Battle of Ye
battle between warlords Cao Cao and Yuan Shang (204)
The Battle of Ye or Battle of Yecheng took place in 204 in the late Eastern Han dynasty. It was fought between the warlord Cao Cao and Yuan Shang, son and successor of Cao Cao's rival Yuan Shao, in the Yuan clan's headquarters Ye (in present-day Handan, Hebei). Cao Cao had been allied with Yuan Shang's elder brother Yuan Tan, who rebelled in a succession feud, and it was by Yuan Tan's request that Cao Cao laid siege to Ye. The successful siege of the city dislodged Yuan Shang's power from Ji Province, and Cao Cao would later use the city of Ye as a major base of his military power.
Background
Yuan Shao, the powerful warlord of the north, had been decisively defeated by his southern neighbour Cao Cao in the Battle of Guandu in 200 and died two years later in frustration. Despite the defeat, the Yuan power bloc was by no means eliminated, for Yuan Shao was survived by his three sons Yuan Tan, Yuan Xi, and Yuan Shang; together with their cousin Gao Gan, the Yuan family still held on to the provinces of Ji, Qing, Bing, and You. The Yuan brothers were not on good terms, however—Yuan Tan, the oldest, contested the succession of his younger brother Yuan Shang, who was preemptively made heir by his supporters Shen Pei and Pang Ji, while the second son Yuan Xi was content with controlling the northernmost You Province and stayed out of his brothers' conflict. In the winter of 202, Cao Cao attacked Yuan Tan's position in Liyang, and Yuan Shang brought his troops to help his older brother. The two brothers held out for six months, before eventually driven back to Ye, where they successfully struck back and caused Cao Cao to withdraw for the time being.
As soon as Cao Cao started to retreat in mid-203, the brothers' feud took a turn to the worse.
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This entry incorporates text from “Battle of Ye” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.