In the Library
Romance of the Three Kingdoms
Luo Guanzhong, 1400
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Demanding
- Reading time
- Reading time 41 hours
- Translated by
- Translated by C. H. Brewitt-Taylor (1925)
- Chapters
- Chapters 120
- Length
- Length 563k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
Empires wax and wane; states cleave asunder and coalesce.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
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The Iliad
Homer
The Iliad does the same thing, but compresses the same warlords and honor code into ten years outside one city's walls, an ancient epic this novel unknowingly echoes.
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About the book
Three men swear an oath of brotherhood in a peach garden as the Han dynasty falls, and the empire begins three centuries of war from which the Chinese imagination has never fully returned. Luo Guanzhong compiled this vast historical novel in the late fourteenth century, drawing on a millennium of chronicles, theatrical scripts, and storytellers' cycles about the warring kingdoms of Wei, Shu, and Wu. Cao Cao the cunning warlord, Liu Bei the righteous claimant, Zhuge Liang the strategist who reads the winds: each carries a stake in a question the novel never answers, which is whether heaven cares who wins. The empire long united must divide, the empire long divided must unite, and the dust of those campaigns blows through every Chinese imagination since.