Romance of the Three Kingdoms: history and legend

Romance of the Three Kingdoms (三国演义) is a Chinese historical novel usually dated to the 14th century, between the end of the Yuan (元朝) and the beginning of the Ming (明朝). It covers nearly a century of history: from the Yellow Turban rebellion (黄巾), which broke out in 184 and shook the Han dynasty (汉朝), to the reunification of China under the Western Jin (西晋) in 280.

In between, the empire broke into three rival states:

• Wei (魏), in the north, founded in 220 when Cao Pi, son of Cao Cao, obtained the abdication of the last Han emperor;

• Shu Han (蜀汉), in the southwest, proclaimed in 221 by Liu Bei, who claimed kinship with the Han imperial house;

• Wu (吴), in the southeast, the kingdom of Sun Quan.

The novel does not hold the balance even. Its heroes are Liu Bei and his followers, the champions of Han legitimacy; Cao Cao, Sun Quan and their men are often painted in darker colours. In its standard version it has 120 chapters. It is one of the Four Great Classical Novels (四大名著) of Chinese literature, alongside Journey to the West, Water Margin and Dream of the Red Chamber.

The novel rests on a real history. The Records of the Three Kingdoms (三国志) were compiled at the end of the 3rd century by Chen Shou (陈寿), an official historian of the Jin who came from the former kingdom of Shu. In the 5th century, Pei Songzhi (裴松之) added a commentary that doubled its length: he quoted other accounts of the same events, even when they contradicted each other, and nearly always named his sources. These two texts are the novel's main historical base.

Long before the novel, the period was a favourite of storytellers. Under the Song, some specialized in "telling the Three Kingdoms" (说三分). The poet Su Shi (苏轼) recorded what a certain Wang Peng told him: families tired of their unruly children gave them a few coins and sent them off to listen to storytellers, and when the tale reached the Three Kingdoms, the children frowned, some even wept, whenever Liu Bei was defeated, and cheered whenever Cao Cao was beaten. The storytellers had already taken sides.

Under the Yuan, a printed version appeared between 1321 and 1323, the Illustrated Plain Tale of the Records of the Three Kingdoms (全相三国志平话): pictures fill the top of each page and the text the bottom, and the story runs from the Peach Garden Oath to the death of Zhuge Liang. Yuan-era plays also put these heroes on stage. The novel brought this popular tradition back closer to the histories.

Tradition credits the novel to Luo Guanzhong (罗贯中), whose personal name was Ben (本). Little is certain about him. He is placed at the turn of the Yuan and Ming dynasties, about 1330 to 1400 according to Lu Xun (鲁迅), though other dates have been proposed, and several places claim him as a native, among them Taiyuan, Dongping and Hangzhou. Even his share of the work is debated: the stories had been shaped by generations of storytellers, and he may have been above all the one who compiled and unified them.

The oldest surviving edition, known as the Jiajing edition (嘉靖本), was printed in 1522, with a preface dated 1494, under the title Popular Romance of the Records of the Three Kingdoms (三国志通俗演义). It has 24 volumes divided into 240 short chapters, and its volumes open with the words "Chen Shou of the Jin wrote the history; Luo Ben Guanzhong, a later student, arranged it" (晋平阳侯陈寿史传，后学罗本贯中编次).

The text read today is a different one. Under the Kangxi Emperor (康熙), in the second half of the 17th century, Mao Lun (毛纶) and his son Mao Zonggang (毛宗岗) thoroughly reworked it: they regrouped it into 120 chapters, polished the style, changed the poems, added and cut passages, and wrapped it in their commentary. Their version drove all the older ones out of circulation. The Maos also gave the novel its famous first sentence (below), which is absent from the 1522 edition; that one opens with the death of Emperor Huan.

Under the Qing, the historian Zhang Xuecheng (章学诚) complained that the novel was "seven parts fact and three parts fiction", so that its readers were often misled. Two famous episodes show how it works.

