分香卖履 / Fenxiang Mailu

分香卖履 / Fenxiang mailu enters the wiki through Hanji 1014 as the source’s reading of 曹操’s deathbed household arrangement. Instead of turning household women and goods into burial display, Cao Cao divides incense among the women, says it should not be buried or used as sacrifice, and tells them to support themselves through handiwork if needed.

The concept is recorded here as a household-settlement frame. The episode treats Cao Cao’s instructions as unusually practical and permissive: the women can learn crafts, earn a living, and remarry if they wish. That does not make the source a complete social history of late-Han women, but it gives the wiki a concrete case where a powerful man’s final arrangement is read through survival, livelihood, and non-sacrificial family duty.

Key Claims

• Deathbed distribution can preserve household utility rather than converting goods into burial prestige.
• The source reads Cao Cao’s instruction as a pragmatic answer to the surviving women’s livelihood risk.
• The permissive remarriage note is source-scoped: it is the host’s highlighted contrast with more coercive death-bound loyalty expectations.

Connections

• 曹操 - actor whose final arrangement grounds the concept.
• 丁夫人 and 卞夫人 - household figures named in the same source.
• 曹昂 - Wancheng death linking Cao Cao’s family branch to the episode’s opening.
• 临危先务军纪 - separate crisis-order concept from the same source.