Talk:Cao Cao

Y Chromosome DNA

http://defence.pk/threads/chinese-general-arrested-for-gilded-lifestyle.295674/page-7

http://defence.pk/threads/chinese-general-arrested-for-gilded-lifestyle.295674/page-7#post-5166120

Y Chromosome analysis of prehistoric human populations in the West Liao River Valley,Northeast China

中国北方古代人群Y染色体遗传多样性研究

Cao Cao's Y DNA is O2*-M268

Journal of Human Genetics - Ancient DNA of Emperor CAO ... http://www.nature.com/jhg/journal/v58/n4/full/jhg20135a.html

www.nature.com › Journal home › Archive › Correspondence Nature by CC Wang - ‎2013 - ‎Cited by 6 - ‎Related articles Feb 14, 2013 - Ancient DNA of Emperor CAO Cao's granduncle matches those of his ... The highest probability (60.18%) was for haplogroup O2* (M268+, ...

Inferring human history in East Asia from Y chromosomes http://www.investigativegenetics.com/content/4/1/11

www.investigativegenetics.com/content/4/1/11 by CC Wang - ‎2013 - ‎Cited by 10 - ‎Related articles Jun 3, 2013 - Furthermore, application of Y chromosome analyses in the family ... Emperor CaoCao (O2-M268) is different from that of the Marquis Cao Can (O3-002611). ... Ancient DNA extracted from a tooth of Cao Cao's grand-uncle also ...

Y-chromosome of Emperor Cao Cao: O2 - Dienekes ... http://dienekes.blogspot.com/2011/12/y-chromosome-of-emperor-cao-cao-o2.html

dienekes.blogspot.com/.../y-chromosome-of-emperor-cao-cao-o2.html Dec 27, 2011 - Haplotype O2-M268 is the only one that is enriched significantly in the ... Therefore, Emperor CAO Cao's claim was not supported by genetic evidence. ... Where did you get the idea that Cao Cao Y-Chromosome should be the ...

Ancient DNA of Emperor CAO Cao's granduncle matches ... http://www.researchgate.net/publication/235620438_Ancient_DNA_of_Emperor_CAO_Cao%27s_granduncle_matches_those_of_his_present_descendants_a_commentary_on_present_Y_chromosomes_reveal_the_ancestry_of_Emperor_CAO_Cao_of_1800_years_ago

www.researchgate.net/.../235620438_Ancient_DNA_of_Emp... ResearchGate Ancient DNA of Emperor CAO Cao's granduncle matches those of his present descendants: a commentary on present Y chromosomes reveal the ancestry of ...

Inferring human history in East Asia from Y chromosomes http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3687582/

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/... National Center for Biotechnology Information by CC Wang - ‎2013 - ‎Cited by 10 - ‎Related articles Jun 3, 2013 - Furthermore, application of Y chromosome analyses in the family ..... CaoCao (O2-M268) is different from that of the Marquis Cao Can (O3-002611). ... Ancient DNA extracted from a tooth of Cao Cao's grand-uncle also ...

Present Y chromosomes reveal the ancestry of Emperor ... http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22189622

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/... National Center for Biotechnology Information by C Wang - ‎2012 - ‎Cited by 10 - ‎Related articles Dec 22, 2011 - Present Y chromosomes reveal the ancestry of Emperor CAO Cao of 1800 years ago. ... Haplotype O2-M268 is the only one that is enriched significantly in ... Moreover, our analysis showed that the Y chromosome haplotype of ... Therefore, Emperor CAO Cao's claim was not supported by genetic evidence.

List of haplogroups of historic people - Wikipedia, the free ... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_haplogroups_of_historic_people

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_haplogroups_of_historic_people Wikipedia Ancient DNA analysis of the tooth of Cao Cao's granduncle, Cao Ding, showed that Cao Cao belonged to Y-DNA haplogroup O2*-M268. The Takamuko clan of ...

List of haplogroups of notable people - Wikipedia, the free ... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_DNA_tested_historical_figures

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_DNA_tested_historical_figures Ancient DNA analysis of the tooth of Cao Cao's granduncle, Cao Ding, showed that Cao Cao belonged to Y-DNA haplogroup O2*-M268. The Takamuko clan of ...

