The Empty Fort Strategy is the 32nd of the Chinese Thirty-Six Stratagems. The strategy involves using reverse psychology (and luck) to deceive the enemy into thinking that an empty fort is full of traps and ambushes, and therefore retreat. This tactic is best known for being used by the Three Kingdoms period strategist Zhuge Liang in a fictitious account in Luo Guanzhong's historical novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms.
There are two actual recorded battles employing such strategy during the Three Kingdom period. The first one, recorded in Yu Huan's A Brief History of Wei, was employed by Wen Ping in 226 at Jiangxia during an invasion led by Sun Quan. The other and the more well known example was from Pei Songzhi's annotations in Records of Three Kingdoms, which was later romanticized by Luo Guanzhong in Romance of the Three Kingdoms (see the Hanzhong Campaign section below for more details).
Read more about Empty Fort Strategy: Cultural References
Famous quotes containing the words empty, fort and/or strategy:
“Come hither, all ye empty things,
Ye bubbles rais’d by breath of Kings;
Who float upon the tide of state,
Come hither, and behold your fate.
Let pride be taught by this rebuke,
How very mean a thing’s a Duke;
From all his ill-got honours flung,
Turn’d to that dirt from whence he sprung.”
—Jonathan Swift (1667–1745)
“The newspapers are the ruling power. Any other government is reduced to a few marines at Fort Independence. If a man neglects to read the Daily Times, government will go down on its knees to him, for this is the only treason these days.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“To a first approximation, the intentional strategy consists of treating the object whose behavior you want to predict as a rational agent with beliefs and desires and other mental states exhibiting what Brentano and others call intentionality.”
—Daniel Clement Dennett (b. 1942)