三Sān国Guó演Yǎn义Yì · Romance of the Three Kingdoms

Sanguo Yanyi (Romance of the Three Kingdoms) is a 120-chapter historical novel traditionally attributed to Luo Guanzhong (c. 1400 CE) that dramatizes the wars between the states of Wei, Shu, and Wu after the fall of the Han dynasty in 220 CE. It is one of the Four Great Classical Novels, and its characters — Liu Bei, Cao Cao, Zhuge Liang, Guan Yu — are still reference points in modern Chinese political and business talk; dozens of everyday chengyu are coined or popularized here (说曹操曹操到, 万事俱备只欠东风, 三个臭皮匠顶个诸葛亮). The novel blends history with romance: it is loosely based on Chen Shou's third-century Sanguo Zhi, but it tilted the record toward Shu as the legitimate succession and fixed Cao Cao as the villain for the next six hundred years of popular memory. Translation seeded from C.H. Brewitt-Taylor (1925, public domain); the verse inserts Brewitt-Taylor omitted are filled with GLM-translated renderings, each labeled `source: "llm"`, and the line's byline names the generator and license (e.g. "GLM · 2026 · machine-generated"). See content/SOURCES.md for the named exception to the no-machine-translation rule.