Fudan University announced that determines DNA surname ... http://www.uuhomepage.com/staticpages/20131112000628.html

www.uuhomepage.com/staticpages/20131112000628.html Nov 12, 2013 - Interdisciplinary teams in search of Cao Cao's family's DNA .... chromosome 6 rare O2*-M268, prove that Cao Cao's y chromosome is the type.

estimating map about birth region & migration of Y-hg O2b tree ... http://s1.zetaboards.com/anthroscape/topic/5475761/1/

s1.zetaboards.com › ... › Biological Sciences › Population Genetics May 13, 2014 - 3 posts - ‎2 authors My hypothesis is that the original O2-P31 or O2-M268 carriers lived ... This haplogroup was also detected on the bronze-age inhabitants of northern China. ... O2-M268 is that after testing the tooth of Cao Cao's uncle found in ...

http://www.nature.com/jhg/journal/v57/n3/full/jhg2011147a.html

http://www.investigativegenetics.com/content/4/1/11

http://www.nature.com/jhg/journal/v58/n4/full/jhg20135a.html

Rajmaan (talk) 03:05, 23 May 2015 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 13 August 2015

Hello,

I represent Nexon M the game publisher based in California. I've noticed that Cao Cao the historical figure has a video game section. ______________ Video games Cao Cao appears in all 12 instalments of Koei's Romance of the Three Kingdoms video game series. He is also featured as a playable character in Koei's Dynasty Warriors and Warriors Orochi series. He also features in Koei's Kessen II as a playable main character.

Cao Cao also appears as a "monster" in Puzzle & Dragons as part of the Three Kingdoms Gods series.[25] ______________ I would like to add that Cao Cao also appears as a "monster" in the mobile game Monster Squad. I wanted to share screenshots of the game here but couldn't upload the image. Here is a direct link to our official Facebook page where we announced the new monster Cao Cao to play in your squad. Players can fight on Dino Island for a chance to get Cao Cao or they can purchase 10 yellow cubes to receive Cao Cao as a bonus reward.

Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/playmonstersquad/photos/a.1535272993367732.1073741828.1518301041731594/1691776167717413/?type=1&theater Forum - https://forum.nexonm.com/forum/monster-squad/general-discussion-ae/456381-new-cao-cao-update Website - https://nexonm.com/

I greatly appreciate your time! CMEres.bw (talk) 22:46, 13 August 2015 (UTC)

Not done: If you look at the other video game mentions, each of the game already has a Wikipedia page and clearly meets WP:N. The Nexon M game Monster Squad does not. Cannolis (talk) 01:20, 14 August 2015 (UTC)

Monster Squad has Cao Cao as a monster in game. Can it be listed as a redirect to the Nexon M Wikipedia where Monster Squad is listed under "Game Pipeline (In-house and through publishing agreements) near the bottom of page - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nexon#cite_note-49?

Xia Hou

This is a 'title' given by the Emperor to a favored court member and generally inherited by a son as in the nobility of the west such as a Count or Marquis. Cao Cao was a Xia Hou but in no way should that be considered a name of any kind for him much less a surname. Anecdotally there are Xiahou surnames now. Would love to hear from others. Jobberone (talk) 08:56, 29 September 2015 (UTC)

Family name

"This is a Chinese name; the family name is Cao" ok... do we really need this

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Importance

On WikiProject Three Kingdoms why is Cao Cao only High importance and the only individual with Top importance Sun Quan? 203.3.64.65 (talk) 01:06, 26 September 2019 (UTC)

Year of birth

Why does this article say both that Cao Cao was born in 155 AD and that he was born in "c. 155 AD"? His year of birth is both clear and unclear? 173.88.246.138 (talk) 05:59, 28 May 2021 (UTC)

Sogdia

I've recently reverted two editors (the relation between whom I make no claims regarding) who have added prose claiming that Cao Cao may have been of Sogdian origin, or that Sogdians have had a big impact on the city of Cao Cao [sic] birth.

This is anachronistic and not supported by the sources the editors cite.

Source 1: Kim, Hyun Jin; Vervaet, Frederik; Adali, Selim Ferruh (2017). Eurasian Empires in Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages: Contact and Exchange between the Graeco-Roman World, Inner Asia and China. Cambridge University Press. p. 52. ISBN 978-1-107-19041-2. Cao often could be a Sogdian surname.
Context is an individual living in 724, employed by the Tang dynasty court.

Source 2: Étienne de la Vassière (2018). Sogdian Traders: A History. Brill. p. 120. ISBN 9789047406990. In the first place... these names are attested, although rarely, to others than Sogdians: no one considers Cao Cao, who put an end to the Han dynasty, to have been a Sogdian, and rightly so. Emphasis added.

