In Our Time - Romance of the Three Kingdoms

Episode Date: June 27, 2013

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, widely regarded as one of the greatest works of Chinese literature. Written 600 years ago, it is an historical novel that tells the story of a tumultuous period in Chinese history, the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD. Partly historical and partly legend, it recounts the fighting and scheming of the feudal lords and the three states which came to power as the Han Dynasty collapsed. The influence of Romance of the Three Kingdoms in East Asia has been likened to that of Homer in the West, and this warfare epic remains popular in China today.With:Frances Wood Former Lead Curator of Chinese Collections at the British LibraryCraig Clunas Professor of the History of Art at the University of OxfordMargaret Hillenbrand University Lecturer in Modern Chinese Literature at the University of Oxford and Fellow of Wadham CollegeProducer: Victoria Brignell.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thank you for downloading this episode of In Our Time. For more details about in our time, and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com. UK slash Radio 4. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, the empire long divided must unite. Long united must divide. Thus it has ever been.

These are the opening words of Romance of the Three Kingdoms, one of the four great classical novels of Chinese literature. Written in the 14th century, It narrates events that happened more than a thousand years before when the Han dynasty collapsed and three separate competing states emerged in China. Full of vivid descriptions of battles and sharp military tactics, it's a complex epic featuring hundreds of characters and stories that are familiar even to Chinese people who have not read the book.

The status of romance of the Three Kingdoms in Chinese culture has been compared to that of Homer in the West, and it's regarded as one of the most influential works in China's literary canon. It's been in print ever since it was first first. published. With me to discuss Romance of the Three Kingdoms are Francis Wood, former lead curator of Chinese collections of the British Library, Craig Clunas, Professor of the History of Oxford University, and Margaret Hillenbrand, University in modern Chinese literature at Oxford University and fellow of Wadham College. Francis Wood, could you start by describing what happened

in the period of history covered by the novel, the fall of the Han dynasty in the third century? The period of the Three Kingdoms, as he called it, lasts from 220 to 280 AD. The Han dynasty had ruled China for about 400 years. What we need to do first, I suppose, is think about China as it was slightly before. China had been a group of separate kingdoms which were united into one in 221 BC by the First Emperor. Then you have the formation of China as a united empire. And subsequently the Han rules over this vast area which stretches from Mongolia. in the north, down to Canton, from the sea across to Sichuan. So the empire, a huge enterprise. But by about 200 AD, you start getting considerable problems. The emperors are enfeebled. There's an incredible rise of eunuch power at court and lots of squabbling.

So the Han dynasty is crumbling. And unfortunately, it also makes the mistake of dealing with local uprisings by giving increasing military power to provincial officials. So you get warlords, as it were, springing up in different parts of China. And by the time we get to 220 AD, the empire is completely crumbled, and you have warring states, as it were. So it's disunion, it's the opposite of imperial unity. The themes of romance of the three kingdoms, what are they?

What are their main themes in them? The themes are, I think, fundamentally, ideas of loyalty. Should one be loyal to an imperium that is crumbling? Should one be loyal to the last emperor or to a member of his family? Or does one transfer one's loyalty? And also, I mean, themes about uprightness, what is the correct way to behave. But also you have themes of things like military skill. You know, how do you actually win?

and some of the most interesting passages in the novel are the ones which describe strategy, schemes, cunning military events and so on. Is the Han forever after seen one for the last 2,000 years since it fell in inverted conventions, seen as the great template, the great ideal of what China was and could be again? I think to quite a large extent. I mean, if one talks about the sort of popular psyche, the Han is one of the great periods in Chinese history, administrative, the administrative system of the whole empire was established. And I do think that, I mean, the phrase that you quoted, the fear of disunion, the fear of what happened at the fall of the Han,

is something that does last throughout Chinese history. I mean, you can even get it, I mean, even recently, dissidents, such as Liu Bin Yan, all get very excited at the idea that China might break up, and that's the only way that they can see change coming. Craig Cliners, can you tell us, what China's society and economy were like at the time the novel was written, which was more than a thousand years later. There are dates that are puzzled around,

