The Talkers and the Trap
A single line opens the volume, and it is one of the saddest in the chronicle.
The state of Wey, in this year, demoted itself from a duchy to a mere "lordship." Wey had been a major state in the Spring and Autumn age — Confucius himself had served at its court. Three hundred years later, the heirs of that state were now formally telling their neighbors: please don't take us seriously. We aren't worth the conquest.
In the Warring States, even the surrender ceremonies had been demoted.
Qin attacked Han and took the city of Yan.
King Hui of Wei died. The man who once asked Mencius what benefit he would bring to the state — who had built then lost the strongest army of his generation, who had been beaten at Guiling and Maling and humiliated by Shang Yang's letter trap — finally lay down. His son took the throne as King Xiang of Wei, inheriting the wreckage.
The Vertical Alliance Fires Once
For one year only — exactly one — Su Qin's coalition behaved the way Su Qin had promised it would.
Chu, Zhao, Wei, Han, and Yan attacked Qin together, marching on the Hangu Pass. The pass was the gateway between Qin's western heartland and the eastern plains; Qin had held it without serious challenge for sixty years. Now five armies converged on it at once.
The siege lasted weeks. Then the eastern alliance fell apart on the road. Each state, watching the others, decided it preferred to be the second-most-damaged, not the first. They withdrew without forcing the gate.
The state of Song, in the same year, proclaimed itself a kingdom. Song was a minor state holding the central plain between giants. Naming yourself a king when you cannot defend the road outside your capital is one of the great Warring States genres. Song would be devoured within forty years.
A coalition that has never been tested under fire is a friendship, not an alliance.
Hangu Pass was the moment Su Qin's vertical alliance was supposed to prove it could win. Instead it proved that five armies under five flags will discover, at the moment of contact, that they have five different acceptable losses. The alliance held in writing. It fractured in the field. The states that had signed Su Qin's pact had not yet learned the difference between agreeing on an enemy and agreeing on a price for stopping.
The Death of the Talker
Qin counter-attacked. At the river Xiuyu, the Qin army cut down the Han forces and took eighty thousand heads — a number the chronicle records dryly, like a price. Two Han generals were captured at Zhuoze.
In Qi, jealous officials had been waiting for Su Qin to slip. Su Qin had been pretending to serve Qi while quietly working as Yan's secret asset, and the Qi court began to suspect. One of his rivals hired an assassin and stabbed him in open court.
He survived the wound long enough to use it.
He told the King of Qi: They struck me because they thought I was your enemy. After I die, dismember my corpse in the marketplace and announce that the man Su Qin was an agent of Yan caught and executed by your justice. The men who paid the assassin will come forward to claim a reward.
The king did exactly that. Within days, the killers presented themselves at the palace expecting payment. The king had them executed instead.
In the same year, Zhang Yi appeared at the Wei court with a long speech for the new King Xiang. The speech is preserved in the chronicle. Stripped down:
Your state is a thousand li wide. Your army is three hundred thousand. Your land is flat — no mountains to defend, no great rivers to anchor a line. Your soldiers spend their careers garrisoning four borders against four neighbors. To the south, you fear Chu and not Qi: Chu is the closer threat. To the west, you fear Qin. The vertical alliance has paid you nothing. What did Su Qin's pact deliver? Hangu Pass, and a withdrawal. The horizontal compact, by contrast, will keep you sovereign. Serve Qin in name, keep your throne in fact. The alternative is to fight every neighbor at once with thirty thousand soldiers per border.
King Xiang signed Zhang Yi's compact. The vertical alliance had now lost two of its six members — the new Wei and the Su-Qin-less Qi.
The Duke of Lu died and was succeeded.
No event recorded.
The king died. His son took the throne as King Nan of Zhou — the last king the Zhou dynasty would ever produce.
The chronicle wastes no words on the transition. By 315 BC, the Son of Heaven had been a ceremonial dignity for so long that his coronations were essentially weather reports.
Qin invaded the Yiqu state on its western frontier and took twenty-five cities. With Yiqu reduced to a vassalage, Qin's back was now permanently safe. It could face east without ever again worrying about a knife from the steppe.
In the east, the rump state of Yan was about to do something stupid enough that it would invite Qi to swallow it whole.
