It was thought that ideally a proper imperial Court should be ruled by a strong senior male, as the word gong (patriarch) in rebel titles suggests, portending a new dynasty. Lacking the will and resources to cope with the rebellion of the Yellow Scarves, the Han Court issues a general call for reinforcements (chapter 1). In response, three of the foreground heroes, Liu Bei (Xuande / dark virtue), Lord Guan (Guan Gong), and Chang Fei (Yide wings to virtue) meet. To defend the hapless Court the three warriors form a brotherhood in a peach garden. Their vow of mutual commitment and loyalty – to live and die, one for all and all for one – hangs over the first two-thirds of the narrative covering the three decades leading up to the fall of the dynasty in 220.

At the transition from the Han to the Wei dynasty in 220, the ruler of the northern kingdom of Wei, Cao Cao’s son, deposes the last Han emperor, sends him into exile, and installs his own family. The southern kingdom had already been semi-autonomous under the Sun clan long before the novel’s opening. In the west the elder brother Liu Bei rules Shu, also called Shu-Han because it purports to continue the fallen Han dynasty and the ruler has the imperial surname, Liu. Thus the three kingdoms, in the making since the battle of Red Cliffs in 208-209, are independently established.

The novel presents in Liu Bei a strong virtuous senior male, who as one of two contenders for the Han throne is capable of restoring authoritative dynastic rule. Moreover, Liu Bei has an ideal heir (although not a biological one) in Zhuge Liang (Kongming), and thus the promise of a reformed Court. The dramatic action of the novel revolves around Liu Bei’s relations with his two sworn brothers-in-arms and the competing relationship with Kongming, who wants Liu Bei to become emperor since he supposedly belongs to the Liu clan and his virtue would empower a reformed effective Court. The brotherhood is essentially a military bond while a restored Court would set up a civil-political order stabilized on filial descent, for which Kongming is the leading advocate. The conflict between the brothers and Kongming drives the narrative. Before explaining that conflict further we should fill in the reader on the other kingdoms, Wei in the north and Wu in the south.

The center of gravity at this time was in the north, where the Court was situated. With a larger population and stronger economy than either the south or the west, the north was more powerful even than the south and west combined. The military leader who rises to prominence and power from the campaigns to suppress the rebellions of the Yellow Scarves is Cao Cao, whose career begins as a protector of the throne. However, Cao Cao soon becomes more than a protector, he becomes a regent operating as the power behind and eventually through the throne.

Like the Shoguns of Japan, who emerge from the battles of the rival protectors of the Heian emperors (Heike versus Genji), the potential victor in China eventually subordinates the last Han emperor but retains him as a figurehead in order to bestow legitimacy on his commands, decrees, and campaigns. As virtual Shogun, Cao Cao proceeds to unify the empire and to prepare the deposition of the Han emperor and the enthronement of one of his sons as the new emperor. Cao Cao himself, however, though made into a villain in the novel, never tries to make himself emperor because that would destroy his image as regent, a role in China and Japan revered for deference to the throne, the restraint it accepts on seeking power. This limit to Cao Cao’s ambition enables Liu Bei to challenge the Cao clan for the Han throne.

Initially, Cao Cao intended to treat Liu Bei and the brothers as valued commanders, but the emperor sees them as allies to free himself from Cao Cao’s control. Once Cao Cao weighs the threat they pose to his own position, he tries to keep them under close watch. Eventually, they escape to pursue their ambition in the wide world beyond the Court. At this time Liu Bei is joined by another major figure, Zhuge Liang / Kongming, a gifted diplomat and strategist. The primary contest now revolves around the struggle for power between Liu Bei and Cao Cao, and continues after their deaths in the struggle between the Cao-Wei house in the north and the Shu-Han house in the west.

To unify the empire, Cao Cao’s primary objective after assuming the regency is to bring the quasi-autonomous southern kingdom of Wu back under the authority of the Han Court. To that end, Cao Cao first leads campaigns against the regional families to the north to consolidate his rear before marching a grand army on the south. The southern campaign leads to the middle segments of the narrative and climaxes in the famous Battle of Red Cliffs, the first major turning point of the narrative set a little more than halfway through the first eighty chapters. Facing Cao Cao’s overwhelming military forces, Sun Quan, the ruler of the south, cannot decide whether to resist or capitulate. Enter Kongming, who despite his youth had been recruited into Liu Bei’s service shortly before as a counselor of unequaled brilliance.

Liu Bei, his top advisor, Kongming, and his brothers have temporarily escaped Cao Cao. Under the protection of Liu Biao, a relative and governor of Jingzhou, they wait and assay their fortunes. Jingzhou is a central province bordering Wu on the southeast, Wei to the north, and offering access to the west. Kongming realizes that Liu Bei, now estranged from Cao Cao, is done for if the south capitulates, so he travels to the southern Court and by means of ingenious arguments persuades Sun Quan to take a stand against Cao Cao and his army poised for invasion.

Cao’s army is accustomed to fighting on land rather than water, but the south is across the mighty Yangzi River and the naval preparations necessary are making the northern soldiers seasick. In a famous scene Kongming has an agent convince Cao Cao to link the ships so that his men can be on a stable surface and overcome their seasickness. Now, however, the ships are vulnerable to fire, which was the point of Kongming’s ruse. Fire happens to be the symbol of Han rule as well as one of Kongming’s weapons of choice.

The novel now shifts from the historical Kongming to legendary romance as he mounts a platform and speaks to nature in Daoist terms to invoke a wind. Kongming has already prepared boats loaded with inflammable material and the wind he invokes drives them burning into Cao Cao’s linked fleet on the far side of the river. The fleet is destroyed, the northern army disperses, and Cao Cao flees north. The south will remain autonomous and an alliance of Sun Quan and Liu Bei forms to take on the kingdom of Wei. But first Liu Bei must move west from Jingzhou to occupy and rule the kingdom of Shu, later Shu-Han.

