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Red Cliffs

Both

The 208 battlefield where the Sun–Liu alliance burned Cao Cao’s fleet. The name is both a place and a battle. Su Shi’s Huangzhou cliff is not the historians’ first choice.

The frame is historical. Character, dialogue, and scale are often rewritten by the novel.

Modern site
Disputed. A leading site is northwest of modern Chibi (formerly Puqi), Hubei. Huangzhou’s Red Cliff is mainly a later literary place
Region
Middle Yangzi

The battle was fought in the winter of 208. Cao Cao came east from Jiangling. Zhou Yu and Cheng Pu commanded Sun Quan’s fleet, and Liu Bei’s army joined them. Huang Gai’s covered boats carried the fire. Ships and the camps on shore burned, and Cao Cao withdrew toward Huarong Road. The fire attack is historical. The beating, the stolen letter, the borrowed arrows, and the east wind were added to the place later.

Where on the river the fighting happened is disputed. The southern bank northwest of modern Chibi city, the old Puqi site, is a leading candidate. The cliff at Huangzhou became famous through Su Shi’s rhapsodies. It is a literary landscape, not automatically the battlefield of 208.

This site therefore keeps Red Cliffs as both a place and a battle. The place page is about where it was and why the site is argued. The tactics and the people belong to the battle.