The story takes shape over the next two years and is worth setting up here. Duke Kuai of Yan — the same Duke Kuai who took the throne at the close of Volume 2 — had become entranced by Confucian and Daoist sage-talk. His chief minister, Zi Zhi, had been quietly accumulating power in the court for years. A flattering courtier convinced Duke Kuai that the highest virtue was the abdication of Yao to Shun in legend — that a true king cedes his throne to a worthier man. Duke Kuai, in 318 BC, had done the unprecedented: he abdicated in favor of his own chancellor, Zi Zhi.
Zi Zhi was not Shun. He was a power-hungry minister who had bought the trust of a credulous old king. The Yan aristocracy was furious. The crown prince — the man who should have inherited — began conspiring.
Wei, in the same year, broke from its newly-signed compact with Qin. Qin counter-attacked Wei at Quwo, took the city, and pointedly returned the city's people unharmed, to demonstrate restraint. Then Qin defeated Han at Yanmen.
No event recorded.
The Yan Civil War — and Mencius's Warning
The conspiracy in Yan came to a head. General Shibei and Crown Prince Ping plotted to attack Zi Zhi. The Qi king, sensing an opportunity, sent secret encouragement.
The civil war that followed killed tens of thousands. The crown prince and Shibei both died in the fighting. Yan was now a leaderless ruin.
The Qi king turned to Mencius:
Should I take Yan, or should I leave it alone? My country has ten thousand chariots. Yan has ten thousand chariots. To attack a state of equal size and conquer it in fifty days is a feat that mere human power could not achieve. Heaven must be granting it. If I do not take Yan, Heaven will send disasters. What do you think?
Mencius answered:
If the people of Yan are happy to be taken, take them. King Wu of Zhou took the Shang dynasty under exactly such circumstances. If the people are not happy to be taken, do not take them. King Wen of Zhou refused, on exactly such grounds. Whether you may conquer is not a question of your power. It is a question of theirs.
The Qi king conquered anyway. Mencius watched.
When the news reached the other states, they began to plan a coalition to liberate Yan from Qi. The Qi king came back to Mencius:
Many feudal lords are now plotting to attack me. How should I prepare?
Mencius said:
I have heard of states ruling all under heaven from a base of seventy li. Tang the Great did so. I have never heard of a state of a thousand li that was afraid of others. The Book of Documents says: 'Wait for our king; when our king arrives, we will be reborn.' If you would rule the people of Yan as their hearts want to be ruled, no coalition will threaten you. If you treat them as a conquered people, you have given the coalition its argument.
The Qi king did not listen. The Yan people revolted. Qi withdrew, badly bloodied. Crown Prince Ping — long thought dead in the civil war — emerged from hiding, was acclaimed the new king of Yan, and took the title King Zhao of Yan. He would spend the next thirty years rebuilding Yan into the only state that ever invaded Qi successfully, in revenge for this season.
In the same year: King Xuan of Qi died, succeeded by his son, King Min of Qi. King Min would inherit the war Mencius had warned his father about. He would not learn from it.
The size of your power is not the size of your right to use it.
King Xuan of Qi treated 'I can take Yan' as the answer to 'should I take Yan.' Mencius, with a single phrase — if the people are happy to be taken — pointed out that the question is two-part, and that his king had only answered half. Half-answered questions, in the Warring States, came back with armies attached.
The Qin king, watching the Yan disaster unfold, also turned to plan the next move. He wanted to attack Qi. But Qi and Chu were bound by an alliance. Qin's army could not split the two of them by force. They had to be split by talk.
He sent Zhang Yi.
The Six Hundred Li That Were Six
Zhang Yi pretended to fall out with the Qin court — a public quarrel, a public exile — and traveled to Chu, where he was welcomed warmly by King Huai of Chu. He told the king:
Qin will surrender to Chu six hundred li of land in the Shangyu region — but only if Chu first breaks its alliance with Qi. Imagine: six hundred li, given freely, in exchange for the simple act of declaring the Qi treaty void.
The Chu court was excited. Several ministers urged caution. Chen Zhen told the king:
If we break with Qi first, Qin will have no reason to give us the land. We should pretend to break with Qi, ask for the land in advance, and only break for real once Qin has paid. Anything else, and we will have lost an ally and gained six hundred li of nothing.
King Huai ignored him. He broke publicly with Qi and sent envoys to Qin to collect.
Zhang Yi met the Chu envoys at the Qin court. He fell off his chariot, broke his leg, and went into recuperation for three months. The envoys waited. King Huai, hearing of the delay, decided that perhaps Qin was disappointed because Chu hadn't broken with Qi enthusiastically enough. He sent an additional party to Qi to insult the Qi king publicly.
