To die, his host afield, the victory heralds yet to come—
Weep, O heroes! Drench your fronts, now and evermore!
proved prophetic and gave heart in future times to Chinese who had been driven south by northern invaders. Historically, the victory heralds never arrived, but Du Fu imagines Kongming dying confident of victory. Thus the poem immortalizes the moment when his spirit of determination to recover the heartland, restore the Han, and reunify the empire ran high.
Luo Guanzhong placed this poem in the 1522 edition (it is in chapter 105 of the Mao edition) to mark Kongming's interment and honor his memory. Du Fu wrote a number of other poems celebrating Liu Xuande and Kongming; a few are added in the Mao edition. Long before the novel in any form, these poems had contributed much to the development of Liu Xuande, Kongming, and others as defenders of an imperiled royal house; in later dynasties they were to become nationalistic symbols in the collective imagination of the Chinese. However, Du Fu did not portray Cao Cao as a villain; and the Tang did not fall. Indeed, about 764 Du Fu composed a poem, "Danqing yin," honoring the painter General Cao Ba and praising him for reflecting the greatness of his ancestor Cao Cao.
The development of Liu Xuande and Cao Cao as symbolic figures entered a new stage in the Song dynasty (a. d. 960-1279). The Song suffered a trauma more severe than the An Lushan rebellion, and comparable to the fall of the Han and rout of the Jin in a. d. 317. In a. d. 1115 the Jurchen nation, northern rival of the Song, established a dynasty called Jin ( "Golden," hereafter spelled Gin to distinguish it from the Jin that followed the Wei). In a. d. 1127 Jurchen armies seized the capital, Kaifeng, and captured the emperor (Hui Zong) and his son, thus extinguishing the imperial line. Another son of Hui Zong fled to southern China, covered with the dust of exile. There, under the guidance of Zong Ze and other advisers, he reestablished a southern Song capital. The new emperor, Gao Zong, proclaimed the new dynasty as the Jurchen were assuming control of the northern heartland. The year 1127 divides the Northern Song from the Southern Song, two periods of markedly different attitudes toward late Han-Three Kingdoms history.
During the Northern Song, between the years 1066 and 1084, the historian Sima Guang produced a continuous history of China covering 1, 362 years (403 b. c. to a. d. 959). He called his work the Zizhi tongjian (ZZTJ), or General History for the Aid of Government. Its rich and accessibly organized data as well as its accuracy and cogent style made the ZZTJ quite readable, and it quickly became a classic. Its narrative is basically chronological in structure but with an occasional shift backward in time to reveal the origin of a particular development. The ZZTJ's sections on the late Han-Three Kingdoms period, while based mainly on the SGZ and the Hou Han shu (HHS), may be considered ancestor to the format of the novel, just as the SGZ may be considered ancestor to its source material.23
Sima Guang's view of dynastic legitimacy, like Chen Shou's, is "northern, '' not" southern, "acknowledging the Wei—a view other Northern Song historians such as Su Dongpo and Ouyang Xiu share. To construct an orthodox line of dynasties, Sima Guang adopts two standards: territorial control and lineal descent. The six major dynasties— Zhou, Qin, Han, jin, Sui, and Tang—are credited with unifying the realm and establishing their lines. Thus, they form the main tradition; that is, they enjoyed unchallenged rule. Conversely, Sima Guang holds that those who were unable to bring the" nine provinces [i. e., the empire] under a single rule were Son of Heaven in name only, not in reality. "Sima Guang fills out the spaces between these six major dynasties with another list, a list of dynasties that held less than the whole empire but dominated their time, starting with the Wei and ending with the Later Zhou (the nine-year dynasty— a. d. 951-60—immediately preceding the Song).