but let's say the end of the 14th century. Well, the novel is very much associated with the name of the author, Logan Zhong, who's definitely a real person, although somebody that we know almost nothing about. And he could have been active at any time between really the end of the 13th century in the beginning of the 15th, but the conventional idea is that he's,

operating around the fall of the Yuan Dynasty in the middle of the 14th century. So that is when the Mongol hegemony, the empire founded by Jingas Khan and his descendants, the Mongol hegemony over China, it too is waning and breaking up, and there are warlords contending with one another. So there are direct parallels between that 14th century period. Now, the stories of the three kingdoms had been prevalent for a very long long. time in various forms of prose fiction and in various forms of drama. And in fact, the novel as we have it, really the earliest edition that we have dates from 1522. And that's a very

different period in China's history, because that's a rising period of prosperity when China is becoming plugged into a global economy and there's a huge population rise. There's also a huge economic boom, which relates to the influx of silver that is coming from the Americas into China. You've got the rise of a vibrant urban culture, a vibrant merchant culture, and it's that that fuels the massive upsurge in the production of printed editions of the novel. And that's the novel as we have it today. So although we associate it with Lu Guangzhou in the 14th century, what we have is really a 16th and even more a 17th century product. That's what people are reading today when they're reading the romance of the Three Kingdoms.

So when it was written and put out, we talked about China being the biggest, the most powerful economic force in the world at that time. Yes. And in the early 16th century, China has a population of about 150 million, which is equivalent easily to the whole of Europe. It's certainly the largest and the most powerful unitary state in the world. And it's pretty much a period of stability and prosperity.

So it may be that actually it's in times of prosperity that people like the frisson of reading about chaos and dissolution. Would you also say that by looking that far back, they can pretty much say what they want without getting into trouble with the authorities? Well, I think that's true. And certainly from the beginning of the novel in the 16th century, people are reading it as having a bearing not just, on, this is not just about the third century, this is about themes. Francis has mentioned

loyalty and the word righteousness, which comes up on almost every page. And again, the idea of legitimacy and legitimate succession and who is legitimate. Now, in the early 16th century, nobody really thinks that the Ming isn't legitimate. There are no alternatives. So it is, if you like, a way of experimenting with ideas about the cosmic and the political order. and the relationship between cosmic and human orders, without saying things that are going to get you into too much trouble with the government. We talk about it as a novel. I'll come back to that a little later, but was it described,

how was it put out at the time? It was a time when novels were stirring in various parts of the world. Was this part of the stirring of the novel? Well, it's earlier even than the stirring of the novel in Europe. This 1522 edition, which is the earliest one that we have, have of the full version of the novel. It has 120 chapters. It's, you know, it's extremely long. It mimics, the language mimics in some ways the language of the oral storyteller. There's a lot of debate among scholars about the extent to which this is the product of a single author as

opposed to the product of a collective experience, but it certainly mimics the conventions of the, of the storyteller. Have we any idea how the it's a question that I asked to Francis but I think maybe we can develop a bit. How the Chinese of that particular time of the end of the 14th beginning of the 15th century, how they saw the Han dynasty? Well the Han dynasty for the Ming is one of the great models. It's very long ago and so actually people don't

really know that much about it so it's possible to project onto it ideas about what it was like that are certainly useful to the imperial government. But also culturally, people have a sense that this period of disunion is in some ways a period of great cultural vibrancy in poetry, in calligraphy, in literature. So again, the whole tension between the value of stability and unity and the value of ferment and change, that's very much part of the way people are thinking about this at the time. And are we talking about this as an empire which were good communications?

