The third work actually dates from several centuries later, but remains very influential for historians of ancient and medieval China.
You can learn more about his project at Three States Records. What emerges is a text now twice as long as Chen Shou’s version, and one that has many interesting tales and even contradictory versions of important events.Įnglish versions of Chen Shou and Pei Songzhi’s works have been done online, appearing in websites such as fan forums for Romance of the Three Kingdoms, but the first academic quality translation is only now being done by Yáng Zhèngyuán. On occasion, I argue with Chen Shou in his judgment of events or on minor points of fact. If one account is clearly wrong, and what it says is not logically sound, then I note which is right in order to correct the mistake. In all such cases I have put in the variant versions to show the different traditions. Sometimes an event is described in two quite different ways and I do not feel that I can decide between them. Sometimes there are two accounts of the same incident, though there may be errors or irrelevancies in the text. If there is something that Chen Shou failed to mention, and if it is something that should be remembered, then I have collected other records to fill in the gap. This was created in the fifth century, with the aim of offering even more anecdotes and sources about the period. The second major work is Annotations to Records of the Three Kingdoms, by Pei Songzhi.
#Three kingdoms period series
Basically, this work is a series of biographies of all the major political and military players from this period - hundreds of men and women. The first is the oldest chronicle from the period, known as Records of the Three Kingdoms, which was written by a third century scholar named Chen Shou. There are several sources that historians can use to study the fall of the Han Dynasty and the rise of the Three Kingdoms, but we will just mention three here. What if you want about the real history of Liu Bei, Cao Cao, Sun Quan, and the other men and women made famous by the novel? What histories exist about the fall of the Han Dynasty and the emergence of the Three Kingdoms period (roughly 180 to 280 CE)? We can offer some help, at least for English audiences.
It is just as much a product of the fourteenth century as it would be of the third. However, it should be remembered that Romance of the Three Kingdoms is a historical novel - it is based on history, sometimes very closely so, but it incorporates a lot of fictional elements and also has biases in favour of certain characters. This fourteenth century novel, said to be written by Luo Guanzhong, is an immensely popular work in China, and through several translations, has spread to international audiences. If you are familiar with the era of ancient Chinese history known as the Three Kingdoms, then you are likely to know this through Romance of the Three Kingdoms.
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