Records of the Three Kingdoms

The Records of the Three Kingdoms is a Chinese official history written by Chen Shou in the late 3rd century CE, covering the end of the Han dynasty (c. 184 – 220 CE) and the subsequent Three Kingdoms period (220–280 CE). It is regarded as to be the authoritative source text for these periods. Compiled following the reunification of China under the Jin dynasty (266–420), the work chronicles the political, social, and military events within rival states Cao Wei, Shu Han and Eastern Wu into a single text organized by individual biography.

The Records are the primary source of information for the 14th-century historical novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms, considered to be one of the four classic novels emblematic of written vernacular Chinese.

While large subsections of the work have been selected and translated into English, the entire corpus has yet to receive an unabridged English translation.

The Book of Han and Records of the Three Kingdoms join the original Han-era universal history Records of the Grand Historian to constitute the first three entries in the Twenty-Four Histories canon, with each work cementing the new genre's literary and historiographical qualities as established by Sima Qian. The Records of the Three Kingdoms consist of 65 fascicles divided into three books—one per eponymous kingdom—totaling around 360,000 Chinese characters in length. The Book of Wei, Book of Shu, and Book of Wu receive 30 fascicles, 15 fascicles, and 20 fascicles respectively. Each fascicle is organised in the form of one or more biographies.

The author Chen Shou was born in present-day Nanchong, Sichuan, then in the state of Shu Han. After the Conquest of Shu by Wei in 263, he became an official historian under the government of the Jin dynasty, and created a history of the Three Kingdoms period. After the Conquest of Wu by Jin in 280, his work received the acclaim of senior minister Zhang Hua.

Prior to the Jin dynasty, both the states of Cao Wei and Wu has already composed their own official histories: the Book of Wei by Wang Chen, Xun Yi, and Ruan Ji; and the Book of Wu by Wei Zhao, Hua He, Xue Ying, Zhou Zhao (周昭), and Liang Guang (梁廣). Additionally, Yu Huan had completed his privately compiled history of Wei, the Weilüe. Chen Shou used these texts as the foundation of the Records of the Three Kingdoms. However, since the state of Shu lacked an official history bureau, the Book of Shu in the Records was composed by Chen Shou himself based on his earlier personal notes about events in Shu and other primary sources he collected, such as his previously compiled writings of Zhuge Liang.

The Records of the Three Kingdoms used the year 220 CE—when the last emperor of the Han dynasty was forced to abdicate to Cao Pi—as the year in which the Wei dynasty was established. The Records refer to the rulers of Wei as 'Emperors' and those of Shu and Wu as 'Lords' or by their personal names.

Due to the biographical rather than primarily annalistic arrangement of the work, assigning dates to the historical content is both imprecise and non-trivial. Certain fascicles contain background information about their subjects' forebears which date back centuries before the main record. For example, the biography of Liu Yan begins with discussing his ancestor Liu Yu's enfeoffment at Jingling (present-day Tianmen, Hubei) in around 85 CE. The first event to receive detailed description throughout the work is the Yellow Turban Rebellion in 184. Many biographies make passing mention of the event, but more concrete information such as correspondence and troop movements during the uprising can be found in fragmentary form in at least four fascicles: the biographies of Cheng Yu, Yu Jin, Liu Bei, and Sun Jian.