Welcome to the Romance of the Three Kingdoms podcast.

This is episode 71.

Last time, we left off with Cao Cao entertaining thoughts of launching another campaign against the south,

to put down Sun Quan and Liu Bei before they became too much trouble.

But first, he wanted to eliminate a long-time thorn in his side,

Ma Teng, a general who was stationed in Xiliang,

which was in the northwestern borderlands of the empire.

Ma Teng, along with Liu Bei, had been part of a failed conspiracy to assassinate Cao Cao years ago,

and the fact that he had a sizable army in the west had always kept Cao Cao up at night,

so Cao Cao decided to use a little trickery.

He was going to send an imperial decree, giving Ma Teng a promotion,

and putting him in charge of leading the campaign against the South.

This would give Cao Cao a chance to lure Ma Teng to the capital and get rid of him.

So let's pause for a moment and give you a little background on Ma Teng.

He was the descendant of one of the most illustrious generals of the Han Dynasty.

His father had been a justice of the peace in a county in the west during the reign of Emperor Huan, which was now more than four decades ago. His father later lost his office and was stranded in the west,

where he took up with the Jiang people, a powerful borderland tribe, and Ma Teng was the product

of a marriage between his father and a woman of the Jiang tribe.

Ma Teng grew up to be tall, strong, even tempered, and well respected. During the final years of

the reign of Emperor Ling, so about 20 years ago, there was frequent attempts by the Jiang people to throw off the yoke of the Han,

and Ma Teng raised the local militia to put down these uprisings.

For this service, he was named the general who conquers the west.

...