Cao Cao: an immensely capable, ambitious and ruthless man whose generalship and cunning make him the great villain of the novel.
The Ten Eunuchs are set against the Regent, whose most competent followers are Yuan Shao and CAO CAO. When the Emperor dies, there is a power struggle to control his two young sons. All this is a result of the corruption at court due to the dominant faction of Ten Eunuchs. Xuande is passed over for promotion after the war, then finally promoted only to subsequently be demoted again, prompting the short-tempered Zhang Fei to whip the government inspector who brings the news.
Dong Zhuo: a thoroughly bad piece of work whose worst tendencies quickly become apparent as the empire descends into disorder.Sun Jian: a hero whose actions will lead to the founding of the Southland Kingdom, the third of the Three Kingdoms.Prone to short-temperedness and drunkenness, he is nevertheless a true hero and worthy oath-brother Zhang Fei: a rough diamond: he comes across as violent and reckless, but underneath he is a deeply loyal man with great potential.Lord Guan: his greatness as a warrior and leader, and his undying loyalty to his oath-brothers, only has one weakness: a keen sense of his own reputation, born from his consciousness of his own great worth.He has the potential to someday become a legitimate emperor, because he is a deeply virtuous man but he faces the impossible destiny of trying to stay true to this virtue (and therefore legitimacy) in a ruthless world that rewards treachery and violence But court machinations see the incompetent and ungrateful Dong Zhuo promoted he offends the heroes. The three fight the Yellow Turbans, as does the heroic commander Sun Jian. The impoverished and insignificant Liu Bei ( XUANDE) meets ZHANG FEI and Guan Yu ( LORD GUAN), and the three gather in a peach garden to swear an oath of brotherhood and pledge to defend the Empire. In a time of turbulence and imperial weakness, the Yellow Turbans rise up in revolt. This first round of warfare is fluid and dangerous: by the end of Part 1, only one man on this list is still alive. Imperial courtiers transform into villainous and ambitious warlords – such as Dong Zhuo, Cao Cao, the Yuan brothers, and Lü Bu. The heroes, noble-hearted Xuande and his two oath-brothers, find themselves entangled in a deadly web of fear and ambition as every provincial governor has to fend for himself. The first part of the story details the splintering of power, as a puppet child emperor is installed and the empire’s central control crumbles. The three heroes swear an oath of brotherhood in the peach garden (Chapter 1) Part 1 I’ve divided my chapter summaries into four parts, because, well, there’s a lot of chapters. It was substantially edited by Mao Lun and Mao Zonggang in the 1660s, and this became the standard version (I read it in translation by Moss Roberts). The novel charts the bloody collapse of China’s Han Empire the emergence of three successor kingdoms and the ultimate fate of those kingdoms as their rulers battle each other to reunify all of China. It is attributed to a mysterious fourteenth-century writer called Luo Guanzhong. Three Kingdoms is a historical novel set between AD 184 and AD 264, and based on real people and real events. Three Kingdoms Part Four: Chapters 91-120
Three Kingdoms Part Three: Chapters 66-90 So I’ve written brief summaries of each of its 120 chapters, for people who want to follow the plot but who don’t have time to read more than 2000 pages and keep track of hundreds of characters. It’s also very, very long and complicated. See Also: Sun Tzu and The Art of Warįor Chinese culture, Three Kingdoms is a bit like Homer and Shakespeare rolled into one. It is an epic tale of war and heroes, loyalty, betrayal and cunning plans of beleagured morality versus cruel political reality and of what men are capable of doing in the pursuit of power. The Romance of the Three Kingdoms is one of China’s greatest and most influential works of literature.
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