A Source Study Of Materials For Three Kingdoms

"Three Kingdoms" was written by Luo Guanzhong, the author lived in the period of the end of Yuan Dynasty and beginning of Ming Dynasty, based on numerous enduring legends and relevant folk works. It is a historic novel created according to both history and novels with the words and languages employed been verified and readers’taste catered to. It is also the first long chapter novel and an outstanding work in the writing of historic works.It is the chronicle accumulation of materials that paved the groundwork of this novel, which means that it is time consuming to finish this work. The main materials employed in "Three Kingdoms" includes "The History of Three Kingdoms" written by Chen Shou and its annotations made Pei Songzhi as well as other relevant history works and folk stories. It is fair to say that the time span of these materials is over one thousand years.The aim of this paper is to discuss the sources of these materials employed and writing features in "Three Kingdoms" by the observation of this work from a new perspective. This paper adopts the methodology of comparison on the influence to the writing of "Three Kingdoms" exerted by historical materials and the materials from folk stories by a close observation of this outstanding work with the purpose of sorting out the sources of these materials employed.Based on the historical materials and folk stories to "Three Kingdoms", this paper explored their influence to the advent of this historic work. This paper holds that the source of these materials can fall into two categories on the whole:direct and indirect materials. As for the first category, "Lao Zi", "The Art of War" and others have all exerted certain influence to the creation of this work. "The History of Three Kingdoms", "Hou Han Shu", "The Comments to The History of Three Kingdoms", as the second category of material, play a role in the creation of this work. Direct materials can be further categorized as historical materials and folk materials. Historical materials include "The History of Three Kingdoms", "Hou Han Shu", etc. while folk materials include "The Comments to The History of Three Kingdoms"A special mention should be made here. "Three Kingdoms" originated from a large amount of stories, including various unofficial, as well as miscellaneous histories underlying the novel. During the period of my learning for the master’s degree, I had no access to all of the stories due to the limited resources available to me. Therefore, I selected the major ones for the purpose of analysis.