Source 3: Wen, Xin (2023). The King’s Road: Diplomacy and the Remaking of the Silk Road. Princeton University Press. p. 335. ISBN 978-0-691-23783-1. Sha identifies the non-Han style of Cao Yanlu's dress, but attributes it to his supposed Sogdian origin
Context is an individual living during the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period.

Source 4: Hansen, Valerie (2015). The Silk Road: A New History. Oxford University Press. p. 100. ISBN 978-0-19-021842-3.
Assesses the "probable ethnic background" of people listed on tax receipts at a "checkpoint near Turfan, c. 600 CE".

Source 5: Li, Xiao (2020). Studies on the History and Culture Along the Continental Silk Road. Springer Nature. p. 13. ISBN 978-981-15-7602-7. The Sogdian Letters mentioned the east end of their trading routes was Ye [Cao Cao's capital], suggesting an early presence of Sogdians in the city.... The Sogdians from Northern Qi [i.e. late 500s CE] brought with them distinctive customs and practices....
The Sogdian Letters are important source materials for early Sogdian history, and the one mentioning Ye discusses events from around 313 CE.

Source 6: Goetzmann, William N.; Rouwenhorst, K. Geert (2005). The Origins of Value: The Financial Innovations that Created Modern Capital Markets. Oxford University Press. p. 49. ISBN 978-0-19-517571-4. the case involved two other Sogdian merchants, Cao Guoyi and Cao Bisuo
Context is people living during the Tang dynasty

It's clear that by the Tang dynasty, people of Sogdian origin were associated with the surname Cao, and that Sogdians had a presence in the areas of Cao Cao's activity by the Southern and Northern dynasties. Nothing indicates that Sogdians were present during Cao Cao's lifetime, and there is even less indication that he was personally affiliated with them by descent.

Also, Cao Cao's father was adopted, and his birth surname was not Cao.

This material belongs in the articles Cao (surname), Sogdian people, Silk Road, etc, but not here. Folly Mox (talk) 18:04, 19 June 2023 (UTC)

I'll addend that early instances of the surname Cao are trivially explained as toponymic in origin, arising from the Zhou dynasty Cao (state). Folly Mox (talk) 18:12, 19 June 2023 (UTC)

Copied content from User:Lds/Sandbox/Cao Cao

Copied content from User:Lds/Sandbox/Cao Cao; see that page's history for attribution as Lds's work is an all around far better and complete version of the current Wikipedia page. More detailed and well sourced. For further information, see these two discussions. first and second.

Unreliable sources

Pei Songzhi was what we would call an inclusionist. As much as his annotations were serious history, they were equally an act of textual preservation – a critical part of manuscript culture – a bit before the collectaneum genre really took off. Have a look at Annotations to Records of the Three Kingdoms for the breadth of sourcing he included. Just because he cites a source, doesn't mean he trusted it.

The footnote on page 133 (in volume 4) of the Annotated Records of the Three Kingdoms is such a prime example I sometimes wonder it reflects the same impulse that led Pei Songzhi to invent citing sources in the first place. He specifically calls out three Jin dynasty historians and their works, saying the writing in Zhang Fan's Hou Han ji is so poor he suspects it to be an unfinished draft, calling Yu Pu's Jiang biaozhuan "rough and procedural", before lambasting Guo Song's Wei Jin Shiyu (cited as Shiyu). Pei describes the Shiyu as (paraphrasing here) total garbage. He says it's the worst history he's consulted, and we 💯 absolutely should not be citing it in this article or any article. Deprecate.

Next, we have Cao Man zhuan. I don't know if Pei Songzhi specifically critiques this or if he trusts his audience to be astute enough to recognise that an anonymous work containing anecdotes about Cao Cao's personality, named after Cao Cao's childhood moniker but attributed to a person from a different geographical region, can be understood to contain folktales and hearsay as much as or more than genuine historical content. This work – along with the Shiyu, whose title gives away its compositional methodology as an oral history – belong to a genre most closely represented in the modern world by supermarket tabloids and celebrity gossip sites. Cao Man zhuan is also a source we should never cite in a Wikipedia article, with the possible exception of sections titled "In legend" or the like. Generally unreliable.

