Well, division by three is splitting apart something into three things.
But seriously, I am envisioning this as is something of a personal scratch pad for my own thoughts and ideas as I study and learn about the sānguó “Three States,” or perhaps more popularly used “Three Kingdoms,”1 period of Chinese history (220 - 280), a period of division where the Hàn Empire collapsed and, against expectations, coalesced into three rival claimant empires rather than a single unified empire.2
The Three States period might be considered something of an “entry level” or even “casual” Chinese history interest, since it is probably one of most popularized one, especially outside China. From my own personal experience, I have met very few people outside China that can say much of anything about Chinese history except maybe “Mongols” and “Communists,” and then “Three Kingdoms,”3 depending on whether or not they’ve heard of the video game series Dynasty Warriors. But if I am to be considered a “filthy casual” for being interested in the popular thing, so be it! Just because something is popular and casualized does not mean it is necessarily bad or unworthy of being taken seriously. Having spent a few years studying the popular thing, I think I have found a few important and serious underlying reasons as to why it became popular and casualized in the first place.
I think also, that there is a sort of attractiveness to being able to point out the problems and misconceptions in the popular views of a casualized thing. When something is casualized, nuances are inevitably lost and lead to erroneous or outright false beliefs that end up being passed around as facts in casual circles. This is fine, of course, it’s all harmless fun within a circle. But occasionally a few in those circles might step out and swagger around boasting of their expertise on the popular thing, and then it can be fun to go up and completely shut them down by pointing out just how many things they’ve gotten wrong from going with the popular misconceptions.
That said, I don’t expect to “set the record straight,” in part because I don’t believe that to be the goal of history or historiography. In my view, historiography is more about an ongoing dialogue that does not and should not end. In historiography, there is never really a “final say.” My understanding and opinions on historical records, historical events, and historical figures have changed quite drastically over my course of study, and I expect them to continue to change drastically into the future. And as fun as it can be to shut down an arrogant upstart, inevitably the day will come when someone even smarter, better educated, and more qualified than me will walk up and shut me down as yet another arrogant upstart boasting about things I don’t really understand.
When that day comes, I hope you will stay subscribed and keep reading. I won’t always be right, but I will do my best to correct my wrongs.
Why Sānguó
So after this long winded rambling of my thoughts of what I’m doing, I should explain why you should care. If I had any sense of marketing I would have reversed the order. But in any case, here is a long overdue and far too short explanation of why you should care about a time period from eighteen centuries ago:
The collapse of the Hàn Empire changed everything. It had reigned for over four hundred years,4 and even when it was in obvious decline over the course of its last century, everyone expected an eventual renewal or restoration of the unified Empire. Either the ruling Liú family would be revitalized and restore the Empire to greatness, or a new ruling family would rise up and take the reigns, establishing a new vigorous Empire over the former Empire’s lands.
This did not happen. When the central authority of Hàn collapsed to the point of open civil war, even after thirty years of fighting, no single power had managed to secure all the former Empire. Instead, power had gathered into three separate groups, and after the last Hàn Emperor5 finally made the symbolic abdication to one of the three, the other two quickly made their own alternative claims to the Empire. Three decades of political maneuvering and warfare had failed to restore a unified Empire and instead led to three rival claimants that fought one another for supremacy for yet another six decades.
So ninety years together serve as an excellent case study of how exactly things change when everything about the world seems to be changing. Some of the greatest and most powerful figures of their time were suddenly brought low and even destroyed by the waves of change, while lesser figures who would probably otherwise have passed on in obscurity were able to ride those same waves to reach heights greater than the fallen, greater than any of them could have imagined in times of stability.
To cite an anecdote, one of the great figures of the period, Cáo Cāo (155 - 220), when a young man about at the beginning of his career in the Hàn Imperial bureaucracy, consulted a celebrated judge of character, who gave him the appraisal:
A competent minister in a governed age, a treacherous opportunist in a chaotic age.
子治世之能臣,亂世之姦雄 6
If one can understand just how people fell, survived, or rose to greatness amidst a changing world, perhaps some of those lessons can be applied to other times. Even if it was eighteen centuries ago, perhaps some of the lessons still endure.
Also, they keep making novels, movies, TV shows, comic books, and video games inspired by the time period, so if you’re familiar with any of those, it can be fun to know a little about the background stuff that inspired it all. Or very, very painful if you end up thinking that most of the historical figures get unfair treatment by modern portrayals.7
Credentials
I have none. I have no degree in history. I didn’t even take a single history course in college.
