「三國」第五回：誰定的規矩

The two iconic showdowns in Chapter 5 of Romance of the Three Kingdoms—"Slaying Hua Xiong while