Young Heroes

The blog yesterday triggered my memories about The Three Kingdoms. After bragging my knowledge about the history to Gang, we watched two episodes (from '95 TV) together, both were about the battle of red cliffs. It's amazing to imagine what happened two thousand years ago, when a group of young people, mostly of my age, led thousands of hundreds of people crusading across the country, cleverly using all sorts of plots and schemes, and finally founding their own states.

Heroes in The Three Kingdoms are amazingly young. Sun Ce occupied 6 counties (80 states in all) when he was 24 and founded Kingdom Wu; his younger brother Quan succeeded at 18 at Ce's death; Zhuge Liang decided to assisted Liu Bei as his chief minister when he was 27; one year later, he facilitated Zhou Yu in defeating Cao Cao and his troops of 800,000. Most generals and advisers made their names during their teenagers, and became well known by 30. This is hard to imagine nowadays - most people barely make any achievement until they graduate from college at around 22, and it will take another few years for them to build up their reputations and move forward in their career path. Luckily one can make breakthrough in his field, and get awarded with a world-class prize by retirement. But most young people, receive little compliment except "youth is beautiful." Especially in China, when aged people are much respected, it's hard for young people to gain acclaim.

One reason that contributes to the emergence of these young heroes is the short life expectancy in ancient China. Confucius called people who are 70 and above to be "rare". During warring times like the Three Kingdoms Period, it was even rare to die in mid-50s, which is considered as "natural death" in The Three Kingdoms. Much more people died earlier, like mid-30s or 40s, usually of wounds or diseases. Given such short lifespans, people had to work hard during their early ages to accomplish as much as they can.

Another reason, I'd assume, was the short educational system in ancient China. Confucianism was made the state mainstream ideology since Han, therefore I'd imagine that children were required to study Confucius books. Other than this, they were not obliged to take extra courses - no foreign language, maths, physics, chemistry, etc. Smart kids could probably finish his coursework in a few years and started to explore the real world as knowledgeable persons. Some generals in the Three Kingdom Period were not even educated, which didn't demean their reputation as most people at that time were illiterate.

The last reason, probably was the lack of child labor protection. It's impossible nowadays to recruit teenagers in armies or hire kids in stores. But in The Three Kingdoms, there were stories about people leading a troop, killing enemies at the age of fourteen; and an eight-year old boy attending policy discussion. Maybe people at that time had a stronger belief in "learning by doing".

I'm 27 now. In The Three Kingdoms, I should either lead an army or at least governed a state for years. Now I'm still looking for jobs. What a progress we've made over the last two thousand years.