Guan Yu: The Bone-Scraping General Worshipped by Both Cops and Triads

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Guan Yu is venerated in Hong Kong police stations and in triad hideouts alike, and the only difference between the two statues is which hand holds the blade. This episode sets aside the 14th century novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms and works from Chen Shou's third century Records of the Three Kingdoms. Guan Yu enters the record as a fugitive during the collapse of the Eastern Han dynasty and the Yellow Turban Rebellion, joining Liu Bei's volunteer militia alongside Zhang Fei. The three shared a room, a sleeping mat and a cooking pot, and contemporaries rated Guan Yu and Zhang Fei each the enemy of 10,000. Captured by Cao Cao around 200 CE and showered with wealth and a noble title, Guan Yu repaid the debt by cutting down the rival commander Yan Liang in a single charge, then sealed up every gift and rode off alone to rejoin Liu Bei.

In 219 CE, commanding Jing Province, he used autumn floods on the Han River to trap enemy armies near Fancheng and capture the general Yu Jin, alarming Cao Cao enough that he weighed moving the capital. Chen Shou judged him unrelenting and conceited. He publicly insulted Sun Quan's envoy over a proposed marriage alliance, and Sun Quan secretly joined Cao Cao against him. Lu Meng's troops slipped past the watchtowers disguised as merchants, and the supply officers Mi Fang and Shi Ren, whom Guan Yu had threatened with punishment, opened their gates. Captured and executed with his eldest son in early 220 CE, Guan Yu was first feared as a vengeful ghost, then promoted by later emperors from marquis to holy emperor, adopted by Buddhists and Daoists, and worshipped by merchants as a guarantor of honest dealing.

• The red face and green robe come from later Chinese opera; the beard is historical, and Zhuge Liang called it peerless in a surviving letter.
• With a poisoned arrowhead lodged in his arm bone, he had a physician scrape the bone without anesthesia while he feasted, drank and laughed with his officers.
• When advisors begged Cao Cao to pursue the departing Guan Yu, he refused, saying the man was only doing his duty to his lord.
• Zhuge Liang soothed Guan Yu's jealousy of the defector Ma Chao with a flattering letter, which Guan Yu proudly showed to his guests.
• Under the Ming and Qing dynasties the state named him the Saint of War and ordered temples built to him across the empire.