling the Emperor and trying to control all of China. Liu Bei is a warlord with the guts to stand up against Cao Cao. Sun Quan is the ruler of the Southlands. So in broad strokes, we’re setting up a battle of Cao Cao against Liu Bei and Sun Quan. Zhou Yu controls Sun’s military and Kongming advises for Liu Bei, though he is not a warrior himself like Zhou Yu is.
The movie invents a subplot here saying that Cao Cao has been in love with Zhou Yu’s wife for years and may have launched this whole campaign as a way to capture her from Zhou. Also worth noting here is that Chinese surnames come before their given name, so if I refer to Zhou Yu as Zhou, or Sun Quan as Sun, I’m saying just their surname.
Sun Quan does, of course, decide to join with Liu Bei to fight Cao Cao. There’s a moment here that I didn’t give too much thought to where Sun Quan cuts off the corner of his desk with his sword and says anyone who again mentions the idea of surrendering to Cao Cao will be treated like this desk. I just figured it was something the writers of the movie added for a little dramatic effect. The moment was actually chronicled by a Chinese historian from 1600 years ago living a couple hundred years after Sun Quan.
The first major battle in the movie happens when the joint rebel army ambushes Cao Cao’s ground forces on their way south. In general, if you like war movies, you do need to check this one out. There’s a lot of cool moments with things I haven’t seen in other movies. It does have a few of those physics-defying moments seen in other Chinese movies, but not near to the extent of Hero or Crouching Tiger.
In this ambush, they direct Cao Cao’s men into a sort of maze created from soldiers shielded and huddled together in clusters. The battles in the movie don’t directly match the historical record, but they’re fairly close. This ambush could serve as a proxy for the small initial victory the rebels had over the northern forces. Cao Cao is undaunted and continues with his main force which sails down the Yangtze toward Red Cliff. It’s worth noting here, that the exact location of the Battle of Red Cliffs is disputed. Once they are camped, there is an outbreak of Typhoid Fever. Instead of burning the bodies of those who died from the disease, Cao Cao orders them attached to rafts and drifts them toward the rebel base at Red Cliff. Fearing the illness, Liu Bei orders his men to return home to live to fight another day, but Sun Quan’s forces have no where else to go. This portion seems to be all invented for the movie. Though disease among Cao Cao’s men is correct, just out of order here. Part of the blame for their initial loss was disease running through the camp as they marched south. So the movie just made the first defeat an ambush and moved the disease to later.
Kongming stays to help Sun’s forces despite his master Liu Bei pulling out. Zhou Yu does a good job of calming any tensions between the two sides over the retreat.
A cool moment here is Kongming’s plan to steal 100,000 arrows from Cao Cao. They send dozens of boats full of straw and scarecrows out toward Cao Cao whose men just unload one barrage of arrows after another into the boats. So much so that the boats start to lean to one side from the weight of the arrows. Kongming has them all turn around 180 degrees and arrows fill up on the other side as well. The boats “retreat” and voila – 100K free arrows.
The wikipedia page for “largest naval battle in history” lists nine candidates. And one of those candidates, with over 1/4 of a million men participating (by the lowest estimates), is our Battle of Red Cliffs which is about to go down now in the movie. It occurs to both sides that if they can catch the tail wind, that fire might be their best weapon. As the time for the battle nears, the wind favors Cao Cao. Zhou Yu’s wife (who Cao Cao is in love with in the movie) takes it upon herself to surrender to Cao Cao in an attempt to stall him and give the wind time to change. The film makes Kongming a genius with this kind of thing and he predicts the time of the wind change down to the hour. Zhou Yu’s wife succeeds in distracting Cao Cao and as the battle begins the wind shifts and fire from the rebel ships destroys Cao Cao’s fleet. As they then begin to assault Cao Cao’s camps, Liu Bei’s army returns to attack the camp from the sides — his withdrawal had been a stunt to fool Cao Cao.
So the south is victorious. There’s a final conflict as one of Cao Cao’s men tries to kill Zhou Yu’s wife for costing them the battle and she is rescued in dramatic fashion. Zhou allows Cao Cao to live in the end and says there is no real victor here today. Then the denouement is rather abrupt and unsatisfying. We just see Kongming and Zhou Yu saying goodbye and there’s no closing text or voiceover or anything. So, again, I strongly recommend the longer version if you can track it down.
