Topic summary
Records of the Three Kingdoms
The Records of the Three Kingdoms is a Chinese official history compiled by Chen Shou in the late 3rd century. It covers the end of the Han dynasty and the histories of Cao Wei, Shu Han, and Eastern Wu through the reunification of China under the Western Jin. The work has 65 volumes divided into the Book of Wei, Book of Shu, and Book of Wu, and is organized mainly as biographies.
Chen Shou drew on earlier official histories of Wei and Wu and collected surviving materials for Shu, which had no comparable official history. In the 5th century, Pei Songzhi added extensive annotations that preserved alternative accounts, quoted lost works, and commented on discrepancies in the text. The Records and Pei's annotations are major sources for the political and military history of the late Han and Three Kingdoms periods.
The work also supplied much of the historical framework for the 14th-century novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Large portions have been translated into English, but no complete unabridged English translation has been published.