The Three Kingdoms (220–280 CE) was the era after the collapse of China's Han dynasty, when the empire split into three rival states: Wei in the north, Shu Han in the west, and Wu in the south. Decades of civil war ended only when the Western Jin dynasty reunified the country in 280. Chronicled by the historian Chen Shou and later immortalized in a famous novel, it is among the most storied periods in Chinese history.
Chen Shou had served the kingdom of Shu before it fell, and then served the dynasty that conquered it. When he sat down to chronicle the age of division he had lived through, he gathered it into a single history in three books, one each for Wei, Shu, and Wu — yet he granted the dignity of imperial annals to Wei alone, quietly casting the northern court as the rightful heir of China and the rulers of Shu and Wu as mere lords. That verdict flattered the dynasty he now worked for, which drew its own claim from Wei, and it did not go unchallenged: centuries later scholars would crown Shu the true heir instead. His Records fixed the facts. Eleven centuries after him a novelist would turn those facts into the most beloved story in the Chinese-speaking world, and bury much of the history beneath it.