Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-v9fdk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-13T01:56:28.422Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

History repackaged in the age of print: the Sanguozhi and Sanguo yanyi

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 June 2006

ANNE E. MCLAREN
Affiliation:
University of Melbourne

Abstract

For over a millennium, the issue of the Shu-Han succession during the Three Kingdoms era (220–265 CE) has served as a proxy for debates about the relative merits of territorial control, blood relationship, and moral qualifications as grounds for imperial legitimacy in China. Debate reached a new height after the fall of north China during the twelfth century, a period when a revitalization of Confucian studies led to a greater interest in the publishing of private histories. This article deals with two little-known revisions of the official history of the Three Kingdoms period, the Sanguozhi, that sought to reflect the legitimacy debate at a time of alien conquest. It is argued that revisionist historians deviated from the norms of traditional historiography by devising new narrative strategies to further their political agenda. These innovations in turn influenced the formation of a new genre of historical fiction.

Type
Articles
Copyright
© School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 2006

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

I wish to thank the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for funding this research project. This article was first presented as a paper at the Annual Meeting of the Association of Asian Studies, Chicago, March 31 2005 for a panel ‘History and historical fiction: new studies of Sanguo Yanyi, and Shuihu Zhuan’. I would like to thank Paul Jakov Smith of Haverford College, who chaired and organized the panel, fellow panellist Liangyan Ge, University of Notre Dame, and the discussant, Patricia A. Sieber of Ohio State University, for their stimulating contributions, which have guided me in my revisions.