carrying out their duty and some did not. But it is perfectly clear that they
had all determined upon the deed. They were not false to their intentions. Is
it not right, then, that their names should be handed down to later ages?”^23
All but one of them, Cao Mei, was killed while carrying out his plans.
The examples of two, Yu Rang and Nie Zheng, describe the range of
martial arts capability and some of the motivations of this sort of man.
I will return to this category, and the most famous assassin, Jing Ke, in the
next chapter. Yu Rang was an unrecognized retainer servingfirst one
family and then another until he entered the service of Earl Zhi. Earl Zhi
treated Yu Rang extremely well, and after the Earl was defeated, killed,
and his clan wiped out, Yu determined to requite his earlier good treat-
ment:“A man will die for one who understands him, as a woman will
make herself beautiful for one who delights in her. Earl Zhi understood
me. Before I die, I will repay him by destroying his enemy! Then my spirit
need feel no shame in the world below.”
Yu tried and failed on two occasions to assassinate Earl Zhi’s nemesis.
On both occasions he went to extremes to place himself in a position to
assassinate his target. Indeed, he explicitly rejected the idea of falsely
accepting employment with his target in order to get close to him. To do
so would have been a disloyal and morally unacceptable act, whereas
trying simply to get close enough to kill the man was otherwise fair play.
He was caught and pardoned on hisfirst failed attempt, but after being
caught on the second, he was killed. His exemplary loyalty to Earl Zhi,
however, marked him as an extraordinary man, and he was given his
target’s cloak to stab with his sword before he died.
Nie Zheng was hiding out as a butcher after having killed a man in his
native village. He was sought out by Yan Zhongzi, who wanted to hire
someone to kill the prime minister of Han, Han Xialei, who was also the
uncle of the Han ruler. Nie resisted all requests and gifts while his mother
was still alive, but after she died, he accepted. Nie chose to go into Han
Xialei’soffice alone with just a sword and kill him. Although the prime
minister was surrounded by armed guards, Nie walked in and murdered
him. Nie then killed thirty or forty of the guards, before peeling off his own
face, gouging out his eyes, and disemboweling himself so no one would
know his identity. Nie was motivated by the kind treatment of Yan
Zhongzi.
While it is difficult to determine the martial competence of Yu Rang, it
seems clear that Nie Zheng was quite skilled as well as bold. A man who
could kill several dozen armed men by himself must have been extremely
skilled. There is a certain measure of exaggeration to these stories, of
48 The Warring States Period