Now Qi was furious. Qi promptly signed a friendship treaty with Qin.
Zhang Yi finally received the Chu envoys. They asked about the six hundred li.
Zhang Yi: I never said six hundred li. I said six li of my personal fief. There may have been a misunderstanding.
King Huai of Chu, when this news reached him, attacked Qin in rage.
Qi joined Qin. Together they crushed the Chu army at Danyang: eighty thousand Chu soldiers killed, the Chu commander captured, the Chu region of Hanzhong taken whole.
King Huai sent another army. It was crushed at Lantian. He sent a third. Qin's allies stripped Chu's northern borders.
By the end of the year, Chu had lost its alliance with Qi, two armies, eight cities, and the entire Hanzhong corridor. Zhang Yi had broken the strongest pillar of the vertical alliance with a sentence about a fief.
If a deal sounds too good to be true, the part that's true is the deal.
King Huai of Chu was offered six hundred li for free. The price was the betrayal of his oldest ally. He agreed without writing the contract first. Zhang Yi did not even need to lie at the moment of payment — he simply revealed that the contract Chu thought it had signed was not the contract Qin thought it had signed. King Huai had bought, in advance, against an oral promise from a man whose entire profession was breaking oral promises.
The same year, in Han, King Xuanhui died. His son took the throne as King Xiang of Han — yet another new king in the eastern states, all of them inheriting wars they did not start.
Zhang Yi's Grand Tour
The Qin king was now seventy years old. He decided his greatest diplomat should finish the work. Zhang Yi was sent on a road trip — a tour of every remaining vertical-alliance state — with one job: get each one to publicly join the horizontal compact with Qin.
To King of Han: Han's land is mountains and bad roads. Two years' grain reserves at most. Half a million troops, but only twenty thousand of them are real soldiers — the rest are levies. Qin has a million infantry, a million cavalry, an unlimited supply of horses. If Qin wishes, it can take Yiyang and cut Han's spine. Or you can serve Qin and keep your throne. The choice is binary.
Han signed.
To King Min of Qi: Your father humiliated the previous Qin king for six years. He paid no price. But you are a new king, and Qin remembers. Su Qin's old vertical alliance is dead. Qin and Chu, your former southern enemies, are now allies. Qin and Wei are allied. Qin and Han are allied. If you stand alone against this combination, no policy will save you. If you join, no enemy will dare strike you.
Qi signed.
To King Wuling of Zhao: Qin has signed treaties with Han, Qi, Chu. The pieces of the vertical alliance are now in our pocket. If you want a Zhao that survives the next decade, sign now. The alternative is to be the last untethered state, surrounded.
Zhao signed.
To King Zhao of Yan — the new young king who had emerged from the civil war: You have just rebuilt your kingdom from rubble. You cannot afford another disaster. Sign with Qin, and we will protect your reconstruction.
Yan signed.
Zhang Yi returned to Qin in triumph. The vertical alliance was, at this point, technically still in existence on paper. In practice, every member had separately committed to a peace with Qin.
He arrived at the Qin border to deliver his report. Before he could enter the capital, King Hui of Qin died. His son took the throne as King Wu of Qin.
The new king did not like Zhang Yi. He had hated him for years.
The Death of Zhang Yi
Zhang Yi, sensing the new king's hostility, told King Wu of Qin:
If Your Majesty wishes a stronger Qin, send me to Wei. The eastern states will believe I am defecting. Qi, my old enemy, will surely attack Wei to punish me. While Qi is fighting Wei, Qin can take Han's Sanchuan corridor — the road to Luoyang. The Zhou king himself will be in your hand. The Nine Tripods of Heaven will be yours.
It was the move of a man buying time, but the king liked it. Zhang Yi went to Wei.
Qi did exactly what he had predicted: it attacked Wei, calling Zhang Yi a fugitive criminal. Zhang Yi told the Wei king:
Send an envoy to Chu, telling Chu to ask Qi to call off this war as a favor. Qi will agree, because Qi does not actually want to fight Wei — only to perform an attack on me. Once Qi withdraws, you will owe Chu a favor. Use it later.
The plan worked. Qi called off the assault.
Zhang Yi died in Wei the following year — peacefully, in bed. The chronicle records his death simply: zhang yi died in wei. The man who had untied a continent's alliance was, at the end, retired and bored.