Was it a federation or was it centralized? Was it held together administratively? As we've come to think the Chinese did in their good times with great efficiency? In the 16th century, China is very much a centralized empire run by an imperial bureaucracy. But it's very much connected to the wider world. And one of the things that shows that is that there's a 1549 edition of the Three Kingdoms in the Library of the Escorial in space. So that shows the ways in which 16th century China is connected

through trade and maritime voyaging to the wider world that even a thing like a novel can end up in a Spanish royal library. I mentioned in the introduction that was one of the four great works. Was it distinguished the moment it came out by its power and its authority? I think pretty much so. It is the first or the earliest of the four great novels, the others being the water margin, the journey to the west, the plum in the golden vase, which are all

come together in this great age between the early 16th and the early 17th century, but it's the first one, and it's also the one that deals most with real history, and hence among educated people it has a particular prestige that the others don't have. Margaret Hillenbrand, can we just go into the business of when it was written and why it was

written by whom? Can we just go deeper into that? Well, as Craig's already said, authorship of the novel is conventionally attributed to La Gwain-Gong, but his dates are about 1330, some say earlier, to about 1,400. But the first printed edition,

as Craig said, didn't come out until 1522, so there's already a lapse in time between his lifetime and the emergence of the first printed edition. It's likely, perhaps, that the novel was copied, was remade, was revised by multiple hands before that edition came out.

But I think the whole notion of an author here is perhaps a contested one anyway. When we think of an author, we imagine a lone creative figure who attempts to produce a decisively original work. But in actual fact here, perhaps a better term would be a creative compiler or an inventive compiler, since the text we read today is the culmination of a long prior history of texts and tales about the Three Kingdoms period.

In Chinese, this prior culture is called the Three Kingdoms period. Kingdom's culture, which gives you a sense of the range of media, the range of genres, and also the wide audiences which they reached. So although it's undeniably true that the Three Kingdoms, the novel, is the high watermark, the ultimate expression of this Three Kingdoms culture, it's helpful to bear in mind these earlier incarnations, and also the extraordinarily vibrant afterlife, which the novel has spawned, which ranges across an even broader range of genres and media, everything from porcelain figurines to multiplayer video games.

The idea of a writer then is interesting to go into further. So do we think of that being writers recognized as writers or was it something they did while they did other things? Or what's the status or position of a writer then? Well... We're talking about the still end of the 15th century. That's an interesting question because at the time

the prevailing dogma held that proper literature, respectable literature, was poetry, philosophy, history, bellestre. Fiction, by contrast, was despised by the Confucian orthodoxy. It was inflammatory, it was fanciful, it was intended for ladies, and the uneducated, no self-respecting literators should be dabbling in fiction. But what we see happening in the Ming Dynasty is the process whereby fiction is rescued, if you like, from the moral badlands and rehabilitated into the premier literary genre of the day.

So what happens during the Ming Dynasty through this text and the others that Craig mentioned is fiction becoming not just popularly engrossing but intellectually vibrant, giving intellectual sustenance to men of letters of the day. Craig touched on the sources. Are there anything you'd like to add to that, the source is available?

Well, I think it's... Sorry to sharpen my own question, but because he mentioned that it'd been around for a long time. So have we got a good, an oral tradition here, for instance? Well, there's the key point. here is how extraordinarily hybrid the text is. It fuses both a range of different genres. It fuses materials drawn from different periods in China's preeming dynastic history,

and it fuses elite and popular traditions. So it's a collage text. It's a composite. But to be a bit more specific about that, there is a historical source called the Records of the Three Kingdoms, which was written by a man called Chen Sho, a court historian sometime after 280 AD, That's the historical substance of the novel.

That is then interlaced with poetry, in particular the verse of the great-tang poet Dufu. And then, as I said, the author seeks to draw in the popular tradition. First of all, via UN Dynasty plays, which took the Three Kingdoms heroes as one of their major subjects, and as you say, the popular storytelling tradition. In particular, a work called the Plain Tales of the Three Kingdoms, which is essentially a raconteur's prompt book. So you get all these tales. woven together and in the very ambitious hands of this author,

they are moulded into a narrative which fuses literature and history, China's past and present, and the elite and popular traditions, to create a novel which essentially reshaped the Chinese literary landscape, as Craig's already said. But who would you think, given that intellectuals, from what you said, rather despise the fiction, who would the author think, or the authors or the compiler think would be reading this? Well, you're touching on a key issue here of audiences, because what we see in the Ming dynasty is an explosion in print culture,

