📚 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?
呂布に挑む三兄弟――起きるはずのなかった決闘
虎牢関では、時代最強の戦士が待っていました。単騎の戦いで無敗の呂布です。彼を抑えるには一人の英雄では足りず、義兄弟三人がともに戦う必要がありました。『演義』最初の大決闘です――ではなぜ歴史家は、そんなことは起こり得なかったと言うのでしょうか？ 『三国志演義』第5回はそれを完璧に演出します。まず張飛が乗り出し、次に関羽が加わり、最後に劉備自身――三兄弟が呂布を取り囲んで回り、ついに彼を退かせます。何世代もの読者が、三兄弟が世界に名乗りを上げた瞬間として受け止めてきました。 記録はその場面を台無しにし――そしてより良くします。実際の歴史では、190年に陽人で呂布の軍を破ったのは孫堅であり、野戦…
Stories around this position — storytelling, not part of the engine-verified content.
3ak4/3Ra4/3RN4/9/6C2/9/9/3p5/4p1c2/3K1p3 wOpen this position in the app: try it against the computer or watch the engines play it out.
▶ Play this studyLoad this position into the Setup editor: rearrange it, edit it and try your own variations.
🧩 Open in Setup