Reflections | The Chinese general who pulled out and swallowed his arrow-pierced eye - well, maybe

I had a health scare recently when a surfeit of what are colloquially referred to as “floaters” flitted across my left eye’s line of vision. Searching the symptoms in Google, as one does, I was increasingly spooked by websites that offered cyber-diagnoses of retinal detachment, onset of blindness and even tumours. After weeks of growing anxiety, I decided to see an ophthalmologist with a friend’s referral.

The doctor put me at ease after a thorough examination of both eyes. He explained in engaging detail the whys and wherefores of my condition, posterior vitreous detachment, a natural corollary of ageing possibly exacerbated by my moderately high myopia.

In the days leading to the consultation, I had grim visions, pardon the pun, of eventually going blind in one eye and recalled the famous one-eyed general Xiahou Dun, who lived and fought during the chaotic final years of the Eastern Han dynasty (AD25-AD220).

Xiahou Dun was the first cousin of the preeminent warlord of the period, Cao Cao, and his most loyal follower. In Romance of the Three Kingdoms, a fictionalised account of the events leading to and during the eponymous period, Xiahou Dun is depicted as an impetuous and incompetent military commander. He is one of the “bad guys” on the side of Cao Cao, the main antagonist of the novel.

A stray arrow put out his left eye during a battle in AD193. He survived the ordeal, but he became very self-conscious about the loss of his eye, and bristled at his subsequent nickname “Xiahou the Blind”. Naturally, fiction writers could not allow this morsel to pass without embellishment. Romance of the Three Kingdoms gruesomely describes Xiahou Dun pulling out the arrow and swallowing his detached eyeball, dramatically proclaiming to all who would listen that he must not discard what his parents gave him.