三国

The opening line of the great novel about this era states the deep rhythm of Chinese history: 天下大势，分久必合，合久必分, "the great force of the realm is that what is long divided must unite, and what is long united must divide." By the late 2nd century CE the 汉朝 Han dynasty, after four centuries, was disintegrating. Court politics had decayed into struggles among eunuchs, consort clans, and officials; the countryside was wracked by the 黄巾起义, the Yellow Turban Rebellion of 184, a massive Daoist-inspired peasant uprising that the dynasty could suppress only by handing real military power to regional commanders.

Those commanders became warlords. As central authority dissolved, the warlord 董卓 Dong Zhuo seized the capital and the puppet emperor; a coalition formed against him; and out of the chaos that followed, a few men rose above the rest by absorbing the others. The most formidable was 曹操 Cao Cao, who took control of the Han emperor and ruled the north in his name, a tactic captured in the phrase 挟天子以令诸侯, "to hold the Son of Heaven and use him to command the lords." The Han would not be formally abolished until 220, but by then it was a hollow shell, and the contest was really among the warlords who would inherit its ruins.

By 229 the division had hardened into three states, each claiming a portion of the old empire and each with a distinct character.

The battle that made the three-way division possible was fought in the winter of 208 at 赤壁, the Red Cliffs, on the middle Yangtze. Cao Cao, having unified the north, marched south with an enormous army and fleet intending to finish the conquest of all China in one campaign. Against him stood an alliance of the two weaker powers: Liu Bei, advised by Zhuge Liang, and Sun Quan, whose forces were led by the young commander 周瑜 Zhou Yu.

Cao Cao's northern soldiers were unused to the river and to ships, and disease ran through his camp. The southern allies exploited this. In the most famous stratagem of Chinese military legend, they chained illusions and fire together: a feigned defection brought fire ships close to Cao Cao's fleet, which he had reportedly linked with chains to steady his seasick troops, and a sudden wind drove the flames through the massed vessels. The northern fleet burned, the army broke, and Cao Cao retreated north, his dream of quick reunification destroyed.

Red Cliffs is the most celebrated battle in Chinese history, a permanent symbol of how intelligence, alliance, and the cunning use of terrain and weather can defeat overwhelming force. It is the dramatic peak of the Three Kingdoms story and the moment that fixed the balance of three powers for the next seventy years. The line attributed to the era, 万事俱备，只欠东风 ("everything is ready, we lack only the east wind"), comes from this battle and is now a chengyu for a plan complete but for one final missing element.

What carried the Three Kingdoms from history into the permanent imagination of East Asia is its characters. No other period of Chinese history has produced so vivid and durable a cast, each compressed by tradition into a single moral essence.

曹操 Cao Cao is the great ambiguous figure: a brilliant general, administrator, and poet, but in the popular tradition the archetypal cunning villain, the man who supposedly said 宁教我负天下人，休教天下人负我 ("better I betray the world than the world betray me"). 刘备 Liu Bei is his moral opposite, the benevolent ruler who wins men's loyalty through virtue and humility. 孙权 Sun Quan is the capable pragmatist holding the south.

Above them all in legend stands 诸葛亮 Zhuge Liang, Liu Bei's chancellor and strategist, the very embodiment of wisdom and loyalty in Chinese culture. His recruitment, in which Liu Bei visited his hut three times before he would serve (三顾茅庐, now a chengyu for earnestly seeking out talent), his near-magical stratagems, and his exhausting devotion to a losing cause made him the model of the brilliant, faithful minister. Around them are the sworn brothers of the 桃园结义, the Oath of the Peach Garden, the loyal red-faced general 关羽 Guan Yu (later worshipped as a god of war and brotherhood, 关帝), the fierce 张飞 Zhang Fei, and the matchless warrior 赵云 Zhao Yun.

The end came not through one of the three founding houses but through a usurpation within the strongest state. In Wei, the able general 司马懿 Sima Yi and his descendants gradually concentrated all real power, sidelining the Cao emperors. In 263 Wei armies conquered Shu, extinguishing Liu Bei's kingdom. Three years later, in 266, 司马炎 Sima Yan deposed the last Wei ruler and proclaimed the 晋 Jin dynasty. Jin then turned on the last survivor: in 280 its forces took the Wu capital, Sun Quan's successor surrendered, and China was, for the first time in sixty years, formally one realm again.

The reunification was thin and short-lived. Within a generation the Jin dynasty tore itself apart in civil war and lost the north to nomadic peoples, and China entered the long 南北朝 (Northern and Southern Dynasties) age of division that would last until the 隋朝 Sui reunified the country in 581. The Three Kingdoms thus sits at the head of nearly four centuries of fragmentation, but its own story, compact and dramatic, was the one that lodged in the culture.

The Three Kingdoms owes its overwhelming cultural presence to two layers of text. The sober history is the 三国志, the Records of the Three Kingdoms by Chen Shou (3rd century), one of the early official histories. But what made the period universally known is the 14th-century novel 三国演义, the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, attributed to Luo Guanzhong, which dramatised and embroidered the history into one of the Four Great Classical Novels.

Through the novel, opera, storytelling, and now film, television, manga, and video games, the figures of the Three Kingdoms became household names across China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam. Guan Yu is worshipped in temples; Zhuge Liang is a byword for genius; Cao Cao's name is a synonym for crafty ambition. The era supplied the Chinese language with a dense layer of chengyu, supplied strategists and businesspeople with a casebook of tactics, and supplied the popular imagination with its favourite gallery of loyalty, betrayal, and brilliance. Few sixty-year stretches anywhere have left so large a mark.