The heroes, noble-hearted Xuande and his two oath-brothers, find themselves entangled in a deadly web of fear and ambition as every provincial governor has to fend for himself. The first part of the story details the splintering of power, as a puppet child emperor is installed and the empire’s central control crumbles.

The three heroes swear an oath of brotherhood in the peach garden (Chapter 1) Part 1 I’ve divided my chapter summaries into four parts, because, well, there’s a lot of chapters. It was substantially edited by Mao Lun and Mao Zonggang in the 1660s, and this became the standard version (I read it in translation by Moss Roberts).

The novel charts the bloody collapse of China’s Han Empire the emergence of three successor kingdoms and the ultimate fate of those kingdoms as their rulers battle each other to reunify all of China. It is attributed to a mysterious fourteenth-century writer called Luo Guanzhong. Three Kingdoms is a historical novel set between AD 184 and AD 264, and based on real people and real events. Three Kingdoms Part Four: Chapters 91-120 Three Kingdoms Part Three: Chapters 66-90 So I’ve written brief summaries of each of its 120 chapters, for people who want to follow the plot but who don’t have time to read more than 2000 pages and keep track of hundreds of characters. It’s also very, very long and complicated. See Also: Sun Tzu and The Art of Warįor Chinese culture, Three Kingdoms is a bit like Homer and Shakespeare rolled into one. It is an epic tale of war and heroes, loyalty, betrayal and cunning plans of beleagured morality versus cruel political reality and of what men are capable of doing in the pursuit of power. The Romance of the Three Kingdoms is one of China’s greatest and most influential works of literature.

Rise of three kingdoms