Welcome to the Romance of the Three Kingdoms podcast.

This is a supplemental episode.

In this episode, I'm going to delve into the life of the real Shu general Zhang Fei

and compare and contrast him with his

fictional counterpart, who exited our narrative in episode 102. Now this is going to be a short

episode because compared to his sworn brothers Liu Bei and Guan Yu, there is relatively

little in the historical records about Zhang Fei, but we'll do the

best we can. So we don't have a birth year for Zhang Fei, but we do know that he joined up with

Liu Bei and Guan Yu in the year 184 as they raised a militia to help put down the Yellow Turban

rebellion. As we discussed in the supplemental episode

on Guan Yu, the historical records say that the three of them were like brothers, but there is

actually nothing that says they were actually sworn brothers, but in any case, they were close

by all accounts. For his role in quelling the rebellion, Liu Bei was given

a position as the magistrate of the county of Ping Yuan in the year 195, and Zhang Fei served on

his staff. Now, in episode two of the podcast, we covered the incident that led to Liu Bei giving up

this position.

A government inspector was coming around fishing for bribes,

and when the incorruptible Liu Bei refused to cave,

the inspector made some rather nasty threats.

In the novel, that turned out to be a really, really bad idea, as Zhang Fei got wind of it, and then proceeded

to tie the inspector to a post and whip him until Liu Bei intervened.

So here's where we run into a discrepancy between the real-life Zhang Fei and the fictional

...