Does anyone know what the plank roads looked like during the Three Kingdoms era...

Does anyone know what the plank roads looked like during the Three Kingdoms era? I'm trying to wrap my head around the logistics of Shu-Han invading Cao-Wei.

Like planks every few feet to a few meters to make sure soldiers and carts had a foothold

As for Liu Bei invading they would have marched even if jungle was in their way. They where driven by divine fervor.

Even then the roads werent in horrible disrepair, if you can overrun checkpoints and blow through forts on the road. From Jing it only took 5 days to Xuchang. And its a large country even back then.

The only time you saw a road fully planked was... never. The most you saw where steplike planks only half a foot apart.

t. Han military manuals

Is it possible to move horses across non fully planked roads?

As long as the wet season iant happening its like normal roads
They planned battle around the weather

Why'd he chuck the baby?

But wouldn't that basically be the same as a cattle grid?

Benevolence

autism

>played DW games as a kid
>always thought Liu Bei was some sort of badass
>watch this show
>Liu Bei's just crying like a bitch every other episode

Although I have to admit, the show is pretty good.

Because "so many lives shouldn't be payed to save the son of a single man" or something like that.

Basically

Liu Cry-beiby's child goes MIA behind enemy lines.
Zhao Snowflake-Yun goes rambo and saves the kid.
Liu just chucks the baby and shouts: "For the sake of some replacable brat I almost lost my greatest general!"

Here they are in the Tang Dynasty (on the left).

Because the novel on which the television series is based was written after the tumultuous times of Song and Yuan, which left a huge imprint on the collective social psyche so that late Yuan/early Ming literature is full of stories of people sacrificing family members for some "greater good" ideal.

If this were Shuihu Zhuan (attributed to the same author as Sanguo Yanyi) we'd have probably gotten a scene of the commander killing his son to feed the flesh to his starving subordinates or some shit.

Granted, Sanguo Yanyi DOES have a story of cannibalism, just not this one.

It's basically the same concept as pouring sand on the road in winter. You want a hard frictional surface to gain traction on.

He is correct that the young are replaceable. In nature, the young are most heavily predated, which allows the middle aged to continue breeding. Letting the small ones go is a filthy western perversion. More lamb, less ram, etc.

However more recent readings would interpret this scene as shaken baby syndrome and attribute it to the young ruler's retardation. It actually makes complete sense.

Should probably point out that this is NOT based on any actual historical event.

For some reason people always seem to assume "historical until proven fictional" with regards to events in the novel/tv series, which is quite frankly a retarded way to approach any work of historical fiction.

It's meant to be taken as historical as a form of didactic.

That's not what a plank road is.

>He is correct that the young are replaceable.
No he isn't.

He literally gets a young virile wife and in unable to sire another son because he's old and homo, and he ends up with retarded dropped-on-the-head-as-a-baby Adou ruining his kingdom

Liu Shan dindu nuffin wrong. All the power was in the hands of Zhuge Liang, Fei Yi & co, he didn't put his nose into public business. Kongming and Jiang Wei's self-aggrandizing jingoism did more to destroy Shu than Gongsi could ever hope to. And when you think about it, he was an angel compared to demential old man Sun Quan and his heirs.

>when you find out its a baby girl

goddamn

Not all of them are like that.That's a particularly shitty one to get up to a remote mountain temple or something.

This is a concrete reconstruction of a blank road, but probably closer to what a plank road looked like.

This looks like it's aiming to look like historical reconstruction, but it's not as clear to see how it is build into the mountain sides

Jesus Christ, how many accidents a year?

Here you can see the wooden construction being built into the cliff side

How do you stick wooden stakes into stone?
Do you just make a hole with steel tools and fit the stakes in?

They're replacing the plank road with a modernized version here, but you can see the holes chiseled out of the mountain side. They would stick cantilevered wooden beams in there

So you can kind of see why maintenance and crossing mountains was a logistics nightmare. It's not just a road through a mountain pass paved with some planks on the ground. They were still considerably faster than trying to cross the mountains on ground level roads looking for a mountain pass or going around a river, since many of the rivers were like canyons with steep cliffs on both sides.

Yes, they chiseled deep holes into the mountains as seen here and then stuck wooden beams in there.

...

Jesus, and I thought suspension bridges were scary. Imagine being in a marching column with an army's worth of gear, food and people on that shit.

That's actually just a scaffolding for them to do work on the road. The road would normally be build on top of the beams that stick out from the holes. Still, it's almost like making a bridge across the side of a mountain range.

There were definitely logistical problems marching through the mountainous terrain. Zhuge Liang had to give up several of his northern campaigns due to running out of supplies. When Cao Zhen attempted to invade Shu-Han, he experienced similar difficulty when it rained. Even when Wei actually did conquer Shu-Han, there were deep concerns regarding supplies. The Wei general Zhong Hui, for example, almost gave up the entire venture after being hard-pressed.

Rain seemed to fuck over both Wei and Shu-Han alternatively when it came to campaigning against each other.