Background
Kongchengji — the Empty City Ruse — is placed by the romance at the critical suture point following the failure of Diyicibeifa. In the spring of the sixth year of Jianxing, Zhuge Liang had just come out of Qishan, with the three commanderies of Nan'an, Tianshui, and Anding submitting en masse, sending tremors through the Guanzhong. But the battle at Jieting collapsed in an instant because Ma Su violated his operational orders, and the entire strategic skeleton caved in at once. For the romance to prevent the "Fall of Jieting — Execution of Ma Su" tragedy from coming to too abrupt a landing artistically, it needed to insert a passage within the defeat that allowed Zhuge Liang to reclaim the moral high ground — hence the Empty City Ruse at Xicheng [c:17456]. From a modern political history perspective, the true function of this episode is not military documentation but political narrative: it is the romance's "moral compensation" for Shuhan's defeat, diluting the failure of national strategy with a victory of individual ingenuity.
Key Figures
The central tension of the event comes from the "mutual recognition" between Zhuge Liang and Sima Yi. Zhuge Liang had no commanders around him — only a complement of civil officials — and of the five thousand troops he had brought, half had already been dispatched for grain transport, leaving only two thousand five hundred [c:17456]. He had no forces to maneuver; his only resource was Sima Yi's impression of him as "unfailingly cautious throughout his life." Sima Yi represents the romance's highest valuation of Wei elite minds — intelligent enough, suspicious enough, and therefore precisely the right kind of target to be exploited in reverse. Sima Zhao appears as son and skeptic: when his father hesitates, he speaks up — "Why does my father undermine his own resolve?" [c:17457] — creating a second layer of contrast. The young man's instinct was correct, but within the power structure the decisive voice belongs to the father's suspicion. This structure of "the opponent is too clever and too fearful, tripped in the end by his own cleverness," is the romance's most concentrated rendering of "winning by intellect over brute force."
Core Issue
On the surface the issue is "whether to dare to retreat"; at depth it is "the science of decision-making under asymmetric information." Zhuge Liang's gamble rested on two assumptions: first, that Sima Yi would not interpret an empty city as evidence of an enemy at the end of his rope, but would instead reason from his fixed impression of "Kongming is unfailingly cautious" that a hidden force must be waiting; second, that even if Sima Yi harbored doubts, he would rather miss an opportunity than risk annihilation — because his own political position (just reinstated, urgently needing to demonstrate steadiness) could not afford any serious misstep. From a game-theory perspective, this is a classic "reverse signaling" operation: deliberately displaying a state that "looks too good to be true," forcing the opponent to reinterpret what he sees as "something the enemy has deliberately staged." After the fact, Sima Yi learned the truth from local residents and lamented, looking to the sky: "I am not the equal of Kongming" [c:17457] — the romance uses this line to elevate the military contest to the level of a comparison between characters.
Political Consequences
Within the self-consistent narrative of the romance, the immediate consequence of the Empty City Ruse is that Zhuge Liang leads his full force back to Hanzhong to regroup, preventing the failure of the first northern campaign from cascading into a complete military and national collapse. Sima Yi, for his "miscalculation," was given credit for merit by Emperor Ming of Wei — Cao Rui told him, "Today the restoration of the Longxi commanderies is all due to your achievement" [c:17457] — a subtle irony the romance has arranged: what Sima Yi truly lost was the intellectual duel with Zhuge Liang, yet on the Caowei court's performance ledger he is still the winner. This layer of foreshadowing sets the tone for the subsequent pattern in which Zhuge Liang's repeated northern campaigns are met by Sima Yi's "countering caution with caution" — the two men are not simply enemy commanders; they are mirror images who mutually shape and mutually understand each other.
Counterfactual Analysis
If we trace the course of events through the historical record, after the fall of Jieting Zhuge Liang withdrew directly to Hanzhong with no Empty City Ruse interlude, and the romance would lose a critical pillar for Zhuge Liang's image — he would be only a commander who was "strategically correct but tactically beaten by Ma Su," rather than one who could "reverse defeat even in extremis." From another angle: suppose Sima Yi had actually dared to enter the city — the romance's only contingency for Zhuge Liang would have been his two thousand five hundred troops fighting to the death, with the outcome almost certainly being capture or defeat, and Shuhan entering ahead of schedule a countdown to collapse. The reason this fictional episode has circulated for a thousand years is precisely that it dissolves a seemingly unsolvable situation through a single individual's bearing, leaving posterity with a cultural-psychological archetype: when information is limited and resources exhausted, daring to use "unconventional" signals to reshape the opponent's perception is often more effective than frontal confrontation. That archetype has since lived not only in popular storytelling but in multiple domains of traditional Chinese military culture, marketplace negotiation, and political contest.