Luo Guanzhong

Luo Guanzhong compiled Romance of the Three Kingdoms, which has shaped how China remembers its own history more than any work of history has. Little is reliably known about him: a native of Taiyuan, active in the late Yuan and early Ming, possibly a member of one of the rebel courts that fought over the collapse of Mongol rule, which would explain a lifelong interest in legitimacy and civil war. The novel takes the historical records of the period after the Han fell in 220 - itself a real and catastrophic collapse in which the registered population dropped by tens of millions - and turns them into a narrative of loyalty, strategy and betrayal running to eight hundred thousand characters. Its opening line, that the empire long divided must unite and long united must divide, is among the most quoted sentences in the language. Its figures became archetypes rather than people: Zhuge Liang as the strategist, Guan Yu as loyalty itself, worshipped in temples as a god and adopted by police forces and criminal societies alike, and Cao Cao as the capable villain. Chinese generals studied it as a manual, the Manchus had it translated before they took Beijing, and it is the source of a stock of allusions - the empty fort, the straw boats borrowing arrows - that ordinary speech still uses. He is also credited, on weaker evidence, with a hand in Water Margin. How much of the novel he wrote and how much he assembled from centuries of storytellers' material is unresolved and probably unresolvable. The version everyone reads was edited again in the 1660s by Mao Lun and his son, who sharpened the moral scheme considerably. He is said to have died around 1400. Guan Yu's cult is the clearest measure of the book's reach: a middling historical general became a god of war and of oaths, with temples across east Asia and an altar in police stations and triad lodges alike.

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