Wang Chen, Xun Yi, and Ruan Ji's Book of Wei is a slightly different matter. By and large it's a serious history, and contains a lot of solid information. But, being as it was compiled during the Cao Wei dynasty, topics like the dynastic founder were politically sensitive, and we can see just from some of the bits quoted in this article just how hagiographically that work treated Cao Cao. "Every time he climbed to high ground he would bust out a rhapsody": uh-huh. "Soldiers mutinied and set fire to his camp at night and he slew dozens of them with his own blade": sure, just like Gimli. Records of private conversations and secret plans? Glad all that got written down! "As soon as Cao Cao showed up to his new provincial appointment, all the corrupt officials mighty and petty trembled in terror, and scurried away to different lands." In his next job after that, he single handedly instigated the downfall of all the world's unorthodox cults. Thanks, Cao Cao! Generally reliable; generally unreliable for specifics about Wei royal family.

Anyway my point is that although the base text of Records of the Three Kingdoms can be treated as a secondary source, and some of Pei Songzhi's additional sources can be trusted as well, we can't just take everything in the Annotated Records of the Three Kingdoms as sober historical fact. Tomorrow (probably) I'll go through and remove everything cited to the Shiyu or the Cao Man zhuan, and tone down the stuff cited to the Wei Shu to make it less "based on a true story".

I guess my other point is that, with the recent replacement of this article with User:Lonelydarksky's years-old draft, we've got a lot more premodern sourcing than modern sourcing, and it's not like modern scholarship has ignored Cao Cao, arguably the most famous person of his generation. The old article leaned super heavily on De Crespigny 2007, but at least he is a subject matter expert who has gone through the authoritative near contemporary sources and drawn informed conclusions about what can be presented as historical fact and what can be discarded as fanciful. So maybe let's try to readd some more modern sources. Folly Mox (talk) 07:00, 26 July 2023 (UTC)

Actually now that I'm starting this process, I think it will be of more encyclopaedic utility, in terms of reader interest, to expand the ==In Romance of the Three Kingdoms== section to a more encompassing title, and move the vignettes sourced to Shiyu and Cao Man zhuan into a subheading underneath that. We can also put stories from Shishuo Xinyu in there if desired. Folly Mox (talk) 15:55, 26 July 2023 (UTC)

Wow what a long article. This citation style improvement / quote verification is going to take me days. Please have patience.

Also, I'd like to rename the custom reference groups to something briefer, because the blue clicky links take up too much horizontal space. Any ideas? I'm also not opposed to completely ungrouping them, or separating them into just two groups by age. I don't think we have anything between and Lu Xun, which gives us a nice eight hundred year lacuna. Folly Mox (talk) 00:18, 27 July 2023 (UTC)

@Folly Mox, thank you for correcting what may be considered as unreliable sources and helping with the citation problems. Particularly the latter as I mostly use the basic editing when on Wikipedia. I just copied the whole article and believed that whatever should be kept or corrected could be done thereafter. Cao Cao's page among the three, was the one I felt would benefit the most from the changes as the previous edition was pretty dull for arguably, the most important person of the era. And while some of the records such as the Cao Man zhuan and Shiyu border more on the legendary side than the historical one, I definitely think they should be kept like you did in the section "In anecdotes, legends, and fiction". Reservations should be noted, but they are still fragments of information that have been saved and should be spread around.TheWayWeAllGo (talk) 11:51, 27 July 2023 (UTC)

User:Lonelydarksky did generally excellent work, and I thank you for identifying it, User:TheWayWeAllGo. I do see you around the Three Kingdoms space all the time and thank you for your own contributions as well. I apologize if my tone above comes across as frustrated; I would have liked to see a more careful merge of the content, but I do see you've been active at Zhuge Liang restoring overwritten content to the live version of that article, and I think once we're done tidying everything up, we'll have three much improved articles to show for it (the third being Conquest of Wu by Jin, for readers who haven't clicked through).

I mentioned this in an edit summary, but LDS's idiosyncratic citation style has received some pushback from the non-specialist community, with articles being sent to draftspace or AfD because the citation style was unclear (even though it's actually easier to verify). See Siege of Yong'an, Lady Xiahou, Princess Dongxiang, Hu Zhongzao, Wang Guangyang. So that's why I've been altering the citation style here, along with improvements and internationalisations in citation templates over the past decade that have allowed for their use.

