Gou Ai

Li Yan's officer, sent from Baidicheng with a grain convoy, who drinks and loiters on the road and arrives ten days late. Zhuge Liang sentences him to death for it — 'Three days' delay ought to mean the death penalty. What can you say to this delay of ten?' — and it is Yang Yi's intervention that gets the sentence cut to eighty blows, which is what makes the traitor. Deserts that night with half a dozen of his staff, is taken to Sima Yi, and is sent to Chengdu with the lie that 'the Prime Minister was too proud of his services and was about to use his sweeping powers to usurp the Throne'. He plants it with the eunuchs, they carry it to Liu Shan, and the recall follows. He is still at large when the chapter ends.

Zhuge Liang interrogates the eunuchs at Chengdu, traces the usurpation rumour back to him, and sends to arrest him — 'but Gou An had already fled and gone over to Wei'. The eunuchs who carried the story to the throne are executed and the rest expelled from the Palace.

Holds the eastern of the two Qushan ramparts with fifteen thousand troops split between him and Li Xin, is besieged by Chen Tai, loses the water supply to Guo Huai's diversion, and is still holding when a north wind brings the snow that lets them melt water and cook. His line — 'I do not understand the delay of Commander Jiang Wei's reinforcements' — is the campaign's epitaph.

Surrenders Qushan in the chapter's second paragraph: 'From the walls of Qushan, the Shu general, Gou Ai, watched anxiously for the expected help. As it came not, he ultimately surrendered.'

Named among the eighty officers at Zhong Hui's muster.