Also, getting a clear understanding of the origin of the versions can help the modern scholars to make use of the good editions to make a research on the texts of the book “History of the Three Kingdoms”, and ultimately the classification level and the utilization value of the well-known historical works can attain an improvement continuously. In the mean time, the textual research on the origins of the versions of the “History of the Three Kingdoms” before the Ming Dynasty and especially the versions during the period of Song and Yuan dynasties can help the modern scholars to research the origin and evolution relationships of all ancient versions in the handing-down process from the emergence of the “History of the Three Kingdoms” to now. However, the researches on the origins of the different versions of the book “History of the Three Kingdoms” have not generated a consistent system yet.
Therefore, this book has a very high historical science research value. The author was very cautious to select the materials for the book “History of the Three Kingdoms”, and used the very simple and concise style of writing. These three historical books and the book “History of the Later Han Dynasty” which was written lately are called by people as the “First Four Historical Records”. This period was the subject of several research papers I wrote back in undergrad a long time ago.The book “History of the Three Kingdoms” which was written by Chen Shou during the period of the Western Jin Dynasty is another very famous historical biographies record after the books “Records of the Grand Historian” and “History of the Han Dynasty”. It’s also the source of a lot of Chinese hero stories and legends and is often considered to be analogous to the legendary Arthurian period in the British Isles. When things went tits up in during the Three Kingdoms Era Buddhists were able to infiltrate courts and government offices, taking over some of the important roles Confucian scholars had occupied, because they were decently well educated and could take care of official business and record keeping. Until that point Buddhism had been lurking in the backwaters of Chinese society after entering the region about 200 years earlier, and had been interacting with the Taoists, with a bit of cross fertilization taking place. This utter breakdown of Chinese society on a wide range of levels led to a rapid rise of Buddhism during the Three Kingdoms Era as the Buddhist philosophy provided people with a way of coping with the mess in a way that the Confucian philosophy failed to do, and their philosophy was just similar enough to some of the Taoist teachings that the Buddhists didn’t come across as completely alien. The Three Kingdoms era that followed the collapse of the Han Dynasty was a massive shock to the entire structure of Chinese society with enormous numbers of people dying, families shattered and scattered, near constant warfare, and a severe breakdown of the stabilizing Confucian system that kept order and provided educated people to run the courts, keep records, etc.
It was brought about by the collapse of the Han Dynasty instigated by a whole mess of factors court eunuchs gaining too much power, rebellions, religions uprisings, murders in the royal family, etc. It’s a pretty interesting period of history in China.
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