Romance of the Three Kingdoms is a Chinese television series adapted from the classical 14th century novel of the same title by Luo Guanzhong. The series was produced by China Central Television (CCTV) and was first aired on the network in 1994. It spanned a total of 84 episodes, each approximately 45 minutes long. One of the most expensive television series produced at the time, the project cost 170 million yuan. It was completed over four years and involved over 400,000 cast and crew members, including divisions of the People's Liberation Army from the Beijing, Nanjing and Chengdu military regions. Some of the dialogue spoken by characters was adapted directly from the novel. Extensive battle scenes, such as the battles of Guandu, Red Cliffs and Xiaoting, were also live-acted. The series is widely seen as among the best period dramas in China and appraised for capturing the grand scale of the novel's story, themes and characters while maintaining its artistic and historical value. The show has a 9.5 rating on Douban from over 89,030 reviews.

List of episodes

The series is divided into five parts and each part has a different executive producer and director(s).

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Part Four

Part Five

Cast

Due to the time taken to complete the project (four years), there were numerous instances of (1) multiple actors portraying the same character or (2) the same actor taking on multiple roles. An example of case (1) was the character Zhang Liao, who was portrayed by Xu Shaohua in episode 12, Zhang Yakun in episode 39, and Wang Weiguo in episode 54. Chen Zhihui was an extreme example of case (2) because he took on four roles – three as generals from Wei, Shu and Wu (Xu Chu, Liao Hua and Taishi Ci) and one as minor warlord Bao Xin. Two other prominent examples of case (2) were Wu Xiaodong and Hong Yuzhou – the former portrayed Sun Jian in episode 5 and Sun Quan from episode 30 onwards; the latter portrayed a young Yuan Shao in episode 5 and Zhou Yu from episode 9 onwards.

Main cast

Other cast

Music

The music for the series was composed by Gu Jianfen and Li Yiding (李一丁).