possessed the world. Yet in the end I have now been cornered here. It is Heaven that
destroys me. It is not any fault of mine in battle. Today, I must surely resolve to die,
but let mefight a joyful battle for youfirst. I vow to defeat them three times, break
the siege for you, cut off the heads of their general, and cut down their banners, so
that you will see it is Heaven that destroys me, not any fault of mine in battle.^15
Xiang Yu then proceeded to do as he had promised, leading his small force
into battle against the pursuing Han troops. Xiang Yu personally cut the
head off the Han commander and killed“dozens of men, nearly one
hundred.”Having temporarily broken free of the Han encirclement, he
then rejected the possibility of escape. His men were ordered to dismount,
and they received their pursuers on foot with close combat weapons. Xiang
Yu again“alone killed several hundred men of the Han army. He himself
also suffered more than ten wounds.”Rather than allow an enemy to kill
him, Xiang Yu cut his own throat.
Xiang Yu and Liu Bang epitomized two frequently juxtaposed archetypes
of the Chinese hero. Both, of course, were warriors and generals. Xiang Yu
was the greater warrior and general, full of arrogant self-confidence, who
believed that his unsurpassed capabilities as afighter were enough to con-
quer the world. Yet his individual martial skills were not sufficient to rule the
world that he conquered. His victories werefleeting because they were only
on the battlefield. Liu Bang was the less-skilledfighter and general, some-
times displaying poor behavior that bordered on cowardice, or at the very
least acting in a less than admirable way. What Liu understood was that
conquest and ruling required a team of accomplished people, and that the
leader of that group needed effectively to subordinate his own ego to the
larger purpose. Only by humbling oneself before the goal of creating and
ruling an empire could one achieve it. A supremely skilled martial artist like
Xiang Yu risked mistaking his own immense power for the much greater
power that could only come from leading others by praising them above
oneself.
The formation of the Han dynasty was not revolutionary in any sense,
however, particularly in martial arts. Many Qin reforms, particularly in
the area of defeudalization, were rolled back, and the nature of Han
dynasty society and culture began as an amalgam of pre-Qin and Qin
practices. In the realm of martial arts, ordinary farmers were still required
to render regular military service and so practiced martial arts as a part of
ordinary rural life. Liu Bang did take steps to distinguish classes of people;
in199 bce, for example, he prohibited merchants not only from wearing
certain kinds of cloth but also from carrying weapons or riding a horse.^16
Interestingly, when Chen Xi (the Marquis of Yangxia and commander of a
Xiang Yu and Liu Bang 65