In 494 BCE, King Goujian of Yue lost to Fuchai of Wu and sued for peace. His ministers devised the revenge: find a beauty, train her in music and manners, gift her to Fuchai. Fan Li found Shi Yiguang of Zhuluo village, renamed Xi Shi, Lady of the West. Fuchai was besotted, built palaces for her, ignored governance, and executed his own warning minister Wu Zixu. In 473 BCE Goujian destroyed Wu. Her afterstory forks: she drowned herself, she hanged herself in guilt, or she sailed away with Fan Li. Mozi, Mencius, and Zhuangzi all mention her; no definitive record exists.
The idiom chenyu luoyan, sinking fish, falling geese, comes from her legend: fish forgot to swim and sank when she washed silk. And 情人眼裡出西施, in the eyes of a lover, every woman is a Xi Shi, is the Chinese beauty-is-in-the-eye proverb, with a darker full version from a Song anthology: it is not appearances that seduce people, but people who seduce themselves. Her shadow twin Dong Shi, the ugly woman who imitated her frown, gave Chinese its idiom for botched imitation.
The claim: the Xi Shi operation is history's earliest documented deployment of attraction as a strategic weapon, a psyop in the archive's own taxonomy, and her legend persists because it is the template: every honeytrap since is a remake. Verdict: the operation is in the record whether or not the woman is, which is the pattern this archive tracks from Mockingbird to Carbyne: the mechanism is always better documented than the asset. Mozi's verdict, her beauty was a curse, got it backwards. The curse was aimed.
Was she a heroine, a honeypot, or the first documented influence operation?