Taiwan is the largest island in China and a dazzling pearl along the southeast coast of our country. According to the Chronicle of the Three Kingdoms, in the second year of the Huanglong Dynasty of Eastern Wu (230), Emperor Sun Quan once "sent the generals Wei Wen and Zhuge Zhi to float to the sea to seek Yizhou and Qizhou", that is, to send two generals, Wei Wen and Zhuge Zhi, to lead ten thousand soldiers to the sea to find Yizhou and Qizhou. Yizhou here is today's Taiwan, and this is also the earliest known historical record of the mainland's exchanges with Taiwan.
After going to sea, Wei Wen and Zhuge Zhi successfully found Yizhou, captured thousands of people from the local area, and returned to the capital Jianye in the spring of the following year. To this day, Wei and Zhuge are immortalized in history for their first official government arrival in Taiwan, but what many people don't know is that they were executed by Sun Quan on the charge of "violating the edict and not doing anything" soon after they returned to Eastern Wu. So, why is that?
In the first year of the Huanglong Dynasty (229), Sun Quan declared himself emperor in Jiangdong and officially established Eastern Wu. However, at this time, he was already nearly the age of knowing his destiny, so he also began to believe in the art of immortals like the former Qin Shi Huang and Emperor Wu of Han, planning to take advantage of the fact that Eastern Wu just occupied the eastern coastal area, and the strong advantage of the water army sent people to the sea to Yizhou and Qizhou to find immortals and find a way to make people immortal. It was in this context that Wei Wen and Zhuge Zhi were given the task of going out to sea to search.
However, the history books say that Wei Wen and Zhuge Zhi set out in the spring of the second year of Huanglong (230), and in the spring and February of the following year, they "all went to prison for violating the edict and failing to do anything." Literally, there are two main reasons for the deaths of Wei Wen and Zhuge Zhi, one is "disobedience" and the other is "uselessness.". First of all, speaking of violating the edict, the above mentioned that Sun Quan let Wei Wen and Zhuge Zhi "float the sea to seek Yizhou and Qizhou", and the request can be described as quite straightforward and concise. We already know that Yizhou is today's Taiwan, so where is Qizhou? In fact, on this point, there are already more detailed records in the history books.
According to the Chronicle of the Three Kingdoms, "In the middle of the sea, the elders rumored that Emperor Qin Shi Huang had sent xu Fu, an alchemist, to bring thousands of virgins, boys, and girls into the sea to ask for Penglai Sacred Mountain and Immortal Medicine, so that the continent would not be returned." There are tens of thousands of families in the world, and the people on it sometimes go to Huiji cloth, Huijidong County people and sea travel, and there are also those who have been moved to Qizhou by wind. That is to say, at that time, it was rumored that the alchemist Xu Fu was commissioned by Qin Shi Huang to lead thousands of boys, girls and boys to the sea, and finally settled in Qizhou, and after years of inheritance and development, it is now said that Qianzhou has tens of thousands of households. There are even people who say that there were people from Huizhou who came to Huiji County to trade, or that some people in Huiji County were directly blown to Qizhou by the sea breeze.
Based on this text, we can get two possibilities. First, Qizhou does not actually exist, and like the so-called three overseas immortal mountains in the "Chronicle of History", Penglai, Abbot, and Yingzhou, they are only mythical and fictional holy places, and the rumors related to them are also fabricated; second, if combined with the widely circulated theory of Xu Fudong's crossing to Japan, and the now lost "Foreign Map" record of "Qizhou to Langya Wanli", then Qizhou may be the main island Kyushu Island located in the southwest of the present-day Japanese archipelago.
Regardless of the possibility, in short, Wei Wen and Zhuge Zhi could not find Qi Zhou due to the unknown and difficult road, and eventually only plundered thousands of people in Yizhou and returned to Eastern Wu to resume their lives. Obviously, Sun Quan's edict was to ask them to find Yizhou and Qizhou, but Wei Wen and Zhuge Zhi only completed half of it, which was indeed against the requirements. From today's point of view, it is impossible to ask them to cross the East China Sea to Kyushu Island without knowing the specific direction, voyage and route, but Sun Quan, as the king of a country, does not know the difficulties involved, and it is naturally difficult to understand.
Let's talk about the second point, reactive. As mentioned above, the reason why Sun Quan mobilized the masses to send a team of 10,000 people to the sea was mainly because he was getting older and older, so he wanted to find a way to live forever. The elixir did not exist, and Wei Wen and Zhuge Zhi naturally did not have the possibility of satisfying Sun Quan's requirements. Some people may say that they did not bring back thousands of people from Yizhou? In this way, even if there is no credit, it is still a bit of hard work.
At this point, I have to add an important piece of information. According to the "Zizhi Tongjian", "Wei Wen and Zhuge Zhijun marched for many years, and the soldiers died of illness and disease, and the continent was far away, and the pawns could not be reached, and thousands of people in Yizhou were returned." Gentle and straight sitting is fruitless, cursed. In other words, the ten thousand troops led by Wei Wen and Zhuge Zhi lost 89 out of 10 due to the plague. Quantitatively, the number of soldiers who died was much greater than the population of Yizhou they brought back; and qualitatively speaking, the trained Eastern Wu soldiers and the native natives of Yizhou could not be compared.
Although when Sun Quan was preparing to send troops, Lu Xun and Quan Chun had all-out opposition, believing that the Laoshi expedition would not only make soldiers prone to water and soil and soil, but also infected with diseases, but also could not get any tangible benefits. Sun Quan did not adopt the correct opinion, resulting in huge losses, but he was unwilling to bear the consequences himself, so Wei Wen and Zhuge Zhi naturally carried this black cauldron. To sum up, the reason why Wei Wen and Zhuge Zhi, the "heroes" who arrived in Taiwan, were put to death on the charge of "violating the edict and having no merit" was first, because they really had no substantive merit, and second, they were used by Sun Quan as scapegoats for their own wrong decisions.