Introducing Our Cast of Three
How I (currently) like to think of the Three Kingdoms
I suspect that whenever we learn something new that excites us, we immediately want to run out and tell everyone else about it. Perhaps there is some deep biological reason; it would be evolutionary advantageous if individuals in our ancestral tribes felt strong desires to run up and tell everyone “I tried this new plant and it made me sick; don’t eat it!” or “I saw a tiger down that way; let’s not go there!”
Anyways, when I first began exploring the Three States historiography, I very quickly wanted to go talk about it with other people. Which proved quite difficult when many of the people I talked to had no idea of what I was talking about. Naturally, the problem only got worse the deeper I went into the historiography.
How exactly do you introduce a subject that is almost completely new to someone?
Well, one way might just be to point to some of the more popular and casual portals, like one of the TV shows or comic books or movies or video games, but this stops being a comfortable option after a while when you want to add “but be warned, I completely disagree with their decisions on how to portray Zhōu Yú” every time you make a recommendation.
Another might be to try to write your own introduction. I’ve tried that before. Didn’t work out. And yet here I am, trying to do it again.
I’m sure most of the early subscribers already have familiarity with the topic (I know you’re reading this Jim!)1 and are thinking “No worries, friend, we already know enough and don’t need yet another introduction.” To this I say, you’ve caught me! I’m not really doing it for the sake of introducing the subject to the absolute newcomers (at least, not only for that), I’m actually doing this to try to figure out how I would approach the subject if I were a teacher. (Good thing that I’m not a teacher I suppose.)
Well, I’ve been exposed. No choice but to just go into it right?
The High Level Context
Periodiziation models of history are not perfect (no model ever is), but they work because it is convenient and useful to have the periods as common reference points, even if the temporal lines between periods are very blurry.
In standard Chinese historiography, the dynastic states are the period reference points. Xià2 and Shāng are the regimes of high antiquity and the beginnings of civilization, and Zhōu is the time of classical antiquity, where civilization developed enough to become the nostalgic golden age, the classical model for successor regimes.
As civilization grew during Zhōu, both geographic state size and population size expanded beyond the ability of the Zhōu court to effectively control. Regional regimes established themselves as states capable of defying the Zhōu court and turned to attacking and conquering one another. The victor of the warring states was Qín, and its victory inaugurated the idea of a single unified empire, and even though the Qín regime was relatively short lived, a single unified empire was maintained by the succeeding Hàn regime.3 With the Hàn regime ruling for about four centuries, the idea of a unified regime passed down through a succession of dynasties became the standard for political thought. So when Hàn declined, the natural pattern should have been a new regime to succeed it. When that did not happen, people had to wonder, what went wrong?
Continuing a periodization model, the drama of the fall of Hàn and rise of three claimant successors can be roughly divided into two major periods:
The Civil War. The Fall of Hàn. Jiàn'ān. Roughly 189 to 220.
The Three Kingdoms Proper. Roughly 220 to 280.
Part I: The Fall of Hàn
Zhōu : China :: Classical Greece : Europe
Hàn : China :: Rome : Europe
Yes, I know these are terrible analogies, the latter of which has encouraged far too many “my dad can beat up your dad” Hàn vs Rome arguments. But hopefully it gets the point across.4 The Hàn Empire was, is, and will continue to be a big deal in Chinese historiography. Qín was the first proper empire, but Hàn happened to be guaranteed a better public relations and propaganda department just from being longer lived than its predecessor,5 so the name Hàn ended up with positive connotations that continue on and will continue on.
Have a map I took off Wikipedia.6
Anyways, the short version of the fall of Hàn: running an empire is hard. We will talk about the reasons and specifics of Hàn’s decline later. For our quick high-level pass, suffice to say that like all great empires, Hàn declined, broke down, and then broke apart. And when it broke apart, it broke apart hard.
