Straw Boats Borrow Arrows

One hundred thousand arrows.

Not a hundred thousand grains of rice, and not a hundred thousand pebbles. A hundred thousand real arrows. Each one was a shaft of bamboo shaved straight, with sharp iron at one end and feathers at the other so that it flies true.

A person counting one arrow a second, all day and all night without rest until the sun rose again, would still fall short.

The story takes place on the banks of the Yangtze, in a book that people have been telling and retelling for more than 600 years. The man who had to find all those arrows was Zhuge Liang. He was a celebrated adviser and strategist of ancient China. People in Vietnam know him best by his courtesy name, Khổng Minh.

The one who set the task was Zhou Yu, the commander leading the army on the river. Zhou Yu asked a question that sounded very generous: could the work be done in ten days?

Ten days for 100,000 arrows works out to 10,000 a day. That means forges glowing red from dawn until late at night, carvers splitting bamboo without a pause, and people combing every riverside village for feathers. Anyone who heard it knew that ten days was already far too short.

Zhuge Liang listened, then answered that ten days might be too late for the great task ahead. And then he asked for three days.

Three days.

He even offered to sign a formal written pledge, a military oath, accepting punishment under army law if he failed. The paper was written and signed, and the ink was not yet dry.

At this point, it looked as if things were going very badly wrong.

The most worried man was Lu Su, a friend of Zhuge Liang. He hurried over to press for an answer. Zhuge Liang said nothing about forges at all. He only asked Lu Su to help him borrow a few things.

Twenty light boats. Thirty soldiers in each boat, which comes to exactly 600 men. A screen of blue cloth hung all around each boat. And along both sides of every hull, more than 1,000 bundles of straw, tied in place.

Not one stalk of bamboo. Not one feather. Not one forge. Only boats, cloth and dry straw. Lu Su could make no sense of it, but he got everything ready all the same.

The first day passed, and the twenty boats lay still at the landing. The second day went the same way. Lu Su paced in and out, counting down the hours.

On the third night, in the fourth watch, while it was still pitch dark, Lu Su was invited onto the boats.

That night, mist covered the whole sky. Out in the middle of the Yangtze it was even thicker, so thick that two men standing face to face could not see each other. The twenty boats were tied one to the next with long ropes. They drifted silently toward the northern bank, where Cao Cao had his river camp. Cao Cao was one of the great generals of China at the end of the Han dynasty.

When they drew close, Zhuge Liang had the boats lined up in one long row, bows pointing west and sterns pointing east. Then he gave an order that did not sound like the order of a man trying to hide. He had the drums beaten. He had the men shout as loudly as they could.

Lu Su nearly cried out. Six hundred men in twenty small boats were pounding drums right at the gate of a huge army's river camp. Zhuge Liang simply invited him to sit inside the cabin. Then he smiled and told him to stay there a while: once the arrows came, they would go home.

On the other side, in the camp, the soldiers heard the drums but saw nothing. The mist swallowed everything. No one could tell how many boats were out there, how many men, how many troops were hiding behind that wall of mist. Cao Cao was a careful man. He would not send troops out into a white blank where no one could see the way. He ordered everyone to hold their ground, and to shoot.

The archers and crossbowmen of the river camp shot first. Then more archers were called down from the camp on land. Altogether, more than 10,000 bowmen were loosing their strings toward the river.

Arrows flying through mist made a strange sound. A steady rattle, like hail pouring down on a thatched roof, going on and on without end.

But the arrows did not fall into the water. They stuck in the straw.

The bundles of dry straw tied along the hulls caught them all. Each arrow pierced the stalks and stuck fast, one arrow on top of another. Behind the straw hung the blue cloth screens, and behind the screens sat 600 men, keeping still. All that night, on all twenty boats, not one person was hurt.

After a while, the outer side of each boat was so thick with arrows that from a distance it looked like the back of a porcupine. Zhuge Liang then had the boats turned around, bows pointing east and sterns pointing west. He brought them a little closer still, so that the other side of each hull could take its share.

Day slowly broke. The mist began to thin. Zhuge Liang gave the order to head back. Before they left, he had the men on every boat shout one line together through the thin mist: thank you, Chancellor, for the arrows.

With the current behind them and the boats so light, they went so fast that the other side could not have caught them even if it had tried.

Back at the landing, the arrows were pulled out of the straw and counted. Each boat held about five or six thousand. The twenty boats together held more than 100,000. Enough, with some to spare.

In those three days, his side had not lit a single forge, split a single stalk of bamboo, or gathered a single feather.

Lu Su kept asking the same thing. How had he known?

Zhuge Liang said that three days earlier he had worked out that there would be a heavy mist on exactly that night. That was why he had dared to accept a deadline of three days. Then he added a saying that later generations have often repeated. A general who does not know the signs of the sky and does not understand the lie of the land is only an ordinary general.

On a closer look, the whole story rests on two quite ordinary things, which he simply did more carefully than anyone else. The first was reading the sky. Three days before, while the river was still clear, he had already seen the night of mist that was coming. The second was understanding the man on the other side. He knew well that a careful man who could see nothing would not send out his troops. That man would hold still and shoot. So Zhuge Liang had straw ready to catch the arrows.

The tale of the straw boats borrowing arrows is in chapter 46 of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, a classic Chinese novel. It is a story from a book, made up and passed down by people of old, not a page from the chronicles. Perhaps that is why it is as neat as a stage play. One river, one night of mist, twenty boats and one number.

In Vietnam, that book sits on the shelves of a great many families, most often in the translation by Phan Kế Bính, revised by Bùi Kỷ. Many Vietnamese people knew the face of Khổng Minh long before they knew where the Yangtze was. In Vietnamese, the phrase thuyền cỏ mượn tên has become a familiar saying. It means straw boats borrowing arrows. Whenever someone gets through a hard task using just what happens to be at hand, people bring up that misty night. The story came into the Vietnamese language the way stories do, carried by people who love to tell them, from the house next door into their own home, and there it stayed.

One hundred thousand arrows. Now that number has a shape. It is more than 1,000 bundles of dry straw tied along both sides of the boats. It is 600 men beating drums in the mist. It is a night when no one could see anyone. And it is the rattle of arrows striking straw, steady and even, until the sky grew light.