Welcome to the Romance of the Three Kingdoms podcast.

This is a supplemental episode.

All right, so this is another big one,

as we bid farewell to the novel's main protagonist, Liu Bei.

In the novel, he is portrayed as the ideal Confucian ruler,

extolled for his virtue, compassion, kindness, and honor,

as well as his eagerness for seeking out men of talent.

But how much of that is actually true?

Well, we'll see. But, bear in mind that even the source material we have to work with about Liu Bei should be considered heavily biased. The main

historical source we have, the records of the Three Kingdoms, was written by a guy who had

served in the court of the kingdom that Liu Bei founded,

which no doubt colored his view of the man.

Given Liu Bei's eventual status as the emperor of a kingdom, there were, unsurprisingly,

very extensive records about his life and career, and what's laid out in the novel in terms of

the whens, where's, and what's of his life pretty much corresponds with real-life events.

Because of that, I'm not going to do a straight rehash of his life, because that alone would

take two full episodes. Seriously, I had to rewrite this episode three times to make it a

manageable length, which is why it's being released about a month later than I anticipated. So instead,

I'm going to pick and choose from the notable stories about Liu Bei from the novel, and talk about

which ones were real and which ones were pure fiction,

and then I'm going to conclude by taking a look into the novel's general portrayal of the man

compared to his real life self.

...