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Culture Part IThe earliest literary work on the Three Kingdoms was 'Sandu Fu' Three Capitals, by Zuo Si only two years after the kingdom of Wu was conquered. Containing over 10,000 words, Three Capitals was written in the style of a ballad. After this, works about the Three Kingdoms continued to be published, but few survive from the period of division.Curiously, in light of their later popularity, there is minimal evidence for the existence or the content of tales about the Three Kingdoms among surviving literary material from the latter part of the first millenium.. In the Tang, however, the poet Li Shangyin shed some light in his poem Jiaoer Shi, on the hero Zhang Fei. From his poem we know that by the late Tang, Three Kingdoms stories were widely known among the people. By the latter part of the Northern Song, we have much broader evidence of the popularity of Three Kingdoms tales, famously from poet and writer Su Shi (Su Dongpo) who frequently visited Red Cliffs. He wrote in 'Zhi Lin' Miscellaneous Record:"Wang Ban once said that when the common people found that their children were too mischievous, they often gave them a few coins and sent them to listen to story-telling. If the story being told was the Story of the Three Kingdoms, the children would knit their brows and cry when they heard that Xuande [Liu Bei] suffered defeats, and shout and sing with happiness when they heard of Cao Cao losing a battle. It shows, therefore, that the ideas of a gentleman and a mean person do not change with their times."
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