a printing revolution which made China this period the most glorious in China's history in terms of print culture. So you see an expansion of readership, which are catered to... Sorry to interrupt you, but can we talk about if it wasn't the intellectuals, if it wasn't the people of God, which people would be reading? It would have been officials, merchants, educated ladies, members of religious. orders, even to a lesser extent, the lower orders. So there's spreading literacy, which is expanding the target readership year on year. But there's also a sense going on here of literature expanding its own remit. It's not just about pedagogy and self-betterment.

It's about how to get pleasure out of reading. Francis Wood, can we go further into the structural format of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms? I think whenever I've read it, what I'm always struck by is, its closeness to traditional historical writing. And I think I agree with Margaret too about, I mean, I think it's very interesting to say that, you know, whilst it was officially despised by the Confucian elite, you bet that they read it. They just didn't sort of keep it. But they would also have been versed in the sorts of things that she's talking about in the histories.

I mean, China starts off very, very early on with a historical tradition, writing about the past, setting down the truth about the past. And the language of the Sangu, I find, is extraordinarily. close to the official writing. I was reading the history of the former hand. It's exactly the same. These accounts of battles, the Duke of so-and-so, ladies' army against the Duke of something else, the Duke of

somewhere else, led his army against and so on so. So it's very, very close to not so much fictional writing as we would think of it today. I mean, it's right, but it's lightened by poetry interposed, but otherwise it reads very much as a dynastic history. How far

do we know that if the historical part is true, what sort verifications are there? I know the verifications are its closeness to the sorts of text that Margaret mentioned. It is, I think, generally speaking, close, but then of course it takes off.

Someone said, I think, it's something like 70% history, 30% fantasy, is the sort of usual number given. And what I always think is so nice about it is that it sort of plods along with history, attacks on this, that and the other, and taking this town and the other. And then all of a sudden a character comes in

who actually later on is deified and becomes the god of war. So it sort of takes off at moments, but not at very many moments. Craig Clainers, Margaret was talking earlier about the development of printing. Could you give us more about that? Because it was phenomenal the way the printing developed at that time. At the time of this book was written. One of the important things to remember is that printing's not new in China at this point. So this is not a technical revolution.

There's very little about Ming printing, which hasn't been done before, but what there is is a vast expansion in scale and the vast growth of a commercial publishing industry which is engaged in really cut-throat competition with one another. So one of the reasons that this novel is very successful,

it's being published by lots and lots of publishers. We have 33 editions from the early 16th century through to the early 17th. They're all competing with one another, They're all claiming that their edition is the best one. They're doing things like claiming to have commentaries by famous scholars, which are completely fictitious. And one of the very important things they're doing is putting pictures in.

And we know that the pictures are very important because we have this very nice anecdote from the 1570s where a 10-year-old boy, his mother tells him off for reading the Romance of the Three Kingdoms. He's not paying, he wanted his breakfast because he's reading this book. And he says, no, no, no. I wasn't just looking at the pictures. I really, really was reading the words as well,

which suggests that some people perhaps maybe did just look at the pictures. So the thing about the main publishing industry, it's very commercial, it's very competitive, and it's on a very, very large scale. Books could get into the hands of, we're not talking about the peasantry of this vast empire, but books were not limited. It's not like Europe at this time

where books are really restricted to a very small, educated elite. Books and printing and printed books are a common part of daily experience for a goodly proportion of the Ming Empire's 150 million population. Margaret Hillenbrand, can you tell us about the two key male protagonists in the book? Well, the two protagonists are, on the one hand, Liu Bei, who is the founder of the Shu Kingdom. And facing up to him is a man called Cao Cao, who's the founder of the Wei Kingdom. So these two men, embody two competing models of kingship. They embody two different ideas of dynastic legitimacy.

