Hey everyone, Lhasla Montgomery again, as usual. No music intro, fanfare or anything. Don't send me money or buy my book. I'm just here once again to bring you another nugget from the past 5,000 or so years of Chinese history.

Today we look at Gwan Yu, the history of and the myths behind this legend of Chinese history and culture.

I was with my homies from Ning Ball last week,

and we had an appointment downtown.

So I took them to lunch in the old Chinatown and we walked around after a nice dim sum at Ocean Seafood on Broadway.

This is in LA and I bought a a Guanyuy statue at some gift shop for 8 bucks and when the owner wasn't looking I snapped a photo with my phone of the altar inside his shop which of course

Prominently features Guanyu you can see this on my China History podcast website as the featured photos that went along with this episode.

This is about as typical a shrine to Guanyaieu as you could find.

And you can't speak of Guaieu without speaking

also of Lio Bei and Changfei.

This is the history part.

You see, Guaieu was very much real. He was a historical figure who later became a god. So we'll look at the historical aspect of Guanyu and then we'll look at all the myths and powers contained in his being when he went from being Guanyu to Guanggong and Guangdi.

Let's first look at the historical Guayu.

And to do that, we have to jump back 1,850 years to 162 a.D.

These are the closing years of the Eastern Han dynasty.

The Western Han, running from 206 BC to 8 a.D. followed by Wangman's brief

Xin Dynasty from 9 to 23 a.d. and then the Han is restored but the capital

is moved to the east to the city of Loyan and as you

no doubt recall from the previous episodes on the Eastern Han and the

three kingdoms. The end came in 220 AD and China crumbles like it

often did in between dynasties and after a period of consolidation China is later divided up into the kingdoms of Shou, Wei, and Wu.

In this period, of course, immortalized in Lo Gwan Jong's late 14th century book Romance of the Three Kingdoms.

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