Proverb Interpretation:
Thinking you’re smart instead of being smart delays or pits you.
origin:
During the Three Kingdoms period, Liu Bei and Sun Quan joined forces to fight Cao Cao’s soldiers at Red Cliff. Jiang Gan, a strategist under Cao Cao, took the initiative to ask Cao Cao to go to Eastern Wu to convince Zhou Yu to surrender because he used to study with him as a child. Cao Cao was delighted and told Jiang Gan to go and return quickly.
Zhou Yu was studying how to deal with Cao Cao, and when he heard of Jiang Gan’s visit, he guessed the purpose of his trip and came up with a brilliant plan to kill him with a borrowed knife. Zhou Yu ordered his men to host a banquet to welcome Jiang Gan. At the banquet, Zhou Yu told everyone, “Jiang Gan has been a good friend of mine for many years, and although he serves Cao Cao, I know that he is by no means Cao Cao’s lobbyist, so let’s get drunk today without mentioning the war.”
After the banquet was over, Zhou Yu was drunk, and he said to Jiang Gan, “You and I haven’t seen each other for many years, let’s catch up tonight, so don’t sleep in the guest room, just sleep inside my tent.” With that, he brought Jiang Gan to his tent.
As soon as Zhou Yu entered the tent, he fell asleep, but Jiang Gan couldn’t sleep because he hadn’t persuaded Zhou Yu to surrender, so he couldn’t go back to Cao Cao. So Jiang Gan quietly got up while Zhou Yu was sleeping and looked through the papers on Zhou Yu’s desk, trying to find useful military secrets. Sure enough, Jiang Gan saw a letter of surrender from Cai Mao and Zhang Yun, Cao Cao’s naval governors, to Zhou Yu. Jiang Gan was so surprised that he put the letter into his pocket and returned to Cao Cao in the dark.
In fact, this was all a ploy by Zhou Yu. Knowing that only Cai Mao and Zhang Yun would be in charge of the navy under Cao Cao, he deliberately forged a letter of surrender and asked Jiang Gan to steal it. Cao Cao, always suspicious, would surely kill Cai Mao and Zhang Yun. Sure enough, Cao Cao read the letter and killed Cai Mao and Zhang Yun in a fit of rage. When Cao Cao realised that Zhou Yu had used the sword to kill him, it was too late. Jiang Gan’s theft of the letter was really a clever mistake.