So on the one hand, you have Liyal Bey, who is blue-blooded. He's loyal. He's capable of inspiring intense loyalty in others, despite his diplomatic and military mistakes. And his particular talent is his ability to make alliances with the most talented men of the realm. But on the other hand, there is this Tsar-Zar character who's opportunistic, ruthless, exploitative,

and a character says to him when he's a very young man, you would make a superb statesman in a time of peace and a treacherous villain in a time of chaos. And rather than being offended by this, Tata is immensely pleased. And that gives you an idea of what his personality is like. But actually for many Chinese readers, one of the real hero of the book might be a man called Kongming, who is Leo Bay's conciliere, he's a sort of almost sorcerer-like strategist,

who's come down the centuries as the most renowned man of brilliance and military and diplomatic genius in Chinese history. He's your favourite, isn't it, Francis, Woodard? Absolutely, yes. You sort of adopted him in the notes that I read. Anyway, can you tell us why? Because, I mean, I tend to still refer him to him as Trugol Yang.

I mean, one of the things, the name problem is enormous. He's just, in a book that I find a bit tedious, these accounts of battles, He's the really lively character. He does amazing things like finding himself in need of 100,000 arrows and having absolutely no time to make them because the battle is about to start. He borrows Tau Tau Tau's arrows by sending a boat downstream, padded with straw and a few sailors on it shooting

and the enemy on the far bank shoot all their arrows into the boat. They're captured in these straw padding and boat sails by, and he's got all the arrows. He spends a lot of time doing things like creating the noise of battle just to upset the enemy at night. Ruses like retreating, but pretending not to retreat by leaving campfires lit. He dams rivers and then releases the water at the last minute.

And I think my favourite story is the one, you have to think of him as absolutely having terrorised his enemies. I mean, they don't know what's coming next from him. And there's a great time when the city of Sichung is besieged and surrounded. and what he does is open the gates of the city and then sit up above the main gate of the city in his peacock feather cloak and play the Guchung which is a kind of Guchi

and his stringed instrument played by gentlemen so he's this picture of calm in the middle of war and of course the enemy doesn't dare go in because they just know from how he appears that something utterly ghastly is going to happen so he's very good fun he enlivens the story at all times It's the relationship between Liu Bei and Zhuge Liang,

which many Chinese readers have found compelling. The illustrations to the book very often show the scene, which is known in Chinese, is three visits to the thatched hut. And this is, Liu Bei attempts to get, he hears of this great magician, this scholar, who's living in a secluded hut in the mountains, contemplating and playing music and so on. And he visits him to try and get him,

to join him as a strategist and Zhuge Liang refuses him a first time and a second time, but the third time he agrees. So there's three visits to the Thatched Hut. This is, it's like Robert Bruce on the Spider, it's about perseverance, but it's also about the desire of the, that the good Lord will try again and again and again

to get the worthy man. And that's a theme that the Chinese elite, the Chinese literati, very compelling as a model between the Lord and the Minister. This is very important to them. Given that this was being written at the time of the Great Ming Dynasty, were any moral

and political messages being more or less explicitly stated? Well, I think the message about legitimacy, loyalty, retribution, there's also, we haven't talked about the idea that one of the great themes of the novel is what goes around, comes around,

the notion of, which of course, derives to an extent from the Buddhist idea of karma that things will kind of... So can you give us an example of that? Well, that the bad will ultimately receive their just deserts. This is a very moral novel. It's interesting that unlike some of the other great novels, which have been forbidden by law by imperial governments, for example, the water margin, which is about bandits and about rebellion,

and the governments of the Ming and Qing Dynasty are constantly issuing laws to say that no one should read this. But the Three Kingdoms, this is seen as a moral novel. It's a novel in which the moral order, the right moral order, is restored at the end and legitimacy is restored. So in some ways it's a very conservative message. It's not a message about rebellion.

It's a message about the, the re-establishment of the rights. So in a sense it's like European tragedy, in the sense that things are chaotic, but then a moral order is restored at the end. The status quo is restored at the end. More than that, it's upheld, isn't it? It's upheld at the end, yes.

