📚 Taolue Yuanji — a Ming-dynasty endgame manual
Five Red pieces — two chariots, a knight and a cannon — all bear down on a Black king guarded only by two advisors, a cannon and three pawns. Study the board and you would expect Black to fall within a few moves. Yet the classical manual Thao Lược Nguyên Cơ (game 24) concludes: draw. "One man holds off three" — Black's king here plays the besieged hero who simply will not fall, exactly like the figure in the position's name. That figure is Lü Bu at Hulao Pass in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms: Zhang Fei fought him fifty bouts without a decision, Guan Yu joined for thirty more, and finally Liu Bei himself had to enter the fray. The duel — an invention of the novel, absent from the histories — is retold in the anecdote below. On this board, can you achieve what the three sworn brothers could not, and break the draw?
Three brothers against Lü Bu — the duel that never happened
At Hulao Pass, the mightiest warrior of the age sat waiting: Lü Bu, unbeaten in single combat. It would take not one hero but three sworn brothers fighting together to hold him. It is the Romance's first great duel — so why do historians say it could not have happened? Chapter 5 of the Romance of…
Stories around this position — storytelling, not part of the engine-verified content.
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