Mr. Zheng Zhenduo's judgment in the evolution of his masterpiece Romance of the Three Kingdoms: "Many of these publications must come from one source, and they are all based on Jiajing." (1) thus formed the following common misunderstanding:
(1) The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, which is popular in Jiajing, is the version closest to Luo Guanzhong's original, or Roche's original;
(2) Romance of the Three Kingdoms has only one version system derived from Jiajing Edition;
(3) Among the numerous versions of Romance of the Three Kingdoms, only Jiajing and Maoben are the most noteworthy. Therefore, for a long time, when discussing the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, all kinds of literary history and novel history generally focus on the Mao version, with an incidental reference to Jiajing version, and almost ignore other Ming versions such as Biography of the Three Kingdoms and Comments on Li Zhuowu. This situation, to a considerable extent, determines that the overall level of the study of The Romance of the Three Kingdoms is not high. Mao Zonggang and his son revised The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, among which Mao Zonggang and his son edition is the most prominent, and is regarded as the first book of gifted scholars. On the basis of the rough edition, Modern People's Literature Publishing House deleted Shi Mao's comments, corrected some mistakes and added several notes, which became a better popular edition.
However, due to the limitation of the research level in the past, there are still many "technical errors" in the collating edition of People's Literature Publishing House, including textual errors, geographical errors, official errors, calendar errors and other types of errors. Nevertheless, it is still the version with the largest circulation. Since 1980s, many publishing houses have sorted it out, but few of them have academic value. Among them, The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, published by Jiangsu Ancient Books Publishing House, has been highly praised by academic circles and readers, and is regarded as the best version so far. Correct a large number of "technical mistakes" in the book, and list them in turn in the form of "checklist", point out where the mistakes are, put forward correction opinions, and explain the basis for correction; At the same time, comment on what readers don't know or what is specious, and explain it in simple terms, giving people a new understanding.
As for China's classic novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms, the popular Romance of the Three Kingdoms is the Romance of the Three Kingdoms published by Ming Jiajing at noon, that is, Robben, which is compiled from the long-standing folk stories of Liu, Guan and Zhang Taoyuan. As early as the end of the Tang Dynasty, the story of the Three Kingdoms had been circulated among the people. Li Yishan's "Poetry of Pride" said: "Either tease Zhang (bearded) or laugh at Deng Ai for eating (stuttering)." In the Northern Song Dynasty, there appeared an orator who told the story of the Three Kingdoms. In the Yuan Dynasty, there were many dramas adapted from the stories of the Three Kingdoms, and a Three Kingdoms Pinghua appeared. This Pinghua story begins with the Yellow Scarf Uprising, and when it comes to the unification of the Western Jin Dynasty, it has a relatively complete story. At the end of Yuan Dynasty and the beginning of Ming Dynasty, Luo Guanzhong compiled the popular Romance of the Three Kingdoms on the basis of predecessors, using the historical materials of the History of the Three Kingdoms by Chen Shou and Pei Songzhi's notes. As soon as this popular romance came out, many versions appeared. During the reign of Emperor Kangxi in Qing Dynasty, Mao Zonggang revised it to make the novel more complete, and it was called the "First Scholar's Book". This is the 120 Romance of the Three Kingdoms that we saw today. Robben was forgotten when Mao Ben appeared.