Three Kingdoms tells the story of the fateful last reign of the Han dynasty (206 B.C.-A.D. 220), when the Chinese empire was divided into three warring kingdoms. This decisive period in Chinese history became a subject of intense and continuing interest to historians, poets, and dramatists. Writing some 1,200 years later, the Ming author Luo Guanzhong drew on this rich literary heritage to fashion a sophisticated, compelling narrative that has become the Chinese national epic. Luo's novel offers a startling and unsparing view of how power is wielded, how diplomacy is conducted, and how wars are planned and fought; it has influenced the ways the Chinese think about power, diplomacy, and war even to this day. As important for Chinese culture as the Homeric epics have been for the West, this Ming dynasty masterpiece continues to be widely influential in China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, and remains a great work of world literature. The University of California Press is pleased to make the complete and unabridged translation available again.

"Three Kingdoms" tells the story of the fateful last reign of the Han dynasty (206 B.C.-A.D. 220), when the Chinese empire was divided into three warring kingdoms. This decisive period in Chinese history became a subject of intense and continuing interest to historians, poets, and dramatists. Writing some 1,200 years later, the Ming author Luo Guanzhong drew on this rich literary heritage to fashion a sophisticated, compelling narrative that has become the Chinese national epic. Luo's novel offers a startling and unsparing view of how power is wielded, how diplomacy is conducted, and how wars are planned and fought; it has influenced the ways the Chinese think about power, diplomacy, and war even to this day. As important for Chinese culture as the Homeric epics have been for the West, this Ming dynasty masterpiece continues to be widely influential in China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, and remains a great work of world literature. The University of California Press is pleased to make the complete and unabridged translation available again.

"(An) engrossing memoir ...To turn everything recorded here - births, an infant death, family uprootings, civil turmoil, maintaining an American household in the interior of China - into gold requires an alchemy that only a beautiful, strong-minded, witty and loving wife and mother can hold the secret to." (John Espey, Washington Post Book World). "A wonderful, sad, moving memoir by an indomitable American ...Golden Inches not only gives many fascinating glimpses of historical events; more important, it shows us what it meant to live through those events and deal with them without rancor, resentment or facile anger and enthusiasm." (Tracy B. Strong, New York Times Book Review). "This closely observed portrait of living in isolated missionary communities and treaty ports, against the background of one of the most turbulent periods of twentieth-century Chinese history, is an important document. It is also a moving story of one family's obsessive and destructive love affair with China." (Tiffany Brown, Times Literary Supplement).