Explaining his method, Sima Guang writes: "The purpose is not to honor one and denigrate another, or to distinguish legitimate [zheng] from transitional [run], but in times of division in the empire we have to have reign titles covering the years, months, and days in order to chronicle the sequence of events." Thus, Sima Guang uses the reign titles of certain emperors and not of others merely to standardize the chronology of a transdynastic account and not to suggest a moral judgment; no "Spring and Autumn" inferences should be drawn from what he includes or leaves out. Sima Guang explicitly excludes the claims to legitimacy of Liu Bei: "As for the relation between the Zhao Lie Emperor [Bei's temple title] and [Shu-]Han, despite his alleged descent from Prince Jing of Zhongshan, his clan affiliation is quite remote.... Indeed, it would be unthinkable to make him the heir to Han rule as if he were on a par with the founder of the Later Han or the Eastern Jin."24
This Northern Song consensus changed dramatically after Jurchen armies drove the dynasty south and forced it into a defensive position similar to that of Shu-Han nine hundred years earlier. Southern Song poets, philosophers, and statesmen drew on the Eastern Jin and mid-Tang traditions of championing the cause of Shu-Han. (The opportunistic Southland was never so appealing a model as the militant Riverlands. ) The renowned general Zong Ze, a key figure in establishing the Southern Song, pleaded with the new emperor not to abandon the fight to recover the lost northern capital. Zong Ze's appeals were met with hostility and indifference at court, and according to his Song shi biography he expressed his despair with the closing lines of Du Fu's "Shu xiang" cited above:
To die, his host afield, the victory heralds yet to come—
Weep, O heroes! Drench your fronts, now and evermore!
The famed poet Lu You, who grew to manhood in the first generation of the Southern Song, began his "Jiannan" (South of Saber Gateway) with the oft-quoted couplet:
Our kingdom's mandate—restore the Han [i. e., Song];
Heaven's will—smite Cao Cao [i. e., the Jurchens].
Lu You's contemporary General Yue Fei had been an active opponent of the evacuation to the south. After the move, Yue Fei distinguished himself on the field by retaking a number of key cities from the Gin conquerors and added his voice to Zong Ze's in demanding a counterattack to regain the heartland. (In a. d. 1142 Yue Fei was accused of treason and murdered. ) Like Zong Ze, Yue Fei invoked Three Kingdoms heroes to symbolize his ambition to clear the homeland of invaders. He is quoted as saying, "Why begrudge one's life? I want future generations to know my name from written history; I want to be glorified like Lord Guan and Zhang Fei."25
Other Southern Song writers, struggling against the weak-willed court, enlisted Shu-Han heroes to represent their cause. In a. d. 1165 the poet Wang Shipeng visited the restored temples of Liu Xuande and Kongming. On his visit to the former, he wrote:
In the final phase of the Later Han, bandits fastened their covetous eyes on the sacred instruments of imperial rule, and the empire was divided into three as if it were a tripod shared by three men. But Liu Xuande was emperor still. He had the stature of the Supreme Ancestor, the marks and signs of Guang Wu [i. e., the founders of the Former and Later Han, respectively], and he had vassals fit to serve a true and virtuous king. But he lacked the northern heartland.... Had I the wine in my hand, I would make no offering to the Cao-Wei dynasty.
On his visit to Kongming's temple he wrote:
From the surviving fragments of the shrine one can glimpse Kongming's grand manner. Alongside him stand Guan and Zhang—one dragon, two tigers. Oh, where shall we find such men today to rid us of humiliation at the hands of outsiders?
Through the writings of Lu You and Wang Shipeng, Liu Xuande, Kongming, Lord Guan, and Zhang Fei were becoming popular symbols of Han nationalism, and Cao Cao was being treated as something more than a villainous vassal; he was being turned into a symbol of the foreign conqueror. At the same time, there is evidence that in the opposing Gin court the Shu-Han kingdom was associated with the fallen house of Song. Yang Weizhen's Song Liao jin zhengtong bian (Debates on legitimacy: Song, Liao, and Gin) refers to a discussion before the Gin emperor in 1202; in the discussion the last Northern Song emperor was called "a homeless, wandering soul like Zhao Lie [i. e., Xuande] in Shu." Moreo
ver, some Gin rulers paid annual homage at Cao Cao's burial site.26
The most important Southern Song champion of Liu Xuande's cause was the molder of neo-Confucian philosophy, Zhu Xi, another member of the generation of Lu You. In 1172 Zhu Xi completed an unusual project, one that directly influenced Three Kingdoms. He recast the ZZTJ in a slightly altered form, placing Sima Guang's text under a series of interpretive headlines which imposed a judgment on the events recounted. The ZZTJ was too important to ignore, and so Zhu Xi remade it for his own didactic purposes. He called the work Zizhi tongjian gangmu, or General History to Aid Government with a Network of Headings, adding the word gangmu to Sima Guang's title much as Luo Guanzhong added the word yanyi to the title of the Sanguozhi. Luo Guanzhong must have read both the ZZTJ and the Gangmu and must have used the sections on the Han and the Three Kingdoms in organizing his novel.