In late 189, the political intrigue in the capital surrounding an Imperial succession took a violent turn, and a frontier military officer took advantage of the chaos to lead his troops into the capital, restoring order with himself in control of the Imperial court. Most of the rest of empire refused to accept this, and by 190 the east of the empire had raised their own troops to remove him, claiming this would restore the legitimacy of the Imperial court. Neither side was able to decisively destroy the other quickly, respect for Imperial authority completely broke down, and within another year the war was devolving into a free-for-all between powerful figures attacking one another to grab as much as they could, with the expectation that at the end of it all, one figure would remain standing as master of the whole empire.7
Most popular portrayals focus on this first phase of the period, the civil wars from about 189 to 220,8 which is perhaps to be expected: this was a time of intense statecraft, of people on the margins of societies rising from relative obscurity to rebuild some semblance of order and governance almost from scratch in the middle of total chaos for three decades of war. There were a lot of characters in this drama to capture popular imagination, many of whom deserve more detailed discussion later, but of the many regimes that had risen up in the chaos of 190, by 220 there were four (yes, four, not three) major cast members standing.
Part II: Three Empires
In the period of 220-222, the fighting had stabilized enough to leave three major regimes that then, one after another, declared their formal claims to be the successor to the Hàn Empire: Wèi, (Shǔ-)Hàn, Wú. To consider our cast of three, we can use a high-level model of the geography of the empire as a division into five general regions:
The central plains, Wèi
The southeast, Wú
The southwest, (Shǔ-)Hàn
The northeast, Yān, later conquered by Wèi
The northwest, conquered by Wèi
Wait, Yān? Yes, that would be our fourth cast member. They never quite got big enough to be so bold as to make their own official claim to succession to Hàn (though they came very close), but they were still very important to the Three Kingdoms drama.
Anyways, have another CC 3.0 map off of Wikipedia.
In the above map, green is Wèi, yellow is (Shǔ-)Hàn, red is Wú. If you look closely at the physical geography details, you can see how the geography contributed to the division. The southwest (Shǔ-Hàn) is isolated by mountains, and the southeast (Wú) has a major river as a defensive moat against invasion. Mountainous terrain and water barriers in the northeast also helped that region (Yān) resist the power of the central plains (Wèi) for a while.
So from 220 onward, there was near constant warfare between the states, but with few major changes in the balance of power. As long as competent and well organized regimes took advantage of the natural geographic barriers, they could not be easily conquered by their rivals. The question then was which side would blink first.
And blink they did. Though the founders of the three kingdoms had managed incredible achievements in building their states from the ruins of Hàn, the structures of their new states were still brittle and rather hastily thrown together patchworks of expedient decisions made under the pressure of the first 189-220 phase of the civil war, a time when some groups could not plan even a year ahead. From 220 to 280, the drama of the three kingdoms became one of court intrigue, of political maneuvering and backstabbing and bloody purges. The hastily created frameworks of the founders were co-opted by ambitious politicians, who in turn had to carefully manage their own rise to power to not be so disruptive as to break the delicate political machinery of their own states, and leave them vulnerable to conquest by the rival states.
All three states, Wèi, (Shǔ-)Hàn, and Wú, were co-opted by internal factions to some extent, but it was the faction within Wèi led by the Sīmǎ clan that was the most successful, seizing control of the government while also repulsing (Shǔ-)Hàn's and Wú’s attempts to take advantage of the internal disorder. Once sufficiently secure in their position in Wèi, the Sīmǎ led faction took the offensive to take advantage of the internal disorder of their two rivals, first conquering (Shǔ-)Hàn in 263, using that achievement to formalize their succession to Wèi and officially announce their new Jìn empire, and finally conquering Wú in 280.9
Part III: The Fall of Jìn
Take a close look back at the table of dynasties, and you might notice something: formal unification might have been achieved in 280, but already in 304 there was a new rival regime declared. The unification of Jìn barely lasted two decades before there was another civil war, and following the breakup of the Jìn empire, the various successor claims eventually coalesced into the Southern-Northern Dynasties period, the empire divided between two regimes with a south-north divide that followed roughly the same geographic barriers as those between Wèi and its two rivals (Shǔ-)Hàn and Wú.
From a high level view, then, the Three States was the first century of a total of four centuries of division across a geographic south-north divide. Just as Qín was the first great unification that set the standard model for the intellectuals of Hàn and later unified regimes, the Three States was the first great dis-unification that became the model for the intellectuals of the Southern-Northern Dynasties period and later periods of division and civil war.10 From this perspective, the Three States period is very deserving of being a “serious” subject for historical study, even without all the romanticized and mythologized stories and popular media attention.11
And it should be obvious that division and civil war is a very serious thing, which makes the question of legitimate succession a very serious thing. When one regime is about to be succeeded by multiple claimants, it becomes very important to understand the competing arguments for legitimacy, because the arguments are not merely arguments of intellectual curiosity, they are arguments with very real effects on the course of a civil war.
