Chen Sheng

In August or September 209 BC,[4] he was a military captain along with Wu Guang when the two of them were ordered to lead 900 soldiers to Yuyang (漁陽; southwest of present-day Miyun County, Beijing) to help defend the northern border against Xiongnu.

They announced that Fusu, the crown prince of Qin, who had wrongly been forced to commit suicide, and Xiang Yan, a general of Chu, had not died and were joining their cause.

Using 900 men to resist an empire seemed to be a suicidal move, but the people, who had felt deeply oppressed by the Qin regime, joined Chen Sheng and Wu Guang's cause quickly.

Chen Sheng was greatly weakened, and as he suffered losses at the hands of the Qin army, he personally led a force to try to gather reinforcements, but he was assassinated by his guard Zhuang Jia in c.January 208 BC.

Chen Sheng was often idealized by versions of history promulgated by Chinese historians as a great leader of the peasants against intolerable oppression of the Qin nobility and bourgeois.

Chen Sheng's decisions, while motivated by his desire to overthrow Qin, were often driven by self-interest and an illusory sense of superiority; as a result he often failed to act on good advice.

As the Song dynasty historian Sima Guang wrote in the Zizhi Tongjian:[5] When Chen Sheng first became the King of Chu, his relatives and friends all arrived to join him, as did his father-in-law.

The pattern of an impostor and his general, founded by Chen Sheng, was closely followed by Han Shantong and Liu Futong in the end of Yuan dynasty.