Politics
Epidemic of 217 建安二十二年瘟疫
About this event
The Epidemic of 217 was the epidemic that spread in the 22nd year of Jian'an (217) through the army of Cao Cao, which had gone to attack Wu, and among the men of letters. That year Sima Lang, who had gone to attack Wu together with Xiahou Dun, Zang Ba and others, personally made the rounds and provided doctors and medicine when a great epidemic broke out among the soldiers at Juchao, but he caught the disease and died. The four men of letters Xu Gan, Chen Lin, Ying Chang and Liu Zhen also died in the same year, and Cao Pi wrote in a letter to Wu Zhi that an epidemic had broken out and these men had passed away all at once. Records, Wei 15 §26Records, Wei 21 §20
Chen Shou recorded this epidemic in the entry on Sima Lang in Records of Wei 15, the Biographies of Liu, Sima, Liang, Zhang, Wen and Jia, and in Records of Wei 21, the Biographies of Wang, Wei, the Two Lius and Fu. The Annals of Emperor Wu in Records of Wei 1 record that year's campaign against Wu but not the epidemic. The epidemic does not appear in the Romance. Records, Wei 15 §26Records, Wei 21 §20–21Records, Wei 1 §155–156
Course of events in the Records
In the 10th month, winter, of the 21st year of Jian'an (216) Cao Cao readied his troops and set out to attack Sun Quan, reaching Qiao in the 11th month. In the 1st month, spring, of the 22nd year (217) he encamped at Juchao, in the 2nd month advanced to Haoxi in Jiangxi and pressed Sun Quan, who had built a city at Ruxukou to hold him off, and in the 3rd month, leading his army back, he left Xiahou Dun, Cao Ren, Zhang Liao and others stationed at Juchao. Records, Wei 1 §155–156
The Biography of Sima Lang records that in the 22nd year of Jian'an, when Sima Lang went with Xiahou Dun, Zang Ba and others to attack Wu and reached Juchao, a great epidemic broke out among the soldiers. Sima Lang personally made the rounds and provided doctors and medicine, but he himself caught the disease and died at the age of forty-seven, leaving instructions that he be dressed in plain cloth with a simple headcloth and shrouded in ordinary clothes of the season. The people of the province remembered him with longing. Records, Wei 15 §26
The Biographies of Wang, Wei, the Two Lius and Fu record that Xu Gan, Chen Lin, Ying Chang and Liu Zhen died in the 22nd year of Jian'an. In a letter to Wu Zhi, Prefect of Yuancheng, Cao Pi said that the year before an epidemic had broken out, that many of his relatives and friends had suffered from the calamity, and that these four men had passed away all at once; he called Xu Gan, author of the Balanced Discourses, a gentleman in whom refinement and substance were in harmony, and lamented that Ying Chang had not fulfilled his ambition to write. Records, Wei 21 §20–21
The same volume records that Wang Can, who had joined the campaign against Wu in the 21st year of Jian'an, died of illness on the road in the spring of the 22nd year, but it does not specify that the illness was the epidemic. Records, Wei 21 §8
Written by 3KDEX (not yet reviewed) — The tags at the end of each paragraph link to the exact passage in the Records volume or Romance chapter it is based on.