The Romance of the Three Kingdoms

The Romance of the Three Kingdoms (三國演義) is a sprawling historical novel about the collapse of China's Han dynasty and the war between three rival states that followed. It is usually attributed to Luo Guanzhong, a writer thought to have lived in the 1300s, during the last decades of Mongol rule under the Yuan dynasty and the violent transition to the Ming.

We know almost nothing certain about him. A brief contemporary note describes a man of few friends who moved through the lower Yangtze region. That is close to all the hard evidence there is, so any portrait of the author writing by lamplight is guesswork. What we can say is that he lived through a time when dynasties were falling and warlords were carving up the country, which is exactly the situation his book describes.

He did not invent the story. The events are real, drawn from the third century and recorded by the historian Chen Shou in his Records of the Three Kingdoms, later expanded with anecdotes by Pei Songzhi. Over the next thousand years those events became popular entertainment. Storytellers in teahouses spun them out over weeks, and opera troupes staged the famous battles. So Luo Guanzhong was working with material his audience already loved. His achievement was shaping the noise of legend into one long, coherent narrative of loyalty, cunning and betrayal.

The text we read today reached us through printers. The earliest surviving edition dates from 1522, with a preface dated 1494, which means the book circulated for generations before that in forms now lost. In the 1600s, under the new Qing dynasty, Mao Lun and his son Mao Zonggang rewrote and trimmed it, sharpened the moral judgments and added commentary. Their 120 chapter version became the standard one, and it is the version most translations follow.

The afterlife is enormous. It is counted among the Four Great Classical Novels of China. Its characters became fixed types across East Asia: the scheming Cao Cao, the strategist Zhuge Liang, the red-faced warrior Guan Yu, who is worshipped in temples to this day. Its scenes drive Peking opera, Japanese and Korean retellings, films, television epics and the video games that introduced it to millions of players worldwide.