The Halberd at Red Cliff: Jian 'an and the Three Kingdoms.

• Author: Butstein, Pablo A.
• Position: Book review

The Halberd at Red Cliff: Jian 'an and the Three Kingdoms. By XIAOFEI TIAN. Harvard-Yenching Institute Monograph Series, vol. 108. Cambridge, MA: HARVARD UNIVERSITY ASIA CENTER, HARVARD UNIVERSITY, 2018. Pp. xvi + 454. $49.95.

The title of this book makes us expect a study of key events of early medieval Chinese history; and to a certain extent, this is what the book contains in its pages. But once we open it, we find that this is not only a book about the past; it is also about the present: it shows how early medieval materials, through their multiple metamorphoses, have shaped and keep on shaping historical imagination in China. These studies on famous third-century literary topics indeed transgress the arbitrary chronological divisions that historians often impose onto their objects. In principle, the book deals with Jian'an (196-220), the last reign era of the Han dynasty, and with the Three Kingdoms (220-280), the period that formally started after the fall of the Han dynasty; but instead of tying its analysis to this time framework, the book focuses on some of the fragmentary memories that these periods left to posterity: the Bronze Bird Terrace, where Cao Cao's concubines and entertainers were to be lodged after the death of their lord; the Seven Masters of Jian'an, a group that encompassed the most important literary figures of the early third century; and the battle of the Red Cliff, which marked the beginning of the Three Kingdoms era. "We can only get to know the past in remnants," claims the author; "and even when we hold an authentic physical object in our hands, tangible as it is, we recognize that it, too, needs a human voice to give it an identity and a story, to articulate what it is, and from whence and where it came" (p. 345). The Halberd at the Red Cliff thus follows these remnants in their full chronological scale--and that scale is Chinese history from the third century until today.

Although the early medieval "remnants" that Tian chose for her book are well-known literary topics of the Jian'an era and the Three Kingdoms, widely present in poetry, storytelling, and visual representations, she warns the reader that her focus is not "literary history." Her focus is community making. From the third century until today, she claims, "the question remains the same, namely, how to construct a community through writing and reading" (p. 8). "Literary" and "artistic" materials indeed have a particular status in Chinese history. In Tian's learned analyses of literati poetry during the whole imperial period, the reader will be able to see that "aesthetic questions" never remained locked within the boundaries of "literature" and "art." To understand this, we should bear in mind the social conditions of poetic writing in imperial times: on the one hand, poetry was part of what is called "social aesthetics," because it displayed the social value of the person who was able to compose a poem; on the other hand, since poetry was a major means of literati communication, its role in shaping the historical and social imagination of the literati was comparable to that of historiography and other genres. That is why poetry was so embedded in community making among literati, and this book amply illustrates this. As for the contemporary uses of the Jian'an and the Three Kingdoms materials, Tian mostly focuses on cinema and TV, which have a strong impact on contemporary imagination, and on fan fiction, which has developed to a considerable extent in the digital age. In this sense, she has not chosen her materials in a random way. On the contrary: for the imperial period, she picked the genres that...