The New Lifetime Reading Plan

The Three Kingdoms Period, as it is called, lasted for only forty-five years—the kingdoms collapsed in 265, leading to an even longer and more chaotic period of disunion—but those years of turmoil and warfare left a disproportionate and indeli- ble imprint on the Chinese imagination ever afterwards. The history of those competing realms—the Kingdom of Wei in the north, the Kingdom of Wu in the southeast, and the Kingdom of Shu Han in the west—was in due course formally recorded in a dynastic history, one of the series of histories modeled on Ssu-ma Ch^en^ Records of the Grand Historian [18]. But it seemed that the tone of a sober official history was not up to the task of conveying the stories of the heroes and villains, assaults and narrow escapes and clever stratagems, that flowed from those tumultuous times. (The Chinese title of the novel means "Supplementary Narratives to the History of the Three Kingdoms," implying that it contains ali the good stories left out of the official version.) Over the centuries storytellers and writers of popular dramas and operas mined the semilegendary tales of the Three Kingdoms for new material with which to entertain their audiences. (This process is not unlike what hap- pened in South Asia with the Mahabharata [16]; well see it at work again with Journey to the West [36].) Gradually these sto­ries were collected, and by around 1250 an early version of The Romance of the Three Kingdoms had probably come into being. The novel as we now have it was written a century later by a scholar named Luo Kuan-chung [Luo Guanzhong]; the oldest known printed copy dates only from the mid-sixteenth century.

Why does the Three Kingdoms Period loom so large in Chinese imaginative literature? Partly for the reason that the dynastic struggles of medieval England were so attractive to Shakespeare [39]: There happened to be, during that period of history, an unusual collection of powerful and compelling indi­viduais, people whose personalities resonate throughout the ages. Just as Richard III and Prince Hal and Falstaff populate the English imagination, so do the heroes of the Three Kingdoms animate the literature of China. In the Romance we find a marvelous cast of characters: Begin with Tsao Tsao [Cao Cao], the greatest of the Han generais, who finally rebelled and founded the Kingdom of Wei; he is excoriated as the paradigm of a traitor and villain (in Peking Opera his robes and armor are always black, and he has the most ferocious face make-up of any opera character). Then his adversary Liu Pei [Liu Bei], a surviving offshoot of the imperial family of Han, who tries to revive his family^ fortunes in the Kingdom of Shu Han. He survives in large part with the aid of his loyal general Chu-ko Liang [Zhuge Liang], the model of loyalty and courage, the opposite (and constant opponent) of Ts'ao Ts'ao. Chu-ko Liang is the chief hero of the tale, and he is celebrated especially for his cleverness and unflappability. In one charac- teristic episode, when his army has nearly run out of arrows, he arranges to be resupplied by the enemy by setting up a row of straw dummies, which are promptly riddled with arrows that his troops can reuse. Also in the fray are general Kuan Chung [Guan Zhong], huge and fearless, who was formally enshrined as China^ God of War in the sixteenth century; Chang Fei [Zhang Fei], a younger, more dashing, and more romantic mil- itary commander, and the Brothers of the Peach Orchard, a group of bandits turned patriotic knights. These are, it is important to understand, real historical figures, and they fight real historical battles; but their stories have been much embroidered along the way to inclusion in this book.

Not only does the Three Kingdoms Period offer a wonder- ful east of characters, however; it also, at least in the popular imagination, saw a return to the (mostly legendary) chivalry and military rectitude of a much earlier era. In the episodes of the Romance, battles are fought in earnest, but there is also an element of sport in the fighting; heroes brag and enemies taunt each other, brothers-in-arms support each other to the death, generais fight ferociously, die bravely, celebrate hugely, and in general live on the edge, larger than life. The Romance has, in other words, the appeal that military "boys' books" always have, of letting their (mostly male) readers fantasize about warfare as a combination blood sport, male-bonding ritual, and fraternity party.