In the fifteenth year of Jian'an (210 AD), the Sun Wu clique in Jiangdong lost two founders successively: one was Zhou Yu, the head of the military generals of the core leadership, and the other was Cheng Pu, who was known as the head of the Jiangdong Tiger Chen.
In the TV series "New Three Kingdoms", Zhou Yu was killed alive by the omnipotent Zhuge Liang, and Cheng Pu was also killed by random arrows in the process of fighting. Of course, these are all literary and artistic works adapted according to the needs of the plot, and there is a big gap with the real historical records. In the Records of the Three Kingdoms, both men were clearly recorded as having fallen ill and died: Zhou Yu died of illness on the way to the Western Expedition to Shu; Cheng Pu died of illness after returning to Jiangxia. However, the record of Cheng Pu in this one also has a slightly eerie color.
According to the Chronicle of the Three Kingdoms and the Biography of Cheng Pu, after the Battle of Gangneung, Cheng Pu was appointed as the Taishou of Jiangxia and led his troops to garrison Shaxian, the former lair of Huang Zu. After Zhou Yu's death, Cheng Pu was appointed as the Taishou of Nan Commandery (南郡太守), and together with Lu Su (鲁蘇) was appointed to guard Nan Commandery (南郡). Later, Sun Quan lent Nan Commandery to Liu Bei, and he returned to the original Jiangxia Commandery and "moved general Kou to pawn." This passage is very concise, saying nothing about the cause of his death, but using the word "卒", which has to lead to a lot of speculation about the cause of his death.
However, in his commentary on the Book of Wu, he did get some additions: "Hundreds of rebels were killed, all of them threw fire, and they fell ill on the same day, and died more than a hundred days." This is to say that after Cheng Pu returned to Jiangxia County, he quelled a rebellion, killing hundreds of people during the period, and finally burning the corpses. He fell seriously ill on the day he burned the body, and after that, he didn't look at it well, and he died after staying up for more than a hundred days.
Through the records in this passage, Cheng Pu's death is described in a bit strange, as if to say: Cheng Pu killed too much, and finally was killed by the ghost. This kind of saying is also more popular in the folk, but it certainly doesn't make sense when we look at it now. There are two questions: First, what happened to the rebellion quelled by Cheng Pu? Second, why did Cheng Pu burn the corpses of the rebels?
First, let's look at the rebellion quelled by Cheng Pu. The rebellion of Jiangxia County after the Battle of Gangneung is not clearly recorded in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, but a speculation can be drawn from the situation in Jingzhou at that time and the records of others. After the end of the Battle of Jiangling, the situation in Jingzhou as a whole was relatively chaotic, and the forces of Wei, Shu, and Wu were staggering their teeth and attacking and defending each other in the Jingzhou area. Due to the short period of time, Jiangxia Commandery, where Cheng Pu was stationed, was not very stable internally, and externally it faced the two forces of Wei and Shu. At that time, the heat of Sun Liu's alliance had not completely diminished, and Liu Bei had just borrowed from Jingzhou Nan County, so the possibility of Liu Bei secretly instigating an internal rebellion in Jiangxia County could almost be ruled out.
According to the Chronicle of the Three Kingdoms, Wen Ping was a general under liu biao, and later liu biao defected to Cao Cao with Liu Biao's son after his death. When Cao Cao first arrived in Jingzhou before the Battle of Chibi, because Jingzhou was adjacent to Eastern Wu, the "people's hearts were uneasy", so he appointed Wen Ping as Jiang Xia Taishou to "entrust border affairs". There is also a very important sentence in this: "Employed in Jiangxia for decades, there is Wayne." Therefore, through this record, it can be roughly concluded that the rebellion quelled by Cheng Pu at that time was most likely that the old ministry under the former Liu Biao's account wanted to go to Wen Ping, and the result was a rebellion.
Second, why did Cheng Pu burn the bodies of the rebels. On this issue, according to the Book of the Later Han Dynasty, from the end of the Eastern Han Dynasty, due to the impact of war, plagues such as typhoid fever and malaria were once rampant in most parts of the Yangtze River Basin. The epidemic lasted for a very long time, throughout the Three Kingdoms period, and lasted until the late Wei and Jin Dynasties and the Southern and Northern Dynasties were effectively controlled. In this regard, in the late Eastern Han Dynasty, the "Treatise on Typhoid Fever and Miscellaneous Diseases" written by Zhang Zhongjing, a famous medical scientist who was then the Taishou of Changsha, can also glimpse the severity of the plague epidemic at that time.
In the current "China Medical News", several scholars' discussions have also come to a conclusion: from the end of the Eastern Han Dynasty to the Wei and Jin Dynasties, the epidemics of typhoid fever, dysentery, malaria, schistosomiasis and other epidemics in Jiangdong were relatively serious. This is also partially recorded in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms: in the Battle of Chibi, a large part of the reason for Cao Cao's defeat was because of the plague epidemic in the army. In addition, several famous generals in Jiangdong, such as Zhou Yu, Lü Meng, Lu Su, and so on, most of them were thirty or forty years old, and they died early in their prime. Some problems can also be explained from this.
According to the medical level at that time, when there was a large-scale epidemic, there was almost no good way to control it. Burning the bodies of the dead was a simple and crude measure to isolate the spread of the epidemic at that time. Therefore, Cheng Pu burned the corpses of the rebels at that time, most likely to control the spread of certain diseases. But because of their old age, they were also infected in the process and died in the end, which are all things that can happen.
Through this analysis, it is concluded that Cheng Pu died of several plagues that were more prevalent at that time. This is more terrifying than the statement that the "ghost is killed" because of excessive killing.
Reference book: Romance of the Three Kingdoms