郅支单于 / Zhizhi Chanyu

Overview

郅支单于 / Zhizhi Chanyu enters the wiki through Hanji 570 as the Xiongnu ruler killed by 陈汤 and 甘延寿. The episode uses his defeat less as an independent Xiongnu biography than as the military event behind a later Han court argument over heroic merit.

Current Profile

The source presents Zhizhi Chanyu as a defiant ruler whose death restored Han prestige and ended a humiliation burden in the memorial’s rhetoric. His role is therefore mostly relational: he is the opponent whose defeat made Chen Tang and Gan Yanshou’s service extraordinary enough that later under-reward and disgrace became politically dangerous.

The source summary uses the form “置之单于”; this page normalizes the route to the historically standard 郅支单于 while preserving the exact naming issue as a source-scoped qualification.

Key Characteristics

• Xiongnu ruler used in the source as the defeated opponent in a major Western Han frontier victory.
• His killing anchors Geng Yu’s argument that Chen Tang and Gan Yanshou performed extraordinary service.
• Functions as a prestige and deterrence marker in the episode rather than as a fully developed biography.
• Normalized here from a likely transcription or summary variant to the standard historical name.

Evidence

• Defeated opponent: Hanji 570 says Chen Tang and Gan Yanshou killed the chanyu in a distant campaign.
• Prestige effect: Hanji 570 says Geng Yu presents the victory as washing away long humiliation and giving the frontier security value.
• Naming qualification: Hanji 570 supplies the source wording that this ingest routes to the standard Zhizhi Chanyu identity.

Qualifications

This page is source-bounded and does not reconstruct Zhizhi Chanyu’s full career, Xiongnu succession politics, western movement, or the complete campaign record. The route normalization should be revisited if a future source preserves a genuinely distinct “置之单于” identity.

What Changed

• Created the page from Hanji 570.

Relationships

• 陈汤 - Han commander whose merit is defined by the campaign against Zhizhi Chanyu.
• 甘延寿 - Han commander paired with Chen Tang in the campaign.
• 匈奴 - polity field to which Zhizhi Chanyu belongs.
• 西汉 - opposing imperial state in the episode’s frontier-memory frame.