390 Three Kingdoms to the fact that in the four nations of Asia directly influenced by Confucianism, history is the main concern of the respective cultures. Three Kingdoms describes China’s traditional political culture and its struggle to define its political form, transporting the reader from the highest councils of dynastic power to the lowest fringes of society, from the capital and key provinces to the edges of the empire and beyond. It is a tale of China itself in its infinite variety, a tale peopled with kings and courtiers, commanders and scholars, magicians and peasant rebels. Women seem to play a small part, but their roles have the utmost significance. The novel offers a startling and unsparing view of how power is wielded, how diplomacy is conducted, and how wars are planned and fought; and the novel has in turn influenced the ways the Chinese think about power, diplomacy, and war. Three Kingdoms, like all of China’s major novels, offers Western readers an understanding of China from the perspective of the Chinese themselves. Three Kingdoms tells of one epoch-marking dynastic cycle: the fall of the Han dynasty, the subsequent division of its empire into three kingdoms—Wei, Wu, and Shu—in ad 220, and the reunification of the realm in ad 280 under a new ruling house, the Jin. The novel covers one hundred and thirteen years, from ad 168 to ad 280, a time of crisis and dissolution in Western history that spans the end of the Roman era under Marcus Aurelius and the beginning of the Byzantine under Diocletian and then Constantine. But the novel’s main concern is the reign of the last Han emperor, Xian (rad 189–220). To this period the author devotes two-thirds of his work, the first eighty chapters; he describes in rich detail the final crisis of the four-hundred-year Han dynasty culminating in the displacement of its ruling house (guojia), the Liu, by the Cao family. The last third of the complete novel, the final forty chapters, deals with the subsequent. Three Kingdoms or Three Dynasties (Sanguo) period; the founding of the Jin and the reunification of ad 280 is recounted in chapter 120.

This “dynastic cycle,” the pattern of many eras in Chinese history, is epitomized in Three Kingdoms’ opening line:“The empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide.” One hundred and twenty chapters later the tale ends with the line reversed:“The empire, long united, must divide; long divided, must unite.” The history of this period of crisis and resolution is both unique and universal—unique for the heroic figures that dominate it, universal for the questions it must address. How is dynastic rule established and maintained? How and why does it fail? What are the qualities of an ideal emperor (di or tianzi, Son of Heaven), an ideal minister (xiang), an ideal vassal (chen)? What is the relation between the ruling house and the empire? If the empire loses its unity, how is it regained?