Romance of the Three Kingdoms (Sanguo yanyi) is a Chinese historical novel, traditionally attributed to Luo Guanzhong in the 14th century, that retells the fall of the Han dynasty and the long war among the states of Wei, Shu Han and Wu. It is counted among the Four Great Classical Novels of Chinese literature. Built from Chen Shou's third-century Records and centuries of oral storytelling and opera, it survives today mainly in a 120-chapter version edited by Mao Lun and his son Mao Zonggang c. 1679.
Three strangers meet at the end of the Han, discover a shared disgust at the ruin of the empire, and swear in a blossoming peach garden to be brothers until death. Liu Bei, Guan Yu and Zhang Fei keep that oath across decades of war, and in the end it kills two of them. No such ceremony ever took place. The third-century record notes only that the three men were as close as brothers; the garden, the sacrificed ox, the vow to die on the same day are a novelist's invention. And for six hundred years afterward, rebels, soldiers and secret societies across the Chinese world swore themselves to one another in exactly those words.