The Three Kingdoms, then, is mostly about warfare and battles but one of the interesting features about this novel is the way the author pays attention to the administration of war, i.e. It takes place during an identifiable time span, namely the periods during which the Han dynasty empire fell apart into three separate kingdoms (hence, obviously, the title), to be reunited again under the Ji dynasty only after 113 years of almost constant strife and warfare between the kingdoms.

The reason for this relates to the third point, namely the time the novel is set in: While the other novels back-dated their events in order to be able to write freely about the present, placing (mostly) fictional characters in a (vaguely) historical period, The Three Kingdoms is a proper historical novel. Admittedly, very many of those characters (again, to a much greater degree than in the other novels, even The Outlaws of the Marsh) are introduced only to be killed off a sentence or two later – if this novel is the one with the largest number of characters, it is also the one with the highest body count. Two of these three items, however, also mark where The Three Kingdoms differs from the other novels: its cast of characters is insane even by Classic Chinese Novel standards, going literally into the hundreds. It is generally assumed that it was written by Luo Ghuanzong (who also may have edited and maybe even written parts of Outlaws of the Marsh) and assumed to have been written in the latter half of the 14th century, but neither of those appears to be quite uncontested.Īfter having read three of the Six Classic Chinese novels before, several things about The Three Kingdoms struck me as immediately familiar, namely its length, the huge number of its characters and that it is set in the past.

As with the previous Great Chinese Classics, both date of composition and author of The Three Kingdoms (also known as Romance of the Three Kingdoms) are not known with certainty. First, I should point out that I am writing this post six months after finishing the novel and while I took some notes when reading it, details are starting to get a bit hazy and I apologise if what follows is even more vague than usual.

Three kingdoms book