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CONCLUSION

There can be no question that Chen Shou was an accomplished
historian for his time, the weaknesses of Records of the Three States
notwithstanding. Those weaknesses were to a large extent the product
of the very difficult circumstances and highly charged and politicized
atmosphere in which he wrote. Chen omitted or only alluded to
important particulars, which led Pei Songzhi to supplement Chen's
work with numerous quotations from contemporary or near-contemporary
sources. But while Pei's additions point up the lacunae
in Chen's work, they also reveal how adroit Chen was in handling
sensitive events and signaling the reader of the need to look more deeply
into a matter. His handling of the death of Empress Zhen is an excellent
example of the context in which he wrote and the constraints under
which he labored. Thanks to Pei Songzhi's selection of material for his
commentary, we are able to appreciate the nature of Chen's
achievement. Small wonder that Chen's work survived rather than
Wang Chen's.

The women whom Chen selected for his history are not, of course,
representative of women at large, nor do they include the totality of
the wives or concubines of any one of the rulers. As we have seen, Chen
applied fairly narrow criteria in making his choices, criteria that resembled
those of historians before him, and ones that were later
followed by Fan Ye. Given what we know about the sources for Fan's

Later Han History, it seems likely that the same criteria were applied
by other historians among Chen's contemporaries, such as Hua Qiao.

We have noted that these fascicles are as much about the male
relatives of the women included as they are about the women
themselves. Wu Jing's biography appears at his sister's entry, and
likewise the entry for Xu Kun, father of Sun Quan's Lady Xu, is
included with hers. Liu Shan's two brothers and his son are given three
quarters the space of the four imperial wives in the Shu section. Thus
these two fascicles each do double duty: The Wu section incorporates
material that in other histories is found in the sections on the imperially
affined families, whereas the Shu section includes the entries normally
found in a section devoted to younger sons of the imperial line. Only
with Fascicle 5, the Wei chapter, do we have something like the typical
standard history section on empresses and consorts.

One wishes that Chen could have broken with the tradition
established by his predecessors and given us a fuller picture of the
women about whom he did write. We are not usually told their given
names, and the descriptions of them are almost entirely from the
standpoint of the impact of their actions on the ruling house. Aside
from a particular woman's being either jealous and scheming or warmhearted
and wise, in most cases the historian tells us little of their
personalities, their lives, and their aspirations. Still, as the reader will
find in the following translation, a careful and sympathetic reading of
the fascicles on palace women—supplemented by Pei's commentary and
by material from other parts of the Records and elsewhere—yields the
outlines of these women and their lives, and though one can never hope
to know them intimately, it is possible at least to have a sense of them
and their world. Clearly there were some extraordinary individuals
among the royal women of the Three States. If the age is rightly known
for having produced men of heroic stature and exceptional ability, the
limited sample of the following chapters is evidence that it also yielded
women who were their match.