Scraping the Bone to Cure the Poison

The empire is at war and three sides are pulling it apart. Guan Yu (Guān Yǔ) commands for one of them, and he is the man the other two least want to see coming. He is camped outside an enemy city called Fancheng, close to taking it, when a crossbow bolt hits him in the right arm.

The bolt was poisoned. The arm swells and stops working, and a camp in the field can do nothing for it — a wounded commander is supposed to go home and be nursed, which here means lifting the siege and handing back everything he has won. There is a second problem, and he minds it more. An army reads its commander's face; if the men see him in pain, the fight goes out of them before the enemy arrives.

So he stays, and hides it, and sits over a board game in his tent to keep his face still. His officers quietly send in every direction for a doctor. One day a man arrives alone in a small boat with a medicine box on his arm and gives his name: Hua Tuo (Huà Tuó). He has come, he says, because he heard whose arm it was. Guan Yu's son Guan Ping (Guān Píng) takes him in.