Zhu Xi treated Liu Xuande as the legitimate successor to Han; he rejected Sima Guang's technical acceptance of Wei as Han's heir. Zhu Xi changed the calendrical entries in his Gangmu to accord with those of Shu-Han and devised headings whose wording implied a pro-Liu Xuande, anti-Cao Cao judgment. Here is how Zhu Xi presents the crucial year a. d. 220, when Cao Pi proclaimed the new Wei dynasty. First he changes the initial year of Cao Pi's reign from the first year of Huang Chu back to the twenty-fifth year of Jian An, the reign title of the deposed Emperor Xian. Then in the heading for the tenth month, he writes, "The Wei king, Cao Pi, proclaims himself imperial majesty, deposes the [Han] emperor, and makes him [i. e., demotes him to] lord of Shanyang." The second year of the Wei, Zhu Xi names the first year of Liu Xuande's reign: "The imperial majesty of Han, Zhao Lie [i. e., Liu Bei]; Zhang Wu [Manifest Might], year 1.... In summer, the fourth month, the king of Hanzhong [i. e., Liu Bei] ascended the throne of the imperial majesty."27 In this way Zhu Xi places himself in the tradition of the Han Jin chunqiu, treating the kingdom of Shu-Han as an extension of Han and denying the legitimacy of Wei.
Militant as a youth about reconquering the heartland, by the late 1160's Zhu Xi was becoming more inclined toward a policy of compromise and coexistence.28 Zhu Xi's purpose in advocating the cause of Shu-Han was not to instigate military action by the south but rather to establish a tradition of dynastic sequence in which his own ruling house would take its rightful place. The Southern Song, much like the Eastern Jin, had to assert its "Chinese" (or Han) identity at a time when non-Han powers held the traditional dynastic base, the zhongyuan, and could not be dislodged. Zhu Xi did not accept Sima Guang's criterion for legitimacy, control of a unified territory. He turned instead to other criteria, such as cultural continuity with the Zhou thinkers Confucius, Zisi, and Mencius, and the moral integrity of the ideal ruler and vassal, for defining legitimacy.
In fact, Zhu Xi was not a wholehearted advocate of the Shu-Han cause precisely because of its territorial ambition. His great admiration for Kongming is tempered by criticism of Kongming's capture of the Riverlands. He wrote, "Kongming... assisted a true king, but he was not completely identified with the Way.... A true king... would not commit an act of unrighteousness even if he could acquire an empire by doing so [citing Mencius, 2A. 2. 24]. Kongming was determined to achieve success and to capture Liu Zhang. A sage would rather not succeed [in such an undertaking]. Kongming should not have done it."29 Because he did not favor aggressive military action to regain the north, Zhu Xi often looked to Mencius as an authority for placing virtue above power. Perhaps Zhu Xi saw the cultural tradition as a compensation for the unrecoverable heartland. Mencius, in the passage cited above, had said that men of virtue ruling even a tiny territory of one hundred li could win the homage of the lords of the realm.
In the novel, the relationship between territorial control and legitimacy is as important as the relationship between lineage and legitimacy or virtue and legitimacy. How to judge Liu Xuande's acquisitions of territory, especially Xuzhou, Jingzhou, and the Riverlands, is one of the novel's central questions. A related question is how to judge Xuande's conduct when he has no territory and after he has acquired territory (and a measure of feudal power).
The ZZTJ furnished Luo Guanzhong with a comprehensive chronological account of the century he wanted to cover. Perhaps one way to look at the word yanyi in the novel's title is to derive the yan (continuous development) from the ZZTJ and the yi (moral significance, message) from Zhu Xi's Gangmu.