The Peach Garden Oath (桃园结义). In chapter 1, Liu Bei, Guan Yu (关羽) and Zhang Fei (张飞) meet while volunteers are being raised against the Yellow Turbans. The next day, in the peach garden in full bloom behind Zhang Fei's farm, they sacrifice to Heaven and Earth and swear to be brothers. The oath is fiction: Chen Shou's Records say only that Liu Bei "shared a bed" with the two men and loved them "like brothers". The scene existed before the novel, in the Yuan-era plain tale and on the stage.

The three visits (三顾茅庐). The Records note in one sentence that Liu Bei went to see Zhuge Liang (诸葛亮) three times before he was received, and Zhuge Liang himself recalls, in his memorial to the throne, the Chu shi biao (出师表), that the late emperor had "visited me three times in my thatched cottage". The novel makes two chapters of it: two fruitless visits, the second through the snow, then the long-awaited meeting.

Lu Xun saw the flip side of such portraits: in trying to show Liu Bei's kindness, the novel makes him look false, and in trying to show Zhuge Liang's intelligence, it makes him almost a sorcerer.

The battle at the heart of chapters 43 to 50 really took place. In the winter of 208–209, Cao Cao (曹操), master of northern China, set out to conquer the south and met his rivals on the Yangtze. Sun Quan and Liu Bei joined forces against him. According to the histories, one of Sun Quan's officers, Huang Gai (黄盖), pretended to defect, then launched fire ships against Cao Cao's fleet, driven by a southeast wind. Beaten, Cao Cao fell back north: his defeat left the south to his rivals and laid the ground for the three-way split. The exact site of the battle is still debated.

The novel keeps this outline, sends Zhuge Liang to talk Sun Quan into fighting, and adds stratagems of its own:

• when Zhou Yu (周瑜) demands 100,000 arrows, he promises them within three days, then sends twenty straw-lined boats into the fog toward Cao Cao's camp; the enemy archers riddle them with arrows, and his men shout "Thank you, Chancellor, for the arrows!";

• he climbs a Seven Stars Altar and "borrows" the southeast wind the fire attack needs;

• on the Huarong road, Guan Yu lets the fleeing Cao Cao go, out of gratitude for past kindness.

These three episodes are fiction, and they enlarge Zhuge Liang at the expense of Wu's commanders. The arrow trick has a historical seed, though: an earlier history of Wei, the Weilüe (魏略), quoted by Pei Songzhi, tells how in 213 Sun Quan's boat, listing under Cao Cao's arrows, was turned round to take arrows on its other side, then sailed away. Earlier versions of the story gave the trick to Sun Quan or to Zhou Yu.

The novel's portraits have outlived the history books. Cao Cao, a statesman, general and poet in the histories, becomes the novel's chief villain. In chapter 4 he mistakenly kills eight people of the household that has taken him in, then kills his host too, and justifies it with a line that stuck (below). In Chinese opera he wears white make-up, the mark of treachery.

Guan Yu (关羽, d. 220), executed by Sun Quan's forces, went further: he became a god. Worshipped as early as the Sui dynasty (581–618), he is honoured in folk religion and Taoism as Emperor Guan (关帝) or Lord Guan (关公), in Chinese Buddhism as a guardian bodhisattva of monasteries (伽蓝菩萨), and emperors raised him to the rank of "Martial Sage" (武圣), the counterpart of Confucius, the "Literary Sage". In Hong Kong, Macau and Southeast Asia, businesspeople also pray to him as a god of wealth, a role the scholar Barend ter Haar finds documented only from the 18th century. Lu Xun had already noted that the novel keeps its warmest praise for Guan Yu.

Several sayings come from the novel or its heroes:

• 三顾茅庐, "three visits to the thatched cottage": to seek out talent with persistence;

• 万事俱备，只欠东风, "everything is ready; all that's missing is the east wind": only the last condition for success is lacking;

• 说曹操，曹操到, "speak of Cao Cao and Cao Cao arrives", the Chinese "speak of the devil";

• and a warning about the book itself: 少不读水浒，老不读三国, "the young shouldn't read Water Margin, nor the old the Three Kingdoms", because its characters are such skilled schemers.