The History of the Wu Kingdom in the Context of the Three Kingodms Period

In 220 AC Chinese ancient empire, the Eastern Han empire fell apart, while all its territories and military forces was split between various warlords and “powerful houses” (super-clan organizations), the most authoritative of which created three independent kingdoms, that is Wei, Wu and Shu – this is how Three Kingdoms period in Chinese History began. One of the finest historical sources describing the history of Three Kingdoms is “Zizhi Tongjian” written by Song Empire court chronicler Sima Guang. But while there have been several studies about the political history of the Wei kingdom and some partial Russian translations of “Zizhi Tongjian” consequently, nevertheless the political history of the Wu kingdom has remained undeservedly forgotten by sinologists. This paper is intended to fill in the aforementioned gap and to analyze the political process in the Wu kingdom based on the author’s own Russian translation of “Zizhi Tongjian” chapters dedicated to the History of Wu. The event history classification and quantitative analysis method will be used in the analysis to obtain the accurate data on the correlations within the Wu kingdom political agenda fluctuations and the relationships between the subjects of political struggle. The results of this paper may reveal the key trends in the political history of the Wu kingdom, as well as determinate the most influential political subjects, differentiate the periodization of the History of Wu and shed light on the consistent pattern of the Wu kingdom political elite formation.