Origins
The "Mountain Yue" were not a single ethnic group but a composite population within Sunwu's territory — mountain-dwelling peoples who had long remained outside the registered-household system, mixed together with refugees evading conscription and armed retainer bands of powerful clans. Danyang Commandery (seat at Wanling, present-day Xuancheng area) was especially representative: it bordered Wujun, Huiji, Xindou, and Poyang on all sides, with valleys stretching for thousands of li; the people of the mountains smelted their own copper and iron, were martial and combative by tradition, and would descend to raid and plunder whenever the moment was right [c:17748]. Over thirty years of expansion in Jiangdong, Sun Ce and Sun Quan launched troops to suppress them repeatedly, but could only capture the outer-county commoners — the able-bodied men in the mountain heartland were never obtained, and so could neither be converted into military manpower nor be stopped from constantly disrupting commandery-level order. In the third year of the Jiahe reign (234 CE), Zhuge Ke volunteered to serve as grand administrator of Danyang and general for the pacification of the Yue, with the essential purpose of carrying out "a second Sun Ce-style opening" within Jiangdong: to forge, over three years, a mountain-warfare army corps available for deployment by the central government.
Participating Forces
On Wu's side, the primary actor was Zhuge Ke himself, backed in the court by his father Zhuge Jin and directly authorized by Sun Quan with a tally of command and a blank commission for troop rolls. Military execution relied on the concurrent frontier-garrison deployment of the four commanderies bordering Danyang — Wujun, Huiji, Xindou, and Poyang — forming an encirclement of the Mountain Yue. On the Mountain Yue side, there was no unified leadership; they were distributed across scattered tribal units and fortified hamlet clusters. Their traditional mode of resistance was dispersed fighting along mountain terrain, using guerrilla raiding to force the official forces to withdraw. Zhuge Ke's strategy was aimed precisely at this "centerless" structure: with no paramount chief to kill, he changed course and fought a war of "resource and time" attrition.
Critical Turning Point
The critical turning point came in the first year of Zhuge Ke's tenure. Rather than sending troops directly into the mountains to suppress the Yue as his predecessors had done, he memorialized Sun Quan requesting "internal renovation of military equipment and external tightening of frontier defenses," directing every county to halt active pursuit of the Mountain Yue and instead concentrate troops to construct fortified stockades at mountain passes and valley mouths, driving the Mountain Yue back into the mountains to defend [c:17748]. As autumn approached and the mountain fields' grain was ripening, he ordered all units of the official forces not to advance into the mountains but instead to go out and harvest the ripened crops in the fields outside the mountains, then burn what could not be harvested. In the spring of the second year, the Mountain Yue's grain stores were exhausted, and small tribal groups began to come down and submit; Zhuge Ke enrolled them all into military registers and settled them in place — neither killing nor plundering. This patient strategy of "seize the grain, not the land" was lethal to the mountain peoples. Traditional punitive expeditions into the mountains lasted three months and then withdrew; the Mountain Yue merely needed to hide for one season. But Zhuge Ke's encirclement was three continuous years of resource suppression, with no single season in which the Mountain Yue could draw breath.
Pacification and Outcome
By the sixth year of the Jiahe reign (237 CE), the Mountain Yue of Danyang were "coming out in their multitudes, the old and young supporting each other, numbering in the tens of thousands." Zhuge Ke honored his promise of "three years to obtain forty thousand armored soldiers," and in addition received over one hundred thousand households of registered subjects. He personally commanded ten thousand of them as a mobile force, distributing the rest among the various commanders who had participated in the campaign, providing a stable supplementary source of mountain-warfare troops for the Wu central army [c:17748]. For his merits, Sun Quan enfeoffed Zhuge Ke as Marquis of Duxiang and gave him the additional title of General Who Overawes the North, propelling him to the second tier of Wu's command structure just behind Lu Xun. From that point on, in every campaign Sunwu waged against the Huai River line or against Shuhan, Mountain Yue fighters formed the core of the infantry — a substantial portion of the two hundred thousand Wu troops at Dongxing and the New Hefei campaign ultimately traced their origins to this moment.
Historical Echoes
The long-term significance of the Danyang campaign far exceeded that of a regional pacification. First, it pushed Sunwu's territory forward from "river-valley clan fiefs" to "hinterland registered-household governance" — the commanderies of Jiangdong only then acquired a fiscal foundation genuinely comparable to that of a Central Plains dynasty. Second, it gave Zhuge Ke personally a complete record of "independent command of both troops and civilian affairs," giving Sun Quan the confidence to entrust him with the regent position for the Crown Prince on his deathbed — this was also the starting point of Zhuge Ke's later court-side inflation. Third, the strategy of "attrition by encirclement and cutting off food supply" was repeatedly borrowed in the later San Guo period: Lu Kang's management of Xiling and Yang Hu's defense of Xiangyang both extracted from it the frontier-governance logic of "seek not swift victory, seek not annihilation, seek only resource exhaustion." If Zhugeliangnanzheng and Qiqinmenghuo represent the paradigm for integrating southwestern mountain peoples, then Zhugekepingdanyangshanyue represents the paradigm for integrating southeastern mountain peoples — uncle and nephew, without intending to do so, together laid the foundational governance path for the later San Guo empire's approach to mountain peoples: "replace conquest with registration into the household system."