With only the pleasures of CCTV to enjoy in the evening while I was in Beijing last December, I ventured out to a nearby bookstore and picked up a copy of the Chinese classic novel The Romance of the Three Kingdoms from its rather limited selection of English language titles, wondering to myself whether I would ever find the time or the energy to read this 1,000+ page doorstopper.

So far, I’ve only read the first volume, but after a rocky start through the first couple of hundred pages I’ve found myself becoming increasingly entranced by this 14^th century account of the turbulent events that took place towards the end of the Han Dynasty when the legendary figures Cao Cao, Sun Ce, and Liu Bei battled it out for supremacy.

And talk about turbulent! One of the main challenges of reading the book (apart from remembering the names) is keeping up with the sheer pace of the action. Friends become enemies and friends again at a bewildering speed as the main protagonists and various pretenders hatch plots and counter-plots to gain advantage over each other; hundreds of thousands of soldiers get slaughtered in pitched battles across the country; whole families and clans including wives, concubines, and sons and daughters, are put to the sword to exterminate all lineages of errant generals and officials; and in one particularly gruesome episode a poor man murders his wife so he can feed the starving Liu Bei with her flesh.

But amid this seething cauldron of carnage, a highly sophisticated and surprisingly nuanced narrative emerges that gradually reveals the strengths, weaknesses, and motivations of the main protagonists and showcases the various strategies they adopt in their struggle for supremacy.

In their lust for domination, none of the main characters come out in a particularly positive light, though I can’t help feeling a sneaking admiration for the brainy but duplicitous Cao Cao and growing sense of contempt for the ambitious but weak-minded Liu Bei.

Even though I’m only a third of the way through the tome, it has already helped fill in quite a number of gaps in my own understanding of the dynamics of Chinese history, politics, culture, and statecraft. I’m looking forward to learning more as the story further unfolds in the second volume.