In the 24th chapter of Water Margin, it was said that Song Wu was eight feet long and Wu Dalang was less than five feet long, which was derided as "three-inch drum bark". With the spread of literature and the shaping of TV series, Wu Dalang's short-lived image has been frozen.
But in fact, Wu Dalang in history, whose real name was Wu Zhi, was a native of Wujiana Village (formerly known as Kong Songzhuang) in Qinghe County during the Yongle period of the Ming Dynasty. He is a scholar and once served as the county magistrate of Qipin in Yanggu, Shandong Province, and did not sell baked wheat cakes. He and Pan Jinlian are also loving couples. Because of carelessness in making friends, it was slandered by rumors, so it spread widely and left a strange injustice through the ages.
In fact, even if Wu Dalang is less than five feet, Wu Dalang is nearly 155cm if one foot is about 3 1cm in the Song Dynasty, which is not particularly short. Song Jiang is also black and short (the seventeenth time), saying that he is six feet tall.
Of course, Lu's eight feet (the second time), Lin's eight feet (the sixth time) and the nine feet (the twenty-eighth time) in Water Margin are all higher than Yao Ming's (226 cm). But after all, it is a literary work, and eight or nine feet may be an estimate. Moreover, it is not easy to determine what kind of scale standard is used in Water Margin.