I did study a year or so of Modern Chinese in college for my foreign language requirements, but my grades were poor and I hated the classes, and I probably ended up forgetting most of it almost immediately. I came back to Modern Chinese a few years later on my own through self-study using DeFrancis’s books,8 which eventually led to learning enough to use Chinese language dictionaries of Classical Chinese to try to get some understanding of the source historiography canon texts. As part of my research into the canonical texts, I a contributor to the Three States Records project, a public repository for our crude first draft translations. Be warned that all the translations there are one-off quick and dirty translations mostly for the team’s internal use, full of mistranslated things, and so, so many grammar and spelling errors.9 Occasionally more polished translations are released when the team has enough momentum going, such as with the Annals of Wei project released last year.
Let it be clear that none of us have any credentials whatsoever. We do our best but do not promise any guarantees.
Principles
So, some personal goals to aim for while running this thing:
Intellectual honesty. Mistakes happen. To not correct them is a bigger mistake.
Find and Know the Sources. A lot of misconceptions necessarily get passed around when things are popular. The best way to be on guard against this is to always trace the sources to the canonical historiography.
Respect the Canon but Know its Limitations. We are very fortunate to have an accepted standard canon for the historiography of this time period. That said, this does not necessarily mean that the canon is always correct and there are known valid criticisms. Nevertheless, the canon has stood the test of time for eighteen centuries and cannot be rejected completely out of hand. The key is to find the balance.
Respect the Readers.
But anyways, let’s try to have fun and hopefully learn a few things along the way.
The term “Three Kingdoms” interests me as perhaps revealing something about the early English speaking translators. The term guó refers to a country or state in general, not necessarily one ruled by a king; in Chinese the word “kingdom” would probably be rendered was wáng guó. The early translators were perhaps envisioning the kingdom as the default form of a state or country.
I include the year dates only as formality. I don’t believe in history as having exact cut-off dates. I do believe in symbolic cut-off dates of course: 220 is the year when the Hàn Emperor symbolically abdicated to the new Wèi Emperor the first of the three claimant successors and 280 is the year when the last of the three claimant states symbolically ended with the surrender of the Wú Emperor. But my interests and studies naturally bleed into times before 220 and after 280, since there are figures who live through the symbolic epochs, and there are inevitable connections between events before and after the epochs. I suspect the view is shared; in my experience, most of the popular fascination with the time period tends to be focused on the period before 220, specifically the three decades of how the Hàn Empire collapsed and how the now legendary figures rose up from the ruins to lay the foundations of the future Three States. The following six decades of political intrigue within the Three States and warfare between the Three States seems to receive less attention.
This narrow view of Chinese history has led to some, for lack of a better word, “cringe” moments, such as seeing someone trying to blame a “Three Kingdoms” figure (who lived about 200 AD) for causing the weakness that led to the Mongol invasions and Yuan dynasty (1279–1368), as if the intervening thousand years didn’t see some more rather important changes. I don’t mean to assign criticism or blame here; in my younger, less educated years, I no doubt also have said things that were even more “cringe.” The mistake is not in saying ridiculous things, but in not learning from them.
Four hundred years isn’t strictly true due to the interruption of the Xīn Empire and the discontinuities between the pre-Xīn and post-Xīn Hàn regimes, but that is a whole other time period that I am not qualified to talk about in any detail.
The term “last Hàn Emperor” is of course disputed; one of the three states claimed to be a continuation of Hàn rather than a replacement, referring to itself by the name “Hàn” in its official documents. Its rivals instead used the name “Shǔ,” a name for the geographical region where that regime was based.
The anecdote appears as an annotation to Sān Guó zhì (SGZ) 1, citing Sūn Shèng's Yìtóng Záyǔ. A variant version also appears in the biography of the character appraiser Xǔ Shào in Hòu Hàn shū (HHS) 68, which has a reversed appraisal: 「君清平之姦賊,亂世之英雄。」 “A treacherous rebel in a pure age, an outstanding hero in a chaotic age.” In either version, Cáo Cāo was judged to be destined to become a very different sort of person depending on the world he would see.
I might end up writing a few less dignified rants about how I feel certain figures have been and continue to be unfairly treated.
John DeFrancis’s Chinese Reader series are by far the best learning resource for Chinese I have ever found. I have no idea how these books did not become standard in University teaching (well, I do have a few ideas, but that would be an entirely separate rant complaining about modern Universities).
I’ve noticed that when trying to translate, I often end up doing “Chinese in English words,” where the Chinese grammar starts leaking into how I think in English.