In summarizing the various Three Kingdoms legitimacy debates the descriptive notice (tiyao) of the Siku quanshu, the great bibliographical encyclopedia of the Qing period, takes a matter-of-fact attitude that is a refreshing reminder of the ability of traditional Chinese scholars to see through the categories and artifices of dynastic propaganda:
From the viewpoint of the author's circumstances, it was only an instance of natural obedience for Xi Zuochi to acknowledge the imperial authority of Shu-Han. For Chen Shou such a position would have led to troublesome confrontations, but when Xi Zuochi wrote, the Jin house had already moved south and its circumstances rather resembled those of Shu. So Xi catered to the consensus of the day by claiming legitimacy for a dynasty that was territorially limited and not in control of the heartland. Chen Shou, by contrast, was in the service of Emperor Wu of the Jin; since Jin had succeeded Wei, to deny the legitimacy of Wei would have been to deny the legitimacy of Jin. How could [his history] have circulated [if he had denied Wei's legitimacy]? It was little different [for a historian then] than [for a historian] at the time of Tai Zu [the first Northern Song emperor], whose usurpation [of the Later Zhou] was much like the usurpation by Wei, while the Northern Han and Southern Tang courts bore resemblance to the court of Shu-Han.30
Consequently, Northern Song Confucians avoided denying the legitimacy of Wei. Once the Song was driven south and confined below the Great River, however, and its own situation became more like that of Shu-Han, with Gin ruling the heartland as the Wei had once done, the Confucians of the Southern Song, one after the other, stepped forward to proclaim the legitimacy of Shu. All these positions need to be evaluated according to the age and not measured by a single inflexible standard.31
Zhu Xi's contemporary and rival, the Southern Song philosopher and statesman Chen Liang (1143-94), advocated a militant anti-Jurchen policy, and this must have influenced his view of Zhuge Liang. Chen Liang's contribution to the evolving persona of Zhuge Liang is an important link between the historical and the fictional hero. In a paper on Zhuge Liang, "From Regional Hero to National Hero," presented at a panel of the 1991 convention of the Association for Asian Studies, Hoyt Cleveland Tillman cites Chen Liang's "Zhuge lun," an essay that emphasizes Zhuge Liang's political and moral virtues as well as his skill in warfare. Chen Liang contrasts Zhuge Liang to Sima Yi (rather than to Cao Cao, presumably because Chen Liang, unlike Zhu Xi, had little sympathy for Han legitimacy, and thus no animus toward Cao Cao): Sima Yi was treacherous, Kongming loyal; Sima Yi was selfish, Kongming public-spirited; Sima Yi was cruel, Kongming humane. Chen Liang then proceeds to praise Kongming as a military tactician. Tillman translates:
Kongming's eightfold formation... would not advance too quickly nor retreat too hurriedly. Shock brigades were unable to break through its front, and armies that seemed to come from nowhere would not be able to go round to strike its rear. An army in ambush could not isolate its wings, and pursuing troops could not surprise its rear. Spies would have no way to reconnoiter, and cunning tricks would have no facility [against this formation].
As Tillman observes, Chen Liang's claim that Kongming was good at schemes and surprises "is quite noteworthy given later portrayals in popular literature."
STORYTELLING AND FICTION IN THE YUAN
Some fifteen years after the death of Zhu Xi in 1200, Chinggis Khan began a series of conquests in Central Asia and China. In 1234 the Mongols accepted the capitulation of the Jurchen's Gin dynasty and occupied all of northern China. In 1260 Khubilai Khan proclaimed Zhong Tong (i. e., Zhongyuan zhengTong, or "Unified/Legitimate Rule from the Heartland" ) the first rei
gn title of the Yuan, as the Mongols called their dynasty in China. Khubilai went on to prosecute a five-year campaign (1268-72) against the principal forward positions of the Southern Song, Xiangyang and Fancheng.32 After the victory of 1272 the Mongols eliminated all Southern Song resistance, and in 1279 Khu-bilai Khan became emperor of a China reunified for the first time since 1127. Never before had all China been brought under non-Han rule. During the Yuan, Han resisters mainly demanded the restoration of the Song dynasty, but they had no substantial base.
Under the Yuan the legends of the Three Kingdoms developed and assumed new form. Popular fiction, dramatic recitation, and plays in particular molded and remolded the heroes into types quite removed from earlier traditions. These plays and narratives created a new, extremely fictionalized tradition—three parts fact, seven parts fiction, one might say. The two main genres—both popular—were storytelling and drama. Many scholars have said that these genres furnished Luo Guanzhong with the popular spirit he infused into his novel and that without this imaginative component the historical academic tradition could never have provided sufficient inspiration for the novelist. We will consider the two genres—story and drama—separately, beginning with the Sanguozhi pinghua,33 Some traditional Chinese historians have treated the Cao-Wei dynasty as legitimate and the Shu-Han dynasty as a rebellious entity. Some have described the achievements of Cao Cao objectively. There are even plays that treat Cao Cao sympathetically. But no significant popular literary tradition makes Cao Cao the hero and Liu Bei the villain. The popular tradition makes Cao Cao the villain and Liu Bei the hero. The novel culminates this tradition, and the primary fictions of the novel stem from the pro-Liu, anti-Cao view: making the peach garden sacrifice and the brotherhood oath the starting point; giving the brothers a dominant role in the story; and emphasizing Shu over Wu as Wei's antagonist.
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