Cultural Legacy
While historical records indicate Cao as a brilliant ruler, he was represented as a cunning and deceitful man in Chinese opera, where the character of Cao is given a white facial makeup to reflect his treacherous personality. When writing the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Luo Guanzhong took much of his inspiration from the opera.
As a result, unscrupulous depictions of Cao have become much more popular among the common people than his real image. There have been attempts to revise this depiction.
As the Romance of the Three Kingdoms has been adapted to modern forms of entertainment, so has its portrayal of Cao. Given the source material upon which these adaptations are founded, Cao continues to be characterised as a prominent villain.
Through to modern times, the Chinese equivalent of the English idiom "speak of the Devil" is "Speak of Cao Cao and Cao Cao arrives." (Chinese: 說曹操，曹操到; pinyin: Shuō Cáo Cāo, Cáo Cāo dào).
After the Communists won the Chinese Civil War in 1949, many people in China began to believe that there were many similarities between Cao Cao and the Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, Mao Zedong. Because of this perceived similarity, Party propagandists began a long-term, sustained effort to improve the image of Cao Cao in Chinese popular culture. In 1959, Marshal Peng Dehuai wrote a letter to Mao in which he compared himself to Zhang Fei: because of Mao's popular association with Cao, Peng's comparison implied that he had an intuitively confrontational relationship with Mao. Mao had the letter widely circulated in order to make Peng's attitude clear to other Party members, and proceeded to purge Peng, eventually ending Peng's career.
Read more about this topic: Cao Cao
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