In the same year, the Qin king sent Gan Mao to execute the rebellious chancellor of Shu. King Wuling of Zhao received Wu Guang's daughter Meng Yao into his harem; she would become the mother of the prince who would topple him in Volume 4.
Qin instituted the office of "Chancellor" — zaixiang — for the first time, splitting it into a Right Chancellor (Chuli Ji) and a Left. This is the bureaucratic ancestor of the office that would run the empire for the next two thousand years.
A small line, easily skipped. It is the moment Qin stopped being a kingdom and started being an administrative engine.
Qin and Wei held a peace conference at Ying. General Gan Mao, sent to attack the Han city of Yiyang, had a conversation with the Qin king before he set out:
Your Majesty, Yiyang is a hard target. Two of our court ministers — Chuli Ji and Gongsun Shi — will, while I am at the siege, urge you to recall me. They will say my campaign is too slow, too costly. I will fail not on the battlefield but in your court. Promise me, in writing, that you will not recall me before Yiyang falls.
The king agreed and signed an oath. They named the agreement after the place it was sworn — the Oath of Xirang.
Gan Mao went to Yiyang. The siege was hard. After five months it had not fallen. As predicted, Chuli Ji and Gongsun Shi began to urge the king to call Gan Mao home.
The king summoned Gan Mao. Gan Mao said: The oath of Xirang is still in your court archives, Your Majesty. The king laughed, ratified the oath again in person, and sent him back. Yiyang fell shortly after.
Get the writing done before the work starts.
Gan Mao did not invent his enemies. He simply named them, in advance, in the document that bound his employer's future hands. By the time the rivals arrived at the king's ear, the king's commitment had already been signed in front of witnesses. The kings of the Warring States respected paper they had signed, more often than they respected counsel they had received.
The King Who Lifted the Cauldron
Yiyang fell. Eighty thousand Han soldiers were killed. Han sent its chancellor to Qin to surrender unconditionally and was forced to accept the loss.
King Wu of Qin, at twenty-three years old, was a man who liked a contest of strength. He went to Luoyang to inspect the Nine Tripods — the great bronze cauldrons that, by tradition, conferred Heaven's mandate on whoever held them. He challenged a strongman in his retinue, Meng Shuo, to lift one of them.
Meng Shuo lifted his and set it down.
The king lifted his.
He dropped it on his own leg. The bone shattered. The wound went septic. He was dead within days.
The throne went to his half-brother King Zhao of Qin — eighteen years old, a child of a low-status concubine. The Empress Dowager Xuan, his mother, would govern Qin for the next forty years, in alliance with her brother Marquis Rang (Wei Ran). Qin's politics, for the first time, would be run by a woman.
In the same year, far to the north, King Wuling of Zhao announced an idea that horrified his court.
The Hu Clothing
For two centuries, Zhao had been losing border skirmishes against the Linhu, the Loufan, and the Donghu — steppe peoples who fought from horseback in trousers and short jackets, while Zhao's nobles fought in long flowing robes from chariots.
King Wuling told his court: We will adopt their clothing. We will adopt their cavalry. We will fight them with their own techniques.
The court erupted. Prince Cheng, his uncle and chief minister, refused to attend audiences. Several senior aristocrats stayed home in protest. To wear Hu clothing was, in the conservative reading, to abandon the dress that distinguished a Chinese nobleman from a barbarian. Three hundred years of cultural identity was being thrown out, the protesters argued, because the king had been beaten in a few border raids.
King Wuling went personally to Prince Cheng's house and explained:
We do not adopt their clothing because we admire them. We adopt their clothing because their cavalry has been killing our infantry for a hundred years. The point of dress is to fit the work the dress is for. Our long robes were made for the chariot age. The chariot age is over. If we keep dressing for it, we will keep losing for it. Our ancestors did not stop being our ancestors because they once wore different clothes. They became our ancestors precisely by changing what needed to change.
Prince Cheng, after some resistance, capitulated. He came to court the next day in trousers.
Within a year, Zhao had built the first Chinese cavalry corps trained on steppe doctrine. Within five years, Zhao would conquer the central state of Zhongshan that had defied it for generations. Within twenty years, Zhao would be the only state in the eastern alliance Qin genuinely feared in pitched battle.
The first ruler willing to look ridiculous wins the next war.