In the midst of these fast moving events, it seems that Kongming wants to capture the fleeing Cao Cao; but does he really? Kongming dispatches the second brother, Lord Guan, to capture Cao Cao. When they meet, however, Cao Cao reminds Lord Guan of an earlier time when Guan was his captive and he magnanimously released him to rejoin his beloved brothers. To preserve his honor (and the love of all Three Kingdoms readers) Lord Guan turns aside to let Cao Cao through. Kongming has killed two birds. He now can demand that Liu Bei punish Lord Guan for disobeying orders, and by keeping Cao Cao in power in the north as a threat to the south makes sure that Sun Quan will not break relations with Liu Bei while Liu Bei is still in Jingzhou. Kongming next convinces Liu Bei that he has to have his own kingdom in the west. Liu Bei moves west with his retinue, displaces the provincial governor, and leaves Lord Guan behind in Jingzhou as a precautionary defense against the south. He has forgiven Lord Guan for Cao Cao’s escape.

Once Liu Bei takes over that third western kingdom the narrative enters a new phase of triangular struggles. The possibility of restoring Han rule over the empire depends on close coordination between the west and the south for defense and offense against the north. But the west and the south break relations and Lord Guan is the cause when he refuses a marriage between his daughter and a son of Sun Quan. As a result Sun Quan turns to Cao Cao and the two close in on Lord Guan agreeing to share control of the key province of Jingzhou. The capture and execution of Lord Guan in the south soon follows. His death activates the peach garden vow of brotherhood of chapter 1 to “live and die as one.”

Thus the reader arrives at the second major turning point in the narrative. The first, we recall, was the Battle of Red Cliffs that had ended Cao Cao’s plan to subdue the south and opened the door to Liu Bei’s control of the west. After Liu Bei establishes his rule in Shu, he proceeds to reform its government and to plan together with the south for the war against the north. But the execution of Lord Guan has doomed the strategy and Liu Bei will either have to try and fulfill his imperial ambition on his own, guided by Kongming, or set aside his imperial quest to honor the brother-oath and avenge Lord Guan’s death by invading the southern kingdom. Liu Bei chooses the latter course of action, and Kongming, appalled at his decision, goes into seclusion, depriving Liu Bei of his tactical expertise. As a result, the invasion of the south fails. Liu Bei cannot return to his kingdom and face the anger of the families whose sons perished for so ill-conceived a campaign; he dies in a town outside the kingdom and his son, Ah Dou (Liu Shan) inherits the rule of Shu (chapter 85).

Ah Dou is not a competent ruler and he has little interest in his father’s grand project. On his deathbed Liu Bei had offered to make Kongming his heir, but Kongming is committed to the principle of filial inheritance as the bedrock of dynastic stability and continuity, and refuses to take Ah Dou’s place. Instead, he begins planning for an invasion of the north with Ah Dou as ruler. A new generation is now underway as we enter the last third of the narrative, chapters 80-120. The third brother Zhang Fei has been killed by his subordinates, while in the north Cao Cao also dies having prepared the way for his son Cao Pi to depose the last Han emperor and establish a new dynasty, the Wei, whose reign begins in 220, honoring Cao Cao retroactively as its founder with the title Martial Emperor.

With no reliable military support from the south Kongming prepares to invade the north. He makes several attempts but is undermined by Ah Dou’s unwillingness to wage war and his preference for a comfortable existence.

In the last of Kongming’s northern campaigns In the year 234 he falls ill while in camp, his army in battle (chapter 104). The last Han emperor Xiandi dies in exile the same year. Kongming is a watcher of the stars, and sees his guiding star fall knowing it is a sign from the skies that death approaches even as he awaits word of the outcome of the campaign. To ward off an counter attack from the Wei General Sima Yi he places a wooden likeness of himself in his carriage. So great is his reputation for deceptive tactics that Sima Yi declines to attack the camp, yielding the saying that a dead Kongming scared off a live Sima.

A set of poems memorializes Kongming’s death, perhaps the most well known by the Tang dynasty poet Du Fu, ending in this couplet: “To die, his host afield, the victory heralds yet to come – / Weep, O heroes, drench your fronts, now and evermore.” (chapter 105). The foreground is now swept clean of heroes, as foretold in the lines on the mighty Yangzi River that opens the Qing dynasty edition, “Of proud and gallant heroes its white tops leave no trace.” After Kongming’s death the narrative flattens out, dramatic interest subsides, the characters are ordinary. Pedestrian history is presented in the novel’s last 16 chapters.

Ah Dou surrenders to the Wei in 263, putting the north in position to fulfill Cao Cao’s ambition to reclaim the south. Three years later, however, the Wei regent Sima Yi stages a coup and establishes his own dynasty, the Jin. The coup had originated in 249, when Sima Yi seized power and ruled through the Wei throne, a reprise of the way Cao Cao as Han regent had ruled through a figurehead emperor.

In 266 Sima Yi overthrows the Cao-Wei house and establishes the Jin dynasty under the Sima clan. With the west out of the way, the Jin can concentrate on reunifying the dynasty. In the final chapter the Jin easily conquers the south (280) in what is almost a comedic parody of Cao Cao’s failed attempt to recover the south. And so the opening lines of chapter 1 are fulfilled: “The empire, long divided, must unite, long united, must divide,” as history comes full circle. But the Jin is no reprise of the mighty Han dynasty, and the Sima clan barely holds on to power for a generation before being driven south. Reunification will not come until 581.

Moss Roberts (New York University)