In reality, the naval and final battles played out a little differently. The movie does show Cao Cao’s ships locked together to stabilize them to prevent seasickness in a northern army that was less used to being on ships than their southern counterparts. Well, what the south actually did was have one of Sun Quan’s generals pretend to surrender. A squadron of ships was sent toward Cao Cao’s fleet under the assumption that they were defecting. But halfway across the South turned these ships into fire bombs and rammed them into Cao Cao’s interlocked ships as they escaped in smaller boats.
After this Cao Cao retreated north and was again attacked and defeated by the southern forces. Cao Cao lived and maintained his power in the north, but control of China was now officially divided. The movie doesn’t get in to any of this, but the three leaders we’ve met in the movie lived on. When Cao Cao died in 220 CE, so about 12 years later, his son deposed the Emperor and declared himself to be the new Emperor. Liu Bei then declared himself emperor as well. Soon afterward, Sun Quan declared the kingdom of Wu in the south to be independent and that he was its Emperor. Thus China entered its Three Kingdom period which would last for the next 60 years before it was somewhat reunified under the Jin Dynasty. Basically, China was “Game of Thrones”, but for century after century.
And the “Game of Thrones” parallel does lead us to the topic of eunuchs. As tempting as it is to shy away from the details here, when we get to the 20th century we will be mentioning chemical castration and female circumcision, so, sorry, humans are often barbaric. Eunuchs are men who have been castrated. And despite “Game of Thrones” always teasing the character Varyss about not having a penis, I had always thought castration meant just the removal of the testicles. It looks like I was only partly correct–while that is typically what castration means, Chinese eunuchs did have their penises removed as well. This was a common form of punishment, but also often a requirement to serve in the court of the Emperor. So a lot of the advisors I mentioned at the beginning–those were eunuchs. A couple decades before the Battle of Red Cliffs, there was a group of influential eunuchs called The Ten Attendants who among other things, assassinated a prominent general.
It’s worth noting here that the Ten Attendants and most of the characters from the movie today are also in the 14th century Chinese novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms. It’s author does have a writing credit on Red Cliff’s IMDb page.
Red Cliff has an 89% on Rottentomatoes. It was a big movie in Asia, but just never made a lot of noise in the US.
A few other random notes from things mentioned in the movie. The Art of War by Sun Tzu, basically the holy book of military strategy, was written in the 5th century BCE, so in the century following the fall of Babylon, about six or seven hundred years before the Battle of Red Cliffs. The best known thought from The Art of War that many people today know even if they don’t know the source is if you know your enemy and know yourself, you cannot be defeated. Kongming from our story today, as I said, was sometimes compared to Sun Tzu. Further, Kongming is credited with possibly inventing things like the landmine, the wheelbarrow, and those flying Chinese lanterns you may have seen and which we see in the movie–basically little hot air balloons. Indeed they are also called Kongming lanterns.
I mentioned the official Han endorsement of Confucianism. Confucius lived in the 5th and 6th centuries BCE; he was actually born just 12 years before the fall of Babylon which we saw in Intolerance. Confucianism focus heavily on honor, respect, and justice; as well as connecting with Heaven and that which is divine within oneself.
We also see in the movie, the common Chinese gesture of salute with the left hand holding the right fist out in front of you. In my usual manner of oversimplification, the right fist represents fighting or violence but the left hand covers it representing peace, making it a respectful greeting.
Typhoid fever, like leprosy which I mentioned in conjunction with Ben-Hur, is a bacterial infection. It’s more common in places with poor sanitation. What also makes Typhoid fever scary is that someone can be a carrier without experiencing any symptoms. This was the case with the famous story of Typhoid Mary in the early 20th century, a cook who unknowingly infected over 50 people.
Before the typhoid outbreak in the film, we see Cao Cao’s men playing a version of soccer. Indeed, the oldest known form of soccer in the world is a Chinese game called cuju, though that may not be exactly what they were playing in the movie, but it is interesting to think about people playing recreational sports 1800 years ago.
Now, unfortunately, we’re now reaching a relatively patchy portion of my list of movies. I just couldn’t find many good, relevant films covering the first millennium CE. If you have some you can direct me to, I do welcome it. But we must continue on. So next week our journey takes us finally out of our comfortable, civilized world spanning from China to North Africa and Italy. We’re opening the door to the legendary times in Britain with the tale of King Arthur in 1981’s Excalibur.
W011: Red Cliff (2008)