Wu and Yue Vie for Supremacy: Who Says Sleeping on Brushwood and Tasting Gall Is Enough to Win?

This is not a tale about a beautiful woman bringing ruin, nor is it merely an inspiring story about striving to improve oneself. The tangled loves and hatreds between two small vassal states in the southeastern corner of China some 2,500 years ago still move us today. Their triumphs and failures, life and death, joys and sorrows are certainly heartbreaking, but even more worthy of reflection is how the ability to read the times amid shifting fortunes decisively shaped the fates of those involved...