Good-looking Chinese ladies for decisive military victory, as related by Louis Cha (page 45)
我在武俠小說裡寫了中國武術怎樣厲害,實際上是有些誇張了。中國人不太擅長打仗,與外國人打仗時,輸的多,贏的少,但是我們有耐力,這次打不贏沒關係,我們長期跟你幹,打到後來,外國人會分裂的。如匈奴很厲害,我們打他不過。漢高祖曾在山西大同附近被匈奴人圍困,無法脫身。他的手下便獻了一條妙計,去向匈奴皇后說,漢人漂亮的小姐很多,你如果把漢朝皇帝抓來,把漢人打垮了,俘虜了大批漢人中的漂亮女人,你這個皇后就要糟糕了。匈奴皇后中了這個詭計,便退兵了。匈奴後來分為南北,南匈奴投降了漢朝,北匈奴則向西走,一部分到了英國,以至滅亡了整個西羅馬帝國。有意思的是,匈奴的一半被中國抵抗住了,投降了,另外一半卻把整個歐洲打垮了。
I wrote about how powerful Chinese martial arts are in my wuxia novels, but actually it’s a bit exaggerated. Chinese people are not so great at fighting wars. When we fight wars with foreigners, we lose more often than we win. But we have stamina! If we don’t win this round, that’s okay, we’ll fight you long-term. Eventually, the foreign country falls apart from civil war. For instance the Huns were very fearsome, so we couldn’t win against them. Han Dynasty Emperor Gaozu was besieged by the Huns near Datong in Shanxi, and could not escape. His advisors offered a stratagem, to go to the Empress of the Huns and say: there are many beautiful Han ladies, and if you capture the Han Emperor, defeat the Han people, and get a whole bunch of beautiful Han women as spoils of war, it’s going to go badly for you -O Empress of the Huns! The Empress of the Huns fell for this stratagem, and pulled back the army. The Huns later split into Northern Huns and Southern Huns. The Southern Huns surrendered to the Han Empire, while the Northern Huns went westward, some of them reaching England, and they destroyed the entire Western Roman Empire. What was interesting was, half of the Huns were resisted by and surrendered to China, while the other half defeated all of Europe.
— From speech given by Louis Cha, also known as Jin Yong 金庸, at Peking University in 1994, as translated by me.
— Han Emperor Gaozu was my favourite Chinese Emperor as a child, for the solipsistic reason that we shared the same family name (along with 60,000,000 - 70,000,000 other people).
— It’s not just pure, unadulterated feminine vanity that leads to my quoting the flattering Louis Cha above. After all, as Jane Austen wrote in Pride and Prejudice: “When a woman has five grown-up daughters, she ought to give over thinking of her own beauty. In such cases, a woman has not often much beauty to think of." I’ve only got two, not five children, and they are small, not grown up, but her point stands, and is truer every year.
— Louis Cha wrote martial arts novels like J. R. R. Tolkien wrote fantasy ones: with unfathomably deep knowledge and literary quality.
— Louis Cha’s doctoral thesis from Cambridge: Imperial succession in Tang China, 618-762 is sadly unavailable publicly. I emailed the repository asking for it to be made openly available. I’ll let you know if they say yes!
Edit:
The repository said: “Unfortunately, the death of the author does not end copyright restrictions under UK law and we are therefore unable to make Louis Cha’s thesis publicly available without permission, which we have not received from the family.”