📚 Yuanshen Haikua — a Qing-dynasty endgame manual
Red to move with two chariots against one — a visible edge in firepower. But Black is anything but outgunned: an extra knight, advisors and elephants screening the palace, and five pawns on each side drawn up like two armies facing off across a river. The classical manual Uyên Thâm Hải Khoát (game 5) concludes: draw. Red keeps pushing, Black keeps holding — a tug of war in which the attacker never quite finds the finishing blow. The name is the most famous "beautiful mistake" attached to Zhuge Liang: the histories record five personal campaigns against Wei (228–234), only two of them by way of Mount Qi — the "six" belongs to the novel and to tradition, as the anecdote below explains. After all those expeditions, still a drawn position: can you find the road that players old and new have left untravelled?
'Six expeditions from Mount Qi' — history counts five, and only two that way
Every fan of the Three Kingdoms knows the phrase: Zhuge Liang launched SIX expeditions from Mount Qi against Wei. It is carved into poems, plays and idioms. There is just one problem: count the campaigns in the records, and neither the number nor the mountain survives. What went wrong? Between 228…
Stories around this position — storytelling, not part of the engine-verified content.
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