“General, surrender.”
As the Chanyu’s curved blade slashed through my battle robe, the setting sun over Mount Junji was pierced by a broken Han banner.
The blood of five thousand men from Jing and Chu soaked my armor, while the emperor in Chang’an had already cut off my way home.
They say I knelt before the Xiongnu royal court,
but they don’t know that beneath my knees lay the roll of fallen soldiers.
They curse me for drinking the barbarians’ strong liquor,
but they cannot see me pouring it into the frozen earth to honor my brothers, who died facing south.
The Chanyu bestowed on me the golden seal of Right Commandant King, yet I built twelve Han-style granaries on the grasslands.
Xiongnu nobles invited me to hunt with them, but I shot down only a lone wild goose and never loosed an arrow at the Han frontier.
For nineteen years, I weathered the wind and frost beyond the frontier. The edge of my sword always pointed south.
The sheepskin map in my tent marked every pass along the Hexi Corridor, yet I never let the Xiongnu catch so much as a glimpse of it.
Until aged Su Wu returned to the Han, holding his staff of office, and asked me, “Are you willing to come with me?”
I ran my fingers over the worn Han-style jade belt hook at my waist. The emperor had personally bestowed it on me before I left the frontier. Now only half remained.
“Ziqing, my home is Chengji in Longxi, but beneath Chengji’s yellow earth, no one is left waiting for me to return.”
The history books will never record:
The Han sword in the Chanyu’s court that sang by itself night after night,
The five thousand names I carved into the back of the golden figure used in sacrifices to Heaven,
Or the Xiongnu princess who always stood facing south when the moon was full
At the sacrificial fire, she raised a blood-written silk message:
“Chang’an calls you a traitorous general, and the Xiongnu see you as a lone wolf,
but the people of this northern grassland call you ‘the Han general who never raised his weapons.’”
“Princess Su He, you said the historian’s brush weighs a thousand jun. But the four characters they wrote, ‘Ling surrendered to the Xiongnu,’ cannot silence the nightly wails of the five thousand wronged souls from Jing and Chu outside my tent. Look at the grass south of the desert: which blade has not been reddened by Han blood?”