King Wuling's reform cost him, briefly, the dignity of his court. It bought him the cavalry that would define Zhao's military for a century. The men who refused to wear trousers were men who had lost more battles than they had won, dressed correctly. He understood what they did not: dignity is downstream of victory. Win the war first; the costume conversations sort themselves out afterward.
The new King Zhao of Qin, in his first independent act, sent Xiang Shou to pacify Yiyang and make peace with Han. King Wuling of Zhao continued the conquest of Zhongshan, taking the city of Ningjia. Chu signed an alliance with Qi and Han.
The chronicle's flat lines conceal a strategic shift. Qin under King Hui had run the diplomatic game by talking. Qin under the regent dowager and her teenage son would run it by attrition.
A comet appeared. The chronicle records it without comment.
King Wuling continued his Zhongshan campaign and took the cities of Danqiu, Shuangyang, and the Hong Pass — and after that, Hao, Shiyi, Fenglong, and Dongyuan. The collected territory tripled Zhao's northern frontier.
In Qin, the queen mother began consolidating power. Wei Ran, her half-brother, was made Marquis of Rang. Her full brother became Lord Huayang. Her two younger sons, the king's brothers, were made Lord Gaoling and Lord Jingyang. The four of them — collectively known as the Four Authorities — would dominate Qin policy for the next thirty years. The dowager built the cabinet that would later have to be uprooted.
The Qin and Chu kings met at Huangji and swore an alliance. King Huai of Chu, who had been duped by Zhang Yi a decade earlier, was now eager to be on Qin's right side. He had not noticed that Qin no longer needed Chu. He had simply made himself useful — and predictable.
A second comet appeared. Qin took Wei's cities of Puban, Jinyang, and Fengling. Qi, Han, and Wei — judging Chu's alliance with Qin to be a betrayal of the old vertical pact — attacked Chu. Chu, panicking, sent its crown prince to Qin as a hostage in exchange for protection.
The Qin and Wei kings, plus the Han crown prince, met at Linjin. The Han crown prince traveled all the way to Xianyang and back as part of the formal ritual; in exchange, Qin returned Puban to Wei.
In the same season, a Qin senior official privately quarreled with the Chu crown prince — the hostage. The crown prince killed the official and fled home to Chu. The trust between the two states cracked.
A solar eclipse. Total. The chronicle says the sun was eaten, and it was complete. The omens were now arriving regularly enough that the chronicler had stopped attaching meanings.
Qin took Han's city of Rang. The governor of Shu rebelled against Qin; Sima Cuo was sent to crush the rebellion and did. Qin's general Huan, with combined Han, Wei, and Qi armies, attacked Chu — the cleanup operation Qin had been waiting to launch. King Wuling of Zhao continued the Zhongshan war. The Lord of Zhongshan fled to Qi.
The Year of Diplomatic Hostages
A long, dense year. The Qin Lord Jingyang was sent to Qi as a hostage, and Lord Huayang invaded Chu in the same season — Qin was now performing peace and war simultaneously, in opposite directions. Chu lost thirty thousand more soldiers. Its general Jing Que was killed. The city of Xiangcheng was taken.
The Qin chancellor Chuli Ji died. Lou Huan, a Zhao official, became Qin's new chancellor — a foreigner running the bureaucracy of the rising hegemon, in the legalist tradition Shang Yang had pioneered.
King Wuling of Zhao doted on his youngest son, He, born to his favorite concubine Meng Yao. He decided to install He as crown prince before his death, demoting his elder son Zhang in the process. He would, two years later, abdicate the throne to He outright while still alive — a move that looked, at the time, like a model of stately wisdom. It would, by the end of Volume 4, be the move that killed him.
The Qin king received an envoy of complaint from Chu. He sent his reply directly to King Huai of Chu:
You and I once swore to be brothers at Huangji. We met. We drank. Then your son killed my official and fled. Then your subjects refused to surrender him. Such grievances cannot be left to fester. I propose we meet personally at Wuguan to talk. Bring no army. Come alone, with attendants. Let us settle this between brothers.
The Chu court was alarmed. Zhao Sui — the old advisor — told the king: Do not go. If you go, you may not return. If you do not go, Qin will declare you have insulted his hospitality. We must accept the latter risk. The former is fatal.
King Huai — who, twelve years earlier, had bought six li for six hundred, and never seemed to learn — went to Wuguan.
The Qin court seized him at the city gate.
