Welcome to the Romance of the Three Kingdoms podcast.

This is a supplemental episode.

So originally, I wanted to do a supplemental episode just on Yuan Shao,

the once mighty warlord of the north who

controlled four provinces and a massive army, but was routed by Cao Cao and died soon thereafter.

Like I had done in a previous supplemental episode about Lu Bu after he exited stage left,

I was going to take a look at the differences between the real

historical figure of Yuan Shao versus his fictional counterpart in the novel. However, once I started

digging into the historical material, it seemed that the novel actually healed pretty close to the

historical sources as far as Yuan Shao was concerned.

Figuring that was probably not going to make for much of an episode,

I decided to combine the material on Yuan Shao with the story of Yu Ran,

a historical figure who was referenced in episode 35, in connection with the assassination attempt on Sun Tse.

So first, let's talk about Yuan Shao. Like I said, the portrayal of him in the novel is actually pretty

similar to his real historical self, from the various stages of his career to his personality.

He came from the bluest of blue-blooded families at the Han court.

Before him, four generations of his family has served in one of the top three ministerial

posts at court. These positions were kind of like the emperor's cabinet, and Yuan Shao did lead the

ultimately unsuccessful rebellion against Dong Zhuo, after which he did take over four northern

provinces to turn himself into a major player. A lot of the other things about him in the novel,

from his denunciation of Cao Cao,

to his refusal to come to Liu Bei's aid because his son was sick, seemed to all come from actual historical sources, namely the records of the Three Kingdoms. There were a couple of

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