That took… a ridiculously long time. First there was a ton of reading I had to do (including on topics only tangentially related to the Three Kingdoms period. Okay, I didn’t actually have to, but like. I did.) And then the last time I tried to get this posted, my laptop straight up died. So it’s been a journey for sure.

Episode 7

Regarding assassins 1.

Assassins are one of the oldest jobs in the history of mankind.

The earliest Chinese assassins in particular date back as far as the Spring and Autumn (770-476 BCE) and Warring States (475-221 BCE) periods. The Han dynasty historian Sima Qian in his “Records of the Grand Historian” 2 wrote a special article on the “History of the assassin”, providing glimpses into the work of the assassins of the early periods. Probably the most famous is the tenet of one of the “Four Great Assassins” 3, “a knight will naturally die for the one who understands him.” A Tang dynasty poet Li Bai 4 also described the elegance of assassins in the line from the poem “A Warrior’s Conduct” 5, “In ten moves he kills a man, for a thousand li he goes without resting, once his business is done, he leaves, body and name never revealed” that circulated for over a thousand years.

On the West, they are known as assassins, from the ancient Arabic “Hashshashin” 6, transcribed into Chinese as 阿萨辛 (asaxin). The Order of Assassins, an esoteric organization the purpose of which was to kill the Crusaders, became nearly legendary and is well familiar to all gamers 7. In the Bible, a Judah woman Jael used her feminine charm to kill an enemy leader 8 – that is probably the earliest Western written account of an assassin.

Now this is the section where the episode spoilers usually go, but nothing particularly historical happens in this episode. Perhaps the only thing I can say is that Dong Huang was indeed Dong Zhuo’s nephew. He was executed after Dong Zhuo’s death and that’s one of the very few things we know about him.

  1. The original text uses two words for “assassin” – the native Chinese word derived from “killing” as well as a transliteration of “assassin”. I genuinely don’t know if there is any English word to do that – “killer” or “murderer” doesn’t really have the same connotations. The text also doesn’t really talk about, say, professional killers, but rather those doing it for personal or ideological reasons. ↩

  2. Sima Qian is the author of the first comprehensive Chinese history – the Records of the Grand Historian, covering over two thousand years of ancient history. The work on the history was started by Sima Qian’s father, but it was Sima Qian who brought it to completion, through a lot of hardships – including choosing the dishonor of castration instead of execution to have the time to finish his work. ↩

  3. “Four Great Assassins” as described in the aforementioned Records of the Grand Historian. There are many assassins, both successful and not, described in the Assassins chapter, but four are particularly prominent: Zhuan Zhu, Yu Rang, Nie Zheng, and Jing Ke.

    You can find translations of the Records of the Grand Historian online (for example several are on the Internet Archive), probably the best of the ones I’ve seen is the ongoing translation edited by William H. Nienhauser, Jr. (the assassins chapter can be found in volume VII, translated by Tsai-fa Cheng, Zongli Lu and Robert Reynolds as well as Nienhauser). If you choose to look any translations up, be prepared that different spellings of names are used in most of them, since they all seem to use the Wade-Giles romanization rather than the pinyin I use here.

    Here are the very very brief summaries of the “four great assassins” stories.

    Zhuan Zhu’s lord (the ruling king’s cousin) intended to seize the throne, considering himself the rightful heir. At an opportune date, he sent Zhuan Zhu to kill the king. Zhuan Zhu accomplished his task, but himself was killed in the process.

    Yu Rang’s lord was the first to appreciate his talents, but was killed by a rival lord, so Yu Rang decided to seek revenge. He took on various disguises to kill his target, but was thwarted every time. The first time his target, impressed with Yu Rang’s loyalty, let him go; the second time, he had Yu Rang seized. As a final wish, Yu Rang asked for his target’s coat to run it through with a dagger, symbolically accomplishing his revenge, and then committed suicide.

    Nie Zheng’s story is the one that contains the “a knight will naturally die for the one who understands him” line. His story is a little different though – he was approached for the explicit purpose of attaining revenge, and although he was treated generously by the lord who hired him, they had no prior relationship. Still, Nie Zheng considered it a blessing to be raised out of the humble circumstances of being a butcher, even if that meant the end of his life – Nie Zheng committed suicide after killing his target.

    Finally, Jing Ke. His story is a bit hard to summarize, as it’s the longest and has a lot of characters (and a lot of people slitting their own throats). Jing Ke is asked to kill the king of a rival kingdom. There’s a whole party, a big plan, a poisoned dagger that would kill even with a scrape, and yet… Jing Ke fails. His friend later tries to kill that king again, and also fails. Still, it’s Jing Ke’s determination that Sima Qian praises and draws attention to. ↩

  4. Li Bai (Li Bo, Li Po) – a Tang dynasty poet that’s considered one of the most important poets both of that era, and Chinese history as a whole. Even though many of his poems were lost, there are hundreds of surviving texts, and not all of them have been translated. ↩

  5. I haven’t been able to find an actual decent translation – all of Li Bai anthologies don’t have this poem, and the only translation is a… very questionable one on a song lyrics website. So. Here’s a rough translation. ↩

  6. Hashshashin. The popular theory claims that the name “assassin” derives from Arabic “Hashshashin” – “ones smoking hashish”.

    And that’s… where the problems start, because there is no real evidence that the assassins smoked hashish, as much as Medieval and even 19th century European authors loved that idea. The word hashish, in the meaning of an addictive substance rather than just “dry herb”, does exist in Arabic sources of medieval times, but not in reference to the Isma’ilis sect. It’s possible that it came to mean just someone of low social status, a criminal, since smoking hashish was largely discouraged in Muslim texts.

    People have argued back and forth about this for a while, and this post is hardly the place to examine the topic further; if you’re curious about it, I can suggest taking a look at The Assassin Legends. Myths of the Isma’ilis by Farhad Daftary. I found it a rather thorough look at the myths surrounding the assassins. It also includes a translation of the French 19th century text that first examined the Arabic sources containing the name (yes, before 19th century people were trying to derive the etymology without having the original Arabic spelling. Or even knowing Arabic at all. This in itself gives a good idea of how much in the popular perception of assassins was pure myth.) ↩

  7. I’m pretty sure that the Order of Assassins appeared quite a bit before the Crusades – it was established in 1090, while the First Crusade is dated as 1096–1099, and the first encounter between the Crusaders and the Order of Assassins happened in 1106. In general, while the Order of Assassins did kill some Christian leaders, they were much more involved in the politics of various local factions. ↩

  8. Biblical story of Jael (Yael) refers to the chapters 4 and 5 of the Book of Judges. I am admittedly not very familiar with the Bible, but the gist of the story is that Jael invited an army general to her tent, attended to him and later killed him in his sleep by driving a tent peg into his head. The attitudes to her doing so seem to differ among the commentators, but this note is probably not the time or the place for that discussion. ↩