Sunday, May 20, 2007

Romance of the Three Kingdoms




Romance of the Three Kingdoms - (A humorous interpretatin of the historical Chinese classic)



by Tsai Chih Chung, Translated by Leong Weng Kam (1994, Asiapac Books)



Fast, easy and entertaining read. Got through the book in a couple of hours. Gave me insight into the history of China, clever war tactics and Chinese humor.


The history was presented with a bit of magic in it when Kong Ming finally got his weather wish granted. As seen in alot of photos and paintings there's always a sense of magic, harmony and mysticism about it.






Alot of the humor was about taking things very literal. e.g. when one soldier says look they have more numbers than us, the next frame depicts the opposing army with soldiers holding banners with numbers on them. Humor was also based on word play between similar sounding words in the language, taking things literally, money and alot of cheekiness too.

No comments: