Three kingdoms

[classic novel in four volumes]

2340 pages

English language

Published March 14, 2001 by Foreign Languages Press.

ISBN:
978-7-119-00590-4
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OCLC Number:
49389330

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3 stars (5 reviews)

Complete and unabridged, Moss Roberts's translation provides an authoritative, annotated English-language version of one of the Four Great Classical Novels of Chinese literature.

"The empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide. Thus it has ever been." With this characterization of the inevitable cycle of Chinese history, the monumental tale Three Kingdoms begins. As important for Chinese culture as the Homeric epics have been for the West, this Ming Dynasty masterpiece continues to be read and loved throughout China as well as in Japan, Korea, and Vietnam. The novel offers a startling and unsparing view of how power is wielded, how diplomacy is conducted, and how wars are planned and fought; it has influenced the ways that Chinese think about power, diplomacy, and war even to this day.

Three Kingdoms portrays a fateful moment at the end of the Han Dynasty (206 B.C.-A.D. 220) when the future of the …

46 editions

reviewed Three kingdoms by Luo Guanzhong (Chinese classics)

Review of 'Three kingdoms' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

Reading Three Kingdoms is a capital-P Project. 120 chapters chronicling close to a 100 years of Chinese history, the fall of the Han dynasty, the emergence of the Shu, Wei and Wu states and their eventual unification by the Jin dynasty. A kingdom long united must divide, long divided must unite. I read this titanic book over 10 months, 12 chapters at a time, and it proved to be a fantastic way to do so: I got enough content every month to think about, never got bored and never forgot what was going on when I hopped back in.

And I really enjoyed my time with it; like Moss Roberts, the translator of this excellent unabridged version, says in his closing essay, this book can be considered a historical text, a novel, a drama - it has it all. A cavalcade of major and minor characters, most of them memorable, …

reviewed Three kingdoms by Luo Guanzhong (Chinese classics)

Review of 'Three kingdoms' on 'Goodreads'

3 stars

Written in the 14th or 15th century (the exact date is a matter of debate), this historical novel can be a difficult read at times, but I'm glad I took the effort to finish it.

Anyone reading this for the first time may want to start with the afterword in volume IV, and read it up to the point where the author suggests you start reading the novel itself. It will give you a better idea of what the focus of the novel is. This is important because the focus doesn't really emerge until the second volume, and I was somewhat lost throughout the first volume as a result.

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Subjects

  • China -- History -- Three kingdoms, 220-265 -- Fiction