Margaret Hilbert-Brandt, is it possible to give us some idea of the style of language, given that very few of our listeners have flew into medieval Chinese? Well, the novel blends vernacular expressions with classical Chinese, classical Chinese grammar, diction, idiom. And in doing so, it creates a text which is more muscular, more fluent, more earthy even, than the so-called respectable literature. Is this new? Yes, because up until this point, respectable literature is written in classical Chinese. Now, classical Chinese, as a literary language, is elusive, it's polished, it's ters, it's lecest, it's leciful, So by incorporating these vernacular expressions into the text, the author, whoever he was,

was bidding for a much broader kind of reading public. And in so doing, what we get is a text which appeals to people because of its speed, the ease of reading, the pleasure that can be taken from reading, and also the use of this more looser literary language opens up new possibilities for storytelling. there's more potential for immediacy, for suspense, for the whole idea of a page turner. So the formal language doesn't allow for that, does it? Not in the same way. It's too elliptical, really, to get you spinning the pages in a pot-boiling sense. It's very good at lashing descriptions of characters onto the page,

and that's the sort of thing that Craig was talking about. Well, in a novel which has a cast of characters reaching well-nigh 1,000, Of course there are many who are just sort of extemporised walk-ons, yes, absolutely. But at base it is a passionate character study, in particular those three characters we've already discussed, and also the two sworn brothers who are Lealbe's main supporters. These five characters are very carefully, very fully delineated personalities, and they give the novel its heart, they allow it to hum and vibrate. Francis Wood, is there any way of comparison?

comparing the romance of the Three Kingdoms with other great works in Chinese literature? I think it does stand out as being much more historical. I don't know, I think, I'm not sure that I entirely agree with Margaret that the characters come out of this particular novel in the way that, for example, with the water margin, they do. I think there's much more sense in the water margin

that these extraordinary bandits who are leading a very different sort of life, their adventures, the episodes that are recounted, give you a much stronger sense of personality than in this case. I think it's action that shows character in the Three Kingdoms. That is, there aren't lengthy descriptive passages. It doesn't say this is what Tartar is like, but by showing key actions, there's a kind of ironic style of narration

whereby it's the things that people do that tell you what they're like, other than any lengthy description on the omniscient narrator's part. How much can we come to the idea? Is there any way of, you've said 70% history, haven't you, and 30% fiction? I think that's a generally... That's one famous 18th century critic said that,

and that's become the kind of accepted... Well, you would go along with it? Yes. I mean, well, I suppose what John Sioux Chung is saying is, 70% of it is like what is in the history book. Now, of course, this was a very long time ago, and the extent to which the history is accurate. So, for example, the history, Margaret mentioned the chronicle of the Three Kingdoms written sometime after 280. But it was written at the court of one of these three kingdoms.

So it's very much, it has an agenda, it's very party-pre about who the legitimate ruler of the whole All Under Heaven should be. So when we say it's like that text, it's not necessarily absolutely like what happened. Margaret, heard a number of episodes from this book have become especially popular and importantly in Chinese culture. Can you give us a couple of examples? Well, I think the standout example here is the scene very near the beginning of the novel, when Liu Bei, who is fired up with zeal to protect this St. Perald-Han dynasty, goes to a tavern where he meets two like-minded men. And they go to a peach garden where they swear an oath of brotherhood. They vow that they will dedicate their lives to the service of the Han Dynasty,

and they also vow if they can to die on the same day. And this fraternal bond then becomes a driving force throughout the novel. You can see its impact on Chinese culture in its representational history. It's in woodblock prints. It's on porcelain figures. It's actually on a painting in the Ashmolean, dated in 1992 by an artist called Zhou Jing Xin, I think. But more importantly, it's acted as a kind of template for male bonding. It's the genesis of ideals of male friendship in the Chinese context,

just as the three men themselves are idealized masculine types. But it also has a subversive taint to consider the idea of three strangers entering into a bond of loyalty outside the kinship nexus. This is a real challenge to what is the much-touted cardinal virtue in the Chinese moral universe, feeling all piety. So for these three men to make this bond, they are saying that their alliance to each other

trumps consanguinity. It trumps the demands of blood. And that's quite countercultural, which is why, unsurprisingly, we see this peach garden mythology being invoked by the triads and by secret societies in China, particularly in their initiation rituals.

