Not for nothing however is this a “romance” that, in its original form, consisted of nearly a million classical Chinese characters and that Chinese television has serialized it in 95 superbly acted and staged episodes of 46 minutes each. As he becomes a tyrant, assassination attempts mount within and revolts brew in the peripheries, eventually giving rise to three contending claimants to the empire. The history is straightforward: A Northern warlord, repelled by the sight of eunuchs who monopolized power in a weak emperor’s court, takes over the court and makes a puppet of the emperor. It is to be approached in the same way, for what the dialogues tell us about a civilization’s understanding of conflict, of statecraft, as well as of virtue. This massive fictionalized history of the struggles attendant to the death the Han dynasty and the establishment the Jin dynasty (circa AD 169-280) is akin to Shakespeare’s historical plays as well as, in some respects, to Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War. The Romance of the Three Kingdoms (Chinese Classic attributed to various authors from the thirteenth to the seventeenth century)
