First Pass

It took one day to kill a Chanyu. It would take two months to send him to Chang'an. In the winter of the third year of Jianzhao's reign, the Han army defeated Zhizhi City. There are 1,518 heads in the snow, and not one of them has a name. Du Xun, the military marquis and false prime minister, was ordered to escort one of them from Kangju to Chang'an, a distance of 11,200 miles. What he wanted to give was the head of the Xiongnu Zhizhi Chanyu. The difficulty is not in the road. In order for the head to be delivered, it must be instantly recognizable. If you want to embalm it, you have to seal it. If you want barbarians thousands of miles away to see it, you have to let people see your face. These two things are not the same thing. What's even more difficult is that this battle was fought under false pretenses. The more complete the head is sent to Chang'an, the more complete the evidence chain will be for "unauthorized invasion". Is the person who escorted it a hero or an accomplice? Over in Chang'an, Prime Minister Kuang Heng has put the "Moon Order" on his desk: In the third month of spring, it is not appropriate to bury the body and bury the body, and it is not appropriate to hang the head. After the beginning of spring, this head will no longer hang in the barbarian residence on Cha Street. That long expedition of thousands of miles was in vain. Du Xun still has sixty days. At every checkpoint along the way, a seal must be stamped on his lacquered letter. He only recognized one truth during this trip: someone had to write down everything that happened on the road for him. The "Book of Han" records this incident in only nine words: Du Xun, the military marquis and fake prime minister, beheaded Shan Yu.