Me: Echoing a popular and relatively uncontroversial sentiment about Liu Bei being a virtuous lord to the common people (from what I can tell, having lurked on the Chinese Internet for a long time and growing up Sichuanese)
Random tumblr user: It was all Shu propaganda, the country had no history records, it was all made up by Zhuge Liang, and you are looking at this with first world western morality!
Me, a Shu person on both sides of the family: I could talk about how Chen Shou, the dude who wrote The Records of the Three Kingdoms for the Sima family of the Jin Dynasty, was from Shu and his father and teacher both worked under Liu Bei and Zhuge Liang. How much of what we know about the three kingdoms period and the behaviors of the warlords come from Chen Shou’s book. How the book was based on records from the Wei and Wu Kingdoms, and Chen Shou conducted interviews with old Shu officials and prominent Shu families to fill in the gaps for the lack of surviving Shu records. How he mentions in his book that there used to be Shu records. How the book was written under the political censorship of the Jin Dynasty, which had no incentive to promote a positive view of the Shu. How the book was generally well received by the old families of Wei who had worked under the Cao family. How the Sima family also approved of its contents and included it in their royal library (which helped ensure its survival to this day). But I rather like the idea that Zhuge Liang was so good at propaganda that he brainwashed all the Shu people, who in turn brainwashed all of ancient China to honor Liu Bei as a virtuous lord for the next 1800 years. His ultimate strategic victory for his beloved Zhu Gong ❤️❤️❤️
