Where has November gone? It was supposed to be the the month of Sleeping Dragon. I planned to write upon his battles, his ruses and his inventions, but the month has gone and I have little to show for it apart from a few nice cooked dishes.
About 15 years ago I decided my reading was too Western. I tried unsuccessfully to get into a few translations of foreign books in the library. On a business trip, I found "The Three Kingdom" in a book store and was immediately transfixed. It reads much like Homer's Iliad, with the politics and connivings of supernatural forces, kings and generals, and frequent battles with lists of the nobles on each side who died, but set in third century AD China.
You know you have a great book when you have a great opening sentence:
The world under heaven, after a long period of division, tends to unite; after a long period of union, tends to divide. This has been so since antiquity.
The action starts with the dissolution of the Han dynasty into warring generals. The hero, Liu Bei was a reasonable leader, but not much of a general, so his aides suggested he visit a certain village to recruit a skilled scholar. He arrives to find the scholar not present, but off doing something menial, and has to return several times before he can meet. The scholar, Zhuge Liang, takes much convincing to get involved in the civil war, hence the title "Sleeping Dragon" or "Wolong".
Zhuge Liang takes over the much diminshed armies of faction and immediately transforms them through training and new tactics. He also moves the faction's capital into a more economically and militarily sensible location. When the faction re-emerges, it wins spectacular successes under Liang.
At the end of the second book, there is a villian, Cao Cao, and hero Liu Bei, and a bunch of also rans, so I dove into the third book, only to find that shortly in, almost every character I knew died.
Before dying, Liu offers the throne to Zhuge Liang, but he refuses and instead supports the successor. Ultimately, Liang too dies from illness. His successor carries on for a while, but there is only one Zhuge Liang, and ultimately the faction is subsumed into the Jin Dynasty.
So by the end of the novel, the winners are characters you have no particular attachment too, the villians and heros are long gone and not mentioned much, and the book peters to a close.
I suppose the point is the immortality of greatness, nobility and mostly renown. To this day Zhuge Liang is a synonym for cunning and good strategy in Chinese culture, as is his goose feather fan.
Zhuge Liang is remembered for several miliary inventions: the land mine, a repeating crossbow and a messaging hot air balloon, as well as a steamed bun and a maze with supernatural powers.
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