Art of War 13.12

傳 is Li Ch‘üan’s conjecture for 待, which is found in the T‘ung Tien and the Yü Lan. The T‘u Shu, unsupported by any good authority, adds 間也 after 敵. In that case, the doomed spies would be those of the enemy, to whom our own spies had conveyed false information. But this is unnecessarily complicated. Tu Yu gives the best exposition of the meaning: “We ostentatiously do things calculated to deceive our own spies, who must be led to believe that they have been unwittingly disclosed. Then, when these spies are captured in the enemy’s lines, they will make an entirely false report, and the enemy will take measures accordingly, only to find that we do something quite different. The spies will thereupon be put to death.” Capt. Calthrop makes a hopeless muddle of the sentence. As an example of doomed spies, Ho Shih mentions the prisoners released by Pan Ch‘ao in his campaign against Yarkand. (See p. 132.) He also refers to 唐儉 T‘ang Chien, who in 630 AD. was sent by T‘ai Tsung to lull the Turkish Khan 頡利 Chieh-li into fancied security, until Li Ching was able to deliver a crushing blow against him. Chang Yü says that the Turks revenged themselves by killing T‘ang Chien, but this is a mistake, for we read in both the Old and the New T‘ang History (ch. 58, fol. 2 and ch. 89, fol. 8 respectively) that he escaped and lived on until 656. 酈食其 Li I-chi played a somewhat similar part in 203 B.C., when sent by the King of Han to open peaceful negotiations with Ch‘i. He has certainly more claim to be described as a 死間; for the King of Ch‘i, being subsequently attacked without warning by Han Hsin, and infuriated by what he considered the treachery of Li I-chi, ordered the unfortunate envoy to be boiled alive.