Battle of Red Cliffs
The Battle of Red Cliffs, also known as the Battle of Chibi, was a decisive naval battle in the winter of AD 208–209 at the end of the Han dynasty, about twelve years prior to the beginning of the Three Kingdoms period in Chinese history. The battle was fought between the allied forces of the southern warlords Sun Quan, Liu Bei, and Liu Qi against the numerically superior forces of the northern warlord Cao Cao. Liu Bei and Sun Quan frustrated Cao Cao's effort to conquer the land south of the Yangtze River and reunite the territory of the Eastern Han dynasty.
| Battle of Red Cliffs | |||||||||
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| Part of the wars at the end of the Han dynasty | |||||||||
Engravings on a cliff-side near a widely accepted candidate site for the battlefield, in the vicinity of Chibi, Hubei. The engravings are at least 1000 years old, and include the Chinese characters 赤壁 ('red cliffs') written from right-to-left. | |||||||||
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| Belligerents | |||||||||
| Cao Cao | |||||||||
| Commanders and leaders | |||||||||
| Cao Cao | |||||||||
| Strength | |||||||||
| 50,000 |
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| Casualties and losses | |||||||||
| Unknown | Heavy | ||||||||
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| Battle of Red Cliffs | |||||||||||||||||||||
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| Traditional Chinese | 赤壁之戰 | ||||||||||||||||||||
| Simplified Chinese | 赤壁之战 | ||||||||||||||||||||
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The allied victory at Red Cliffs ensured the survival of Liu Bei and Sun Quan, gave them control of the Yangtze, and provided a line of defence that was the basis for the later creation of the two southern states of Shu Han and Eastern Wu. Attempts to reconstruct a timeline of the battle's events greatly differ, and the precise location of the battlefield remains widely debated. Most academics consider candidate sites located either southwest of present-day Wuhan on the southern bank of the Yangtze, or northeast of Baqiu in present-day Yueyang, Hunan.