Tseng Shih-hao

Abstract

San-guo-zhi Hou-zhuan is the sequel to Romance of the Three Kingdom. After the Jin Dynasty unified the three kingdoms, Liu Yuan rebuilt the country in northern China because people missed Shu Han, and led the descendants of Guan Yu, Zhang Fei, Zhao Yun, and others to attack Luoyang and Changan. The novelist wrote the plots in which the Han army captured Emperor Huai and Min to get revenge to satisfy the unbalanced psychology of the readers. While the author sympathized with Shu Han, he originally supported that Han Dynasty represented the positive side and the Jin Dynasty represented the negative side and the morality was gradually shaken by the performance of figures in different camps because of thousands of rebellions. Not only did the novelist concealed the atrocities of Liu Yuan, Liu Cong, and Liu Can, he also described the process of which Liu Yao, Shi Le, and Cao Ni went from friendship to break up in detail and led to the division of Han Zhao making the novel ironic. Furthermore, while Liu Kun, Zu Ti, Tao Kan, and others worked hard to dedicate their loyalty to the Sima family, the Liu family changed the name of nation from ‘Han’ to ‘Zhao’. People turned into their identifications with the Jin Dynasty from Han Dynasty, while Han no longer exists. The fall of Han Zhao lost the moral commanding heights of ‘orthodox’ in the chaos and realized the historical evolution of the so-called ‘Jin inherited the orthodox of Han’ in Han-jin Chun-qiu in a roundabout way.

Keywords: San-guo-zhi Hou-zhuan, Han Zhao, Jin Dynasty, loyalism, orthodox