Mr. Lu Xun once said that Cao Cao was a very capable person, at least a hero. Although I am not a party of Cao Cao, no matter what, I always admire him. Cao Cao was an entrepreneur of the State of Wei, who laid the foundation for the later State of Wei, but for some reasons he did not claim the title of emperor before his death. His son Cao Pi declared himself emperor on December 11 of the first year of Yankang's reign as Emperor Wen of Wei. However, the Cao Wei regime that Cao Cao had worked hard to defeat did not last long, and the reason for the lack of longevity was that one of the people who followed him to fight the world, Sima Yi, was a powerful vassal of Cao Wei, but also the founder of the Western Jin Dynasty. Sima Yi was cunning and clever, once during the war, the emperor asked people to send a warehouse of cotton clothes, but Sima Yi preferred to let the soldiers freeze rather than send them, all for the sake of eleven years later.
Born in 179, Sima Yi was very intelligent from an early age and read poetry. Soon after Cao Cao defeated Yuan Shao, he heard that Sima Yi was talented, so he wanted to invite him to be an official. However, the Sima Yi family was a well-known figure, and he thought that the Cao Cao family was from a eunuch background, so he was not willing to give him an official. However, he could not directly refuse, so he pretended to be a patient with wind paralysis, so Cao Cao let him go. Then Cao Cao became the chancellor, who was very short of talent, and remembered Sima Yi. This time, he was inappropriate and deserved, because Cao Cao told the emissary that if Sima Yi did not want to, he would arrest him.
Cao Cao's love was not wrong, but it was not good to refuse to end up in one place, and Sima Yi naturally knew this truth. For the sake of his life, opinions did not matter, and he had to be called to go. Cao Cao spent a long time with him and gradually understood him as a person. Moreover, it was found that Sima Yi had a wolf look. The word is used as a metaphor for the wolf always looking left and right when walking, and also to describe people who are cautious and suspicious and have bad intentions. Therefore, he told his son Cao Pi that Sima Yi was by no means a person who was willing to be a subject and would interfere in our family affairs in the future.
However, Cao Pi had a good relationship with Sima Yi, so he did not pay attention to him and always defended him. Sima Yi did not have enough ability to confront the Cao Wei regime at this time, and he had to be careful, and his diligent and earnest work also reassured Cao Cao. Sima Yi used his cleverness to give Cao Pi a lot of ideas, so after Cao Pi ascended the throne, he was immediately reused. However, Cao Pi's life was not long, and he died of illness at the age of forty, and his son Cao Rui of Wei ming immediately ascended the throne.
In the end, it was not the original emperor, and Cao Rui did not trust Sima Yi as much as his father. Sima Yi still relied on his own wisdom to reassure the emperor, and when he pacified the Liaodong Campaign, Sima Yi's army was not very well supplied. The weather was very cold again, and some people in the army asked Sima Yi to lower his cotton clothes. And Sima Yi said this: The officials and goods of the people are selfless. This means that the cotton garment is a steward's thing, and the courtier's bad is privately distributed to the soldiers. At that time, Sima Yi's prestige was undoubtedly the highest in the dynasty, even surpassing the emperor.
When he said this, he meant to express his intentions to the imperial court, and such a prestigious emperor must not want to see Sima Yi, who wielded military power, win the hearts and minds of the army. Therefore, Sima Yi preferred to bear the insult of abusing soldiers rather than hand out cotton clothes, in order to prove his loyalty to the king. Sima Yi's move was undoubtedly correct, and when Emperor Wei Ming was seriously ill, he took his hand, looked at the prince and said: "Things will be entrusted to each other in the future." However, later Cao Shuang squeezed him out, and Sima Yi also pretended to be ill to make Cao Shuang think that he was really dying.
Just eleven years after the initial pacification of Liaodong, in the first month of the first year of Jiaping (249), Cao Fang and Cao Shuang left Luoyang together to worship the tomb of Emperor Wei Ming. Sima Yi took advantage of this opportunity to tell Empress Guo that he had deposed the Cao Shuang brothers, and then had people take control of Kyoto. The Cao Wei regime thus fell into the hands of Sima Yi, and his patience paid off many years later. Forced by the situation at that time, Sima Yi also did not claim the title of emperor in his life, perhaps Sima Yi and Cao Cao had the same idea, and did not want to bear the name of the eternal curse.
References: Book of Jin, Chronicle of Emperor Xuan, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Book of Wei