And yeah, I acknowledge I was hasty to give a source review above that recommended removing the unreliable sourcing entirely. I was reading the diff of the overwrite and came here before I even knew there was an ==Anecdotes== section. Preserving the information but marking it as other than historical is the best manoevre for encyclopaedic quality. Folly Mox (talk) 15:05, 27 July 2023 (UTC)

Thank you for your kind words, it is nice of you Folly Mox. I didn't take it as such, It was an interesting and valuable read. And yes, you are right. The "merge" could have been done in a better way. I felt unhappy to just overwrite the previous work of other contributors, but I found Lds's work of an overall better quality, his paragraphs in comparison felt more detailed and sourced. I will do the same as you and keep looking for what I feel is noteworthy to readd. I see what you are doing. Detailing further the sources and sometimes citing international text and thank you for that. I could do the former but not the latter as I just translate the text found on Wikisource. We agree about the Anecdotes option.

On "depiction" in the first paragraph

Yesterday I noticed a couple unregistered editors edit-warring over the inclusion of a sentence at the bottom of the first paragraph of the lead, touching on Cao Cao's later reputation and cultural depiction. The text reads:Although often portrayed as a cruel and merciless tyrant, Cao Cao has also been praised as a brilliant ruler and military genius who treated his subordinates like his family. He was also skilled in poetry and martial arts and wrote many war journals. This text is exceptionally similar to a sentence in the previous stable version: Cao Cao remains a controversial historical figure—he is often portrayed as a cruel and merciless tyrant in literature, but he has also been praised as a brilliant ruler, military genius, and great poet possessing unrivalled charisma, who treated his subordinates like family., which had been tagged as needing citation since April 2021.

While I do think that later cultural depictions of Cao Cao are notable enough in their own right to meeit a sentence at the bottom of the first paragraph, neither of these is it. I feel like the cruel and merciless tyrant bit is undue weight without proper contextualisation of the historical and historiographical forces that led to him acquiring such a reputation (not that he didn't sometimes exhibit cruelty or mercilessness). Also – while I don't consider myself a subject matter expert – I did just read de Crespigny 2010's 500-page biography of Cao Cao the other week, and there was nothing in there about him treating his subordinates like family. That's not saying the statement is unsourceable, but if it's not a big enough part of his story to make it into a 500-page book, it probably doesn't belong in the first paragraph of the article. The unrivalled charisma bit might not be sourceable. wrote many poems is strictly duplicative since we mention he's notable as a poet in sentence one, and skilled in martial arts is not notable enough for the lead paragraph. Probably same for his annotations to the Sunzi Bingfa, which is fine where it is later in the lead.

The current text, which I introduced, reads A capable and energetic leader in politics and the on battlefield, Cao Cao attracted a reputation both during and after his lifetime for cruelty and cunning that exceeded historical fact. I'm biased of course but I think this adequately adresses the later depictions – which are touched on in more depth in the last paragraph of the lead, and even more depth in the "Evaluation" and "Anecdote" subsections – while also staying neutral in describing both the acclaim and the scorn that have built up around him. I'd like to know what other people think, though. Folly Mox (talk) 14:46, 7 August 2023 (UTC)

Also, can anyone explain why we need warlord and politician and statesman in the first sentence? Honestly in terms of definingness, warlord is the one that best fits, and politician seems reasonable, only in the absence of statesman. He did produce a number of edicts, but really his statesmanship is pretty low down the list. Folly Mox (talk) 17:06, 7 August 2023 (UTC)

Folly Mox Honestly, the text feels to me as something like: "Although portrayed as a cruel villain by Luo Guanzhong, historically Cao Cao was a true hero." And while Cao Cao wasn't just that, he had a reputation for cruelty during his lifetime in comparison with Liu Bei's reputation for kindness. Cao Cao did commit several massacres, often exterminated complete family by association, bullied the emperor into submission and on a lesser note since nobody got killed this time, had a weird kink for other people's wives.

I would also argue that his depiction in the novel is closer to an antihero/antivilain than a villain. May I suggest that DongZhuo3kingdoms could help with the project, whether the discussion or article, not only for the depiction but as a whole with the lead and historical facts.

You already did a massive work to research and add all the corresponding pages in the references and I thank you greatly for that but if you want to add another section "Cultural depictions of Cao Cao" then go for it.

I also think Romance of the Three Kingdoms should have his own section; I would personally keep the section "Anecdotes and Legends" with the warning about the reliability of the sources. Then a section "In Romance of the Three Kingdoms" as it is written a thousand years later in 1300s. Then a section "Cultural depictions of Cao Cao" where you can develop on contemporary depictions.