Would you like to follow that up, Francis? Is it very unusual though, the peach garden? Well, yes, I think absolutely. And I mean, because of the point about you've got legitimacy as being one kind of main argument, you know, this is stepping outside legitimacy, stepping, as Margaret says, beyond the bonds of family and family relationship.

That's a massive thing to do, I presume, isn't it? But there were no reprimands for that if it was so strict that filial piety and ties of blood were so strong? Was there any criticism of it when it came? one of the positive sides of it is of course that the non-familial bond is also the bond between the ruler

and the subject so it like many powerful ideas it has both a conventional side and a conservative side and a slightly more transgressive side at the same time so you can invoke this if you're a bandit but you can also invoke this if you are a loyal minister

You could also say that the bonds of filial piety, the idea of lineage and patrilineality, are failing in the Han dynasty. It's strife between father and sons, between brothers which has caused the dynasty to get to this pretty past. So the idea of a counter-axis based on loyalty,

it is perhaps legitimised to a degree. And I guess you could say that in the 16th century, in the much more complex commercial society that you've got in the Ming, where people are moving about more, the idea of how you make bonds with people that you are not related to and who you can trust in this world, that's a very compelling theme as well. Are these bonds, when you say they forged friendship,

do they die for each other's friendship? Is it that kind of Spartan deal or what's going on? Well, Guandi, Guan Yu, of course, one of the great points of the novel is when Guan Yu is captured by his enemies and he has offered his life if he will revoke his loyalty to Leobay and join with the forces that have captured them and he curses them and he dies and he is executed rather than changes loyalty. So this is this instantiation of loyalty.

This is again one of the great scenes I think that people would mention as one of the high points of this very long narrative. How did the novel reach the West Francis? We know we've heard about the copy in the Escorialians. when did it start to trickle over to the West? Well, I think almost more interesting than that one, because that presumably sort of zipped straight into the Royal Library is there's a part of a copy in the British Library.

We've got two Joan, and of the same, this is an edition which was published in 1592. There are two Joan in Oxford, two Drone in Cambridge, two Joan in Wuttenberg somewhere, and two in the British Library. And these all appear, this is one book, produced in lots of little separate booklets, you like, but it's a book. It was sold in Amsterdam

in about 1604, I think. And obviously at the time they just thought, gosh, this is an enormous collection of little books from China, not realising it was one book. It's a nice edition. It's quite a good one of the sort that Craig was mentioning, with illustrations, strip cartoon across the top, but quite well

produced. So it starts coming in like that. It comes in from the Dutch East Indies, presumably through the Chinese communities there, sold in Amsterdam on the open market, but of course, nobody at the time could read it. I was about to ask. I mean, how many Chinese, when did Chinese readers discover it,

Chinese readers in the West discover it? It's not really, I think, with the Sangu. Until the end of the 19th century, the first translation is by a man who was in the Imperial Chinese Customs Service, Brewett Taylor, who, in his spare time from being a sort of border guard in distant parts of China, he wrote, he made a translation, which took to Peking, and it was then burnt in the box for uprising, and he had to start all over again, Paul.

man. So it's not until the beginning of the 20th century that you get the first fullish English edition. It's odd, isn't it? These great Chinese novels at a time when Europe is swirling with novels, you would have thought, well, they'd have thought, oh, there's a great cash over there. We must bring them in and examine them. Well, I think,

I mean, I would say, I don't know if you'd agree, but I mean, basically, translations from the Chinese, from the 17th century onwards, tended to be of rather short things. I mean, it may be that people just thought, you know, this is as much as Europeans can take. And, you know, the Three Kingdoms is pretty difficult with these thousand different names. It's not something easy to grasp.

