Writing inside a fish and fox cries by firelight: Chen Sheng and Wu Guang’s first battle for public opinion

Article

On the eve of the Dazexiang uprising, Chen Sheng and Wu Guang put silk bearing the red words “Chen Sheng shall be king” inside a fish, then arranged a nocturnal fox-like cry by a shrine: “Great Chu shall rise; Chen Sheng shall be king.” This was no miracle. The Records of the Grand Historian explicitly describes a campaign they planned themselves to mobilize opinion.

In the seventh month of the first year of Qin’s Second Emperor, nine hundred conscripts were stationed at Dazexiang when heavy rain blocked the roads. The text says they expected to miss their deadline and that the law prescribed beheading for all who did so. Chen Sheng and Wu Guang, serving as leaders among them, believed there was no way back. They reasoned: fleeing meant death, and uprising meant death; if death was equal, why not die for a country? Once the decision was made, they prepared opinion before acting. The chapter “The Hereditary House of Chen She” records a three-part combination in detail.

First, they consulted a diviner. Interestingly, he understood their intention and told them their undertaking would succeed and win merit, then asked whether they were seeking a message through spirits. In this reading, they wished to put words of their own into supernatural mouths. Delighted, they reflected on spirits and concluded, “He teaches us first to awe the crowd.” The diviner gave them the idea: establish authority in the group’s imagination, and let spirits speak for them.

Second, red writing inside a fish. They wrote “Chen Sheng shall be king” on silk and put it into a fish caught in a net. Soldiers bought and cooked the fish, found the writing in its belly, and regarded it as extraordinary. They had paid for the fish themselves and discovered the vermilion words in ordinary preparations. The apparent revelation gained force because both finders and messengers were ordinary men, while Chen and Wu stayed out of sight. The article’s interpretation is that the nine hundred had no visible witness who could expose the human arrangement.

Third, fox cries by firelight. The text says they secretly sent Wu Guang to a thicket shrine beside the encampment, where he lit a covered fire at night and cried like a fox, “Great Chu shall rise; Chen Sheng shall be king.” The soldiers were terrified that night; the next day they talked among themselves and pointed toward Chen Sheng. The secret instruction is the crucial detail: Sima Qian explicitly gives readers a human organizer. An isolated light at a deserted shrine and a fox-like voice did the work. The article reads the transformation as taking place within three days: Chen changed in the soldiers’ minds from a unit leader into a man chosen by Heaven.

Alongside these came a fourth step: adopting identities. Chen proposed that the group falsely claim to represent Prince Fusu and Xiang Yan and call on the realm, expecting many to answer. Fusu was remembered as a virtuous prince whose death many had not heard of; Xiang Yan was a former Chu general whom Chu people cherished. Borrowing the names of dead men, or men whose fate was uncertain to the public, supplied ready-made legitimacy. Together the steps formed a political mobilization: divine backing through divination, material revelation through the fish, spreading emotion through the fox cry, and legitimacy through Fusu and Xiang Yan.

A line must be drawn between the historical account and later embellishment. The Records expressly says Wu was secretly instructed, identifying a planned act rather than a supernatural event; putting the silk inside the netted fish was likewise human action. Sima Qian’s strength was preserving these details rather than concealing the manipulation of spirits. Readers can see that apparent divine intent is sometimes human planning. Later portrayals of Chen as a child of destiny with extraordinary signs from birth are absent from this biography and belong to embellishments whose basis has not been established.

The boundary also matters. This manufactured sign cannot prove that every ancient auspicious-omen account was fraudulent. Sima Qian’s disclosure of the method shows a distinction in the historian’s treatment between creating opinion and a purported heavenly auspice: the former belongs to political technique, the latter to claims of mandate. Chen used a technique; the historian recorded it and left readers to judge. That is the narrative method here: neither conceal what the ancient actors did nor make every conclusion on the reader’s behalf.

The article sees a far-reaching pattern in later stories: Liu Bang’s snake-slaying uprising, Fan Chong’s kingship in the Red Eyebrows movement, Wang Mang’s tokens, and the Yellow Turbans’ “The Blue Heaven is dead.” They all allow heavenly intent to speak before asking people to follow. In modern terms, this is an early detailed record of agenda setting: create a topic through writing in a fish, amplify emotion through the frightening night cries, then secure recognition as the soldiers look toward Chen. More than two millennia later, the technology has changed, while familiar human responses remain.

This anecdote matters because it offers clarity rather than a successful miracle. In an age of claims that rulership came from Heaven, those seeking to overturn it could recognize that divine authorization might be manufactured. Chen Sheng’s greatness lies less in the silk inside the fish than in his question, “Are kings, marquises, generals, and ministers born of a special stock?” The first was a technique; the second was a principle.

Sources

• Sima Qian, Records of the Grand Historian, “The Hereditary House of Chen She.” The wording on writing inside a fish, fox cries by firelight, and the diviner’s question about spirits was checked against the Chinese Text Project’s electronic text.
• The passage about falsely adopting the identities of Prince Fusu and Xiang Yan comes from the same chapter.
• The comparison with later uprising stories, including Liu Bang’s snake-slaying in his Basic Annals and Wang Mang’s tokens in the Book of Han, is NineHound’s synthesis from historical material, not wording in the Chen She chapter.