Three Kingdoms (First Folio Society Edition)

LUO, Guanzhong (trans. & intro. essay Moss Roberts; intro. Ma Jian; illus. Zhuye Shuwu; maps Neil Gower). Three Kingdoms: A Historical Novel. London: The Folio Society, 2013. 4 vols.

Quarto. All four volumes bound in turquoise moiré silk. Covers illustrated and lettered in gilt and black with designs by Neil Gower. Spines lettered in gilt. Top edges gilt. Illustrated endpapers. Illustrated pictorial slipcase. Vol. I: lxxxii, [20], 5–331 pp; Vol. II: vii, 333–728 pp; Vol. III: vii, 729–1,124 pp; Vol. IV: vi, 1,125–1,525 pp. 1,525 pp. total. Illustrated throughout with black and white woodcuts from the 1883 Zhuye Shuwu edition; maps by Neil Gower. First Folio Society edition. Now out of print.

Three Kingdoms opens with one of the great first lines in world literature: "Empires wax and wane; states cleave asunder and coalesce." Written in the fourteenth century by Luo Guanzhong (c.1330–c.1400) and drawing on centuries of oral history, official chronicles, and popular storytelling, it encompasses the turbulent decades surrounding the collapse of the Han Dynasty and the emergence of three rival states — Wei, Shu Han, and Wu — that contested the succession to imperial power across the period roughly from 169 to 280 CE. At approximately 800,000 Chinese characters in its standard form, it is one of the longest novels in world literature, and one of the most read: estimates of its total readership across the centuries run to the hundreds of millions.

The novel has generated a cultural presence in China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam comparable to that of the Greek epics in the Western tradition — shaping popular conceptions of strategy, loyalty, heroism, and betrayal across a dozen generations of readers, and remaining a living reference for everything from business strategy to political thought. Its characters — the strategist Zhuge Liang, the warrior Guan Yu, the idealistic Liu Bei, and the formidable and often villainous Cao Cao — are among the most immediately recognisable figures in East Asian culture. Video games, films, operas, and comic adaptations continue to extend the novel's reach into forms its fourteenth-century author could not have imagined.

The Folio Society edition uses Moss Roberts's immensely readable translation, widely acknowledged as the best available in English, first published by the University of California Press in 1994. The introduction is by Ma Jian — the Chinese novelist, author of Red Dust and Beijing Coma, who has lived in exile in London since 1997 — who brings a contemporary Chinese literary perspective to the work's significance. The woodcut illustrations throughout are drawn from the 1883 Zhuye Shuwu edition, one of the most celebrated illustrated printings of the novel, and the maps by Neil Gower provide geographical orientation across the vast theatres of conflict the narrative encompasses. The turquoise moiré silk binding — an elegant choice for a Chinese classic of this stature — makes this among the more visually distinguished productions in the Folio Society catalogue.

Near fine. Slipcase shows some mild shelf wear. A few small spots along the edges of volumes; otherwise fine throughout.

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Catalogue Number: HH000577