And to define Cao Cao, I would keep warlord, statesman and poet. Warlord and statesman define him better than strategist and politician.TheWayWeAllGo (talk) 18:09, 7 August 2023 (UTC)

Love the work you two have been doing Folly Mox and TheWayWeAllGo

So I agree with the issues around the old text. Unless of course one's family leads to keeping some poison nearby as a just in case. The old ones did lead to duplication and overexaggeration. I do agree better wording can be found then cruel and merciless tyrant while addressing that Cao Cao had a reputation for cruelty.

On the how to define: I like TheWayWeAllGo's “warlord, statesman and poet”

On the cruelty aspect: I do see what you tried Folly Mox, the cruelty and cunning seems to be meant to balance each other out, but it is the cruelty line that pops more than the cunning. Which is unfortunate. Might I suggest something like “A skilled and energetic leader in politics and on the battlefield, Cao Cao also attracted a reputation during his lifetime of cruelty. After his death, tales have played on his skills but also his perceived eccentricity and his cruelty, while he often became the protagonist for Liu Bei to overcome.” Probably too long.

With what we do with the post-Cao Cao era: Keep the annotations and Xinyu as Anecdotes and Legends (great idea), maybe with an explanation at the start as to their reliability? Fiction section could go into their own section, talking about the developments in poetry, plays, have the Pinghua and that sort of thing. I agree with the suggestion that the romance, given how defining it is a view of the era, get its own section. DongZhuo3kingdoms (talk) 19:55, 7 August 2023 (UTC)

User:DongZhuo3kingdoms, how would you feel about A skilled and energetic leader in politics and on the battlefield, Cao Cao also attracted during his lifetime a reputation of cruelty, which grew after his death.? or something equally brief. I don't think we need to mention Liu Bei or Sanguo Yanyi in the first paragraph. We do touch on it later in the lead. If I or someone else ever does split out a Cultural depictions of Cao Cao or somesuch daughter article, I could definitely see that in the lead, but I don't really see Liu Bei (or Sanguo Yanyi for that matter) as a paragraph one matter in Cao Cao's biography.

Thanks for your kind words, both of you. Of course most of the credit goes to User:Lonelydarksky. I do have a few more things to add to this article before I'm ready to put it all the way down, but I think we're doing pretty well where we're at. Folly Mox (talk) 20:48, 7 August 2023 (UTC)

I was more referencing his role culturally in general rather than specifically the romance. Sure, we can keep those factors out. In terms of the suggested change, I feel that tilts away from both cruelty and ability getting some inflation to just cruelty. I'm partially being careful here because I'm well aware how the cruelty in his lifetime line will get ignored, the after his death part will be highlighted.

How about: “A skilled and energetic leader in politics and on the battlefield, Cao Cao also attracted during his lifetime a reputation of cruelty. After his life, legends and fiction would play on the themes of his talent, his perceived eccentricities and his cruelty.” DongZhuo3kingdoms (talk) 05:17, 8 August 2023 (UTC)

Hmm I definitely see what you're saying about not overemphasising cruelty, while also reinforcing the idea that there was legitimate historically factual cruelty. I counterpropose we drop the "capable and energetic" bit – which tbh was to satisfy the sensibilities of the edit warring unregistered editor – like a A skilled and energetic leader in politics and on the battlefield, Beginning in his own lifetime, a corpus of legends developed around Cao Cao which [embellished / exaggerated] his talent, his cruelty, and his perceived eccentricities.

As a p.s. I might not have – and ought not allocate – time to workshop this lead paragraph the coming few days, so please tweak the prose in my absence however best makes sense. I'm just glad the edit warring has stopped. Folly Mox (talk) 07:50, 8 August 2023 (UTC)

I think we are very nearly there. Maybe built upon instead of the possible e-words would work? DongZhuo3kingdoms (talk) 10:39, 8 August 2023 (UTC)

Sure. I hope I indicated clearly how uncertain I was about the choice of verb there. As foretold, I don't really have bandwidth for this today or tomorrow; please alter however feels right to yall. Folly Mox (talk) 17:45, 8 August 2023 (UTC)

I think we have an agreement. I'll get it altered on the Cao Cao page and I hope whatever your doing goes well DongZhuo3kingdoms (talk) 18:11, 8 August 2023 (UTC)