Craig and Craig Lunas, what way, can you tell us how it's been portrayed in the visual arts and how it's had a, not so much, how it's been useful and had an impact in popular culture in China? Yes, well, of course, I've mentioned the illustrations, the printed illustrations to the books, but you also find scenes from the Three Kingdoms or, you know, you also find scenes from the Three Kingdoms on blue and white porcelain from the 14th century. Now, blue and white porcelain was an invention of the 14th century. That period, when the novel was putatively first put together by Lu Guangdong, is also the first period when we have this magnificent porcelain decorated in underglazed blue.

And some of the very first examples that we have have scenes from the Three Kingdoms. And then there seems to have been a burst of interest in portraying these stories at the Imperial Court in the early 15th century. an imperial prince in 1416 paints an imagined portrait of Zhuge Liang and indeed in 1428 the emperor himself, the Xiuanda emperor who was one of China's great cultured emperors, he was a famous painter himself. He again produces a portrait of Zhuge Liang. So this is the image that people are most interested in portraying. And again from the same period, a court painter produces a huge screen panel painting

which shows Guan Yu presiding over the execution of a captured enemy. This is a scene of violence and strained sinews and armor and weapons. But then it falls out of high art. It's fair to say that in elite art of the period after the 15th century, figure subjects are not what's important in the visual arts. So it goes into other art forms. it's very prevalent in porcelain. It's very prevalent in popular woodblock prints of a kind

that ordinary people would have had. And of course, most importantly, it's there in drama. Drama is the way that most people would have encountered the romance of the Three Kingdoms. And so, for example, its popularity is shown by the fact that if you look at a modern listing of peaking opera, from the 426 years of the Han Dynasty, we get 52 stories,

but the romance of the Three Kingdoms period, which is much shorter, there are 155 plays based on this. And it's significant, I think, that the very first movie ever made in China, the first film made in China in 1905, that was a scene from an opera showing a story of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms.

Margaret Hindenbrand, we're told that it's partly, which is a book about strategies, So you've told me, how influential has it been on China's business leaders and military leaders? Well, there's a story which may or may not be apocryphal that senior executives that Sony in Japan are issued with a copy of Three Kingdoms when they're promoted to the upper levels of management, which gives you an idea of how not just in China but right across East Asia, rather like Sunza's art of war, this text has made the crossover into corporate culture. In part, this is because it's a treasure trove of stratagems and bruises and wiles.

And so the kingmakers and the warlords of the Three Kingdoms period become the corporate warriors of today. But also, as I think Craig suggested already, the key theme of the novel, one of its key themes, is how to find, how to deploy, how to retain men of brilliance. And in that sense, it's also been used as a management manual in a less sort of devious way. As far as politics is concerned,

I think the key case and point is Chairman Mao, who devoured the book as a young boy. and reportedly kept it with him at all times on his rise to power and beyond. In fact, the novel offers an early formulation of his guerrilla strategy when one of the minor characters says to Tzal, the opportunistic leader with whom I think Mao clearly identified. He says to him, if you want to win the realm, you must win the affections of the people above all else. And we see Mao internalising that dictum in the way that he devises a peasant-based model of classic Marx. for China's overwhelmingly agrarian society.

But some people have also suggested that we can see the influence of the three kingdoms in Mao's ideas about post-war geopolitics. So the triangulation of power you get in the novel between these three kingdoms may be encouraged Mao to pursue alliance with the USSR against the bulwark of US power. Certainly there's a suggestion that this triangulation of power influenced him in that. way. But in a way, you could argue that any notion of two

weaker powers forming an axis against the stronger power is fairly predictable stuff. What's interesting here is that for Mao, Three Kingdoms offered the Locus Classicus for this strategy. It's the place where he found so many of the stratagems that he used in warfare

and diplomacy. Well, thank you very much, Margaret Hunbrand, Francis Wood and Craig Clunis, and next week we'll be talking about the invention of radio. Thanks for listening. There are many more Radio 4 arts and discussion programs to download for free. Find these on the website at BBC.com.uk slash Radio 4.