The chancellor sent a follow-up message: Your Majesty will be released — once Chu cedes the territories of Wu and Qian. Discuss it with your queen and your son.
The Chu court refused. They installed the crown prince — the same one who had killed the Qin official two years earlier — as the new King Qingxiang. King Huai of Chu remained a Qin hostage and would die in captivity three years later, an old man who never stopped trying to escape.
In the same year, Qin heard of Lord Mengchang's reputation for hospitality to advisors. The Qin king sent Lord Jingyang to Qi as a hostage and asked, in exchange, that Lord Mengchang come to Qin to serve as chancellor.
Lord Mengchang came. The king made him chancellor on arrival.
When the man who sold you a bridge offers you another bridge, walk in the opposite direction.
King Huai of Chu walked into the same trick twice — the first time over six hundred li that turned out to be six, the second time over a brotherly meeting that turned out to be a kidnapping. Both setups had the same fingerprint: a Qin offer that was too generous, requiring an action that could not be undone, with no mediator between the two parties. He never noticed the pattern. The Chu court, which had once warned him not to take Zhang Yi's deal, warned him again not to go to Wuguan. He did not listen the second time, just as he had not the first. A king who cannot learn from his own previous betrayals will be betrayed in the same shape, again, until there are no more betrayals available.
No event recorded in the captured chronicle for this year.
Lord Mengchang Escapes Qin
Someone — the chronicle does not name him — told the Qin king:
Mengchang is your chancellor. But Mengchang is, before all things, a man of Qi. As Qin's chancellor, every decision he makes will weigh Qi's interest first and Qin's second. If you keep him, you have given Qi a window into your court. If you dismiss him, he will go home and serve Qi against you. There is no good option except to kill him.
The king arrested Mengchang and announced he would be executed.
Lord Mengchang's retinue at the Qin court included, by his patient practice over years, a number of men whose talents the Qin court considered useless. Among them was a man who could imitate the cry of a cock perfectly, and another man who was a skilled thief.
The thief slipped into the palace at night and stole back the white-fox fur cloak that Lord Mengchang had earlier given to the Qin king's favorite concubine. He gave the cloak, again, to the favorite. The favorite, pleased, asked the king to release Lord Mengchang. The king released him pending one more day's deliberation.
Mengchang did not wait. He fled toward the eastern border that night, with his retinue, in disguise. He arrived at the Hangu Pass just after midnight. The pass was sealed until cock-crow.
The cock-imitator crowed.
The other roosters in the area, mistaking the sound, all crowed in response. The pass was opened.
By the time the Qin king's pursuit caught up, Mengchang was already in Han territory, beyond reach.
The chronicle preserves this episode in a single line. The longer version belongs to Sima Qian. But the episode's lesson is the chronicle's:
Hire the men no one else will hire.
Lord Mengchang's reputation — which the chronicle commentaries critiqued in Volume 2 as vainglorious — was for hosting talents others overlooked. A cock-imitator and a thief looked like ornaments to a vain patron. They turned out to be the two men who could save him from a death sentence in a foreign court at midnight. The skill you cannot imagine wanting is the skill you will want desperately, exactly once, in a way you would never have predicted. Hospitality without prejudice is, in the long run, the cheapest insurance policy on the market.
In the same year, the Chu court — having installed the new King Qingxiang — received a final ultimatum from Qin: Your father, our hostage, has been refusing to negotiate. We are now treating him as an obstacle, not a king. Your spirit-tablet is in our hands. We are sending an army.
Qin attacked Chu through the Wuguan Pass and took fifty thousand heads. Sixteen cities fell. The Chu of King Huai had been a power that could break the Qin army at Hangu. The Chu of King Qingxiang would spend the next twenty years reduced to a defensive remnant, never again contesting Qin in the field.
King Huiwen of Zhao — King Wuling's young son, who had just been formally enthroned as his father abdicated — appointed his uncle Lord Pingyuan to a high office. Lord Pingyuan would be one of the four great patrons of the late Warring States, in the company of Lord Mengchang. The age of the four patrons was now in full season.
Here ends Volume 3. In Volume 4, Lord Mengchang returns to Qi as a hero and rebuilds his power base; King Wuling of Zhao — having abdicated to his young son — discovers what it costs to leave the throne while still alive; and Qin's territorial expansion under the regency of Empress Dowager Xuan and her brothers begins in earnest. The talkers are mostly dead now. The age of pure conquest has arrived.
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