I have studied a text of "Cao Chong Called an Elephant" before, and I have to admire Cao Chong's wisdom, only five or six years old, I thought of the clever trick of using a boat to call an elephant, according to the current saying, Cao Chong can be called a prodigy in the Three Kingdoms period, but unfortunately Cao Chong died of illness later. So who sent Cao Cao's elephant? What is the purpose of the elephant giver?
After Guan Yu carelessly lost Jingzhou, the Sun-Wu alliance broke down, and in this situation, Eastern Wu felt the need to improve relations with the Cao Wei regime, so Sun Quan declared himself a vassal to Cao Cao and offered a lot of things, and the elephant was one of them. Of course, claiming vassalship was only a means of chaos in the Three Kingdoms, and Sun Quan's real purpose was to unite with Cao Wei to alleviate the threat from Cao Wei.
Cao Cao was naturally very happy to receive the elephant, and he did not hesitate to say the praise of "having a son and conspiring with Sun Zhong", and the whole group was watching this behemoth. Cao Cao wondered how big an elephant should weigh? The courtiers all talked about it, some said a thousand pounds, some said three thousand pounds, but there was nothing they could do about how to call this behemoth!
When he had a son like Sun Zhongmou, Cao Cao's son was also very intelligent. At this time, Cao Chong, who was only five or six years old, stood up and said: "Father, I have a way to weigh the elephant, I don't have to cut the elephant into small pieces, I just need to go to the river and use the boat scale, draw the draft scale of the elephant on the boat, and then replace it with a stone, and finally weigh the weight of the stone." After hearing this, Cao Cao praised it, led a group of people to the river, and weighed the elephant according to Cao Chong's method.
Cao Cao seemed very happy and said to the crowd: "You are not as smart as my youngest son, haha", in fact, Cao Chong used Archimedes' theorem and equal substitution, and then weighed the weight of the elephant, which is very remarkable for a five- or six-year-old child. However, it is a great pity that Cao Chong died of illness at the age of thirteen!