So when Hàn divided into three, which of the three was the legitimate successor? Let’s talk about that next.
Spoilers: It was Wèi. If you disagree (or even if you agree), feel free to
Not actually his name. But you know who you are, “Jim.”
I am aware of the controversies as to whether Xià actually existed or not. My position is that there probably were pre-Shāng cultures, that we have archaeological evidence for these cultures (Èrlǐtóu being the most famous example), and that even if those pre-Shāng groups did not call themselves “Xià,” it is not strictly wrong to use the name “Xià” as a general term for pre-Shāng cultures. Compare for example how Zhōu actually called Shāng as “Yīn” in their own internal documents, yet we would not use the fact that Shāng did not call itself Yīn to say that Yīn/Shāng did not exist. As another, Wèi called (Shǔ-)Hàn as Shǔ while (Shǔ-)Hàn called itself Hàn, and we certainly would not say that Shǔ did not exist.
Yes, I know I’m oversimplifying by ignoring important things like the Different-Surnamed Kings and the Rebellion of Seven States, but I feel it safe to say that in the long term, Hàn continued the ideal of the universal empire of Qín.
We’re already stuck with comparisons to Rome anyways, just from the fact that we use the word “empire” in English. This linguistic quirk might even be a lesson to some on just how much of a legacy Rome really has in the west, which hopefully drives the point home on the importance of the legacy of Hàn in the east.
That said, the word “China” might have descended from the name Qín, so if it did, Qín has that going for it at least in terms of legacy.
I do not endorse Wikipedia. I admit it has its uses, but more people need to be aware that the fact checking and quality control is, quite frankly, abysmal. There is one “Three Kingdoms” map in particular that I would want to call out for its numerous errors, since it seems to be very popular to pass around for some reason, but to do so would probably spread drama. Oh wait, I’m already spreading drama just by mentioning it, aren’t I?
For a narrative history of the time period of 189 to 220, see chapters 59 to 69 of the Zīzhì tōngjiàn of Sīmǎ Guāng, translated into English in To Establish Peace: being the chronicle of Later Han for the years 189 to 220 AD as recorded in chapters 59 to 69 of the Zizhi tongjian of Sima Guang / translated and annotated by Rafe de Crespigny.
As one example, the TV series Three Kingdoms (2010) has about 75 of its 95 episodes devoted to the period of 189-220. The last twenty episodes generally cover 220-234, with the last episode alone quickly covering 234-251, with 251-280 reduced to a voice-over narration in the last few minutes of the episode. As another example, the video game Total War: Three Kingdoms (2019) on release had only 190 as a scenario start date, and at time of writing (2021) the game still does not offer 220 start date scenarios, the latest starting date being 200, added in the Fates Divided content pack.
For a narrative history of 220 to 280, see chapters 69 to 81 of the Zīzhì tōngjiàn of Sīmǎ Guāng. For an English translation, see The Chronicle of the Three Kingdoms (220–265), Chapters 69–78 from the Tzü chih t'ung chien of Ssû-ma Kuang (1019–1068). Translated and annotated by Achilles Fang. Unfortunately a published English translation of chapters 78 to 81 covering the 265-280 is not yet widely available at time of writing.
This is not to denigrate the importance of the Warring States period that preceded Qín, of course, an even older time of division and warfare with plenty of its own drama. Rather, the argument I would make is that the expectation of unity was not quite as strong pre-Qín as it was post-Hàn, which in turn has made the Three States loom slightly larger than the Warring States in popular imagination. For English translations on the historical documents of the Warring States, see Stratagems of the Warring States.
Or at least this is how I justify things to myself when I pretend to be a “serious” student of this subject, as if I weren’t just yet another over-grown brat who got into the time period from all the comics, TV shows, movies, and video games. As I’ve said, I have no qualifications to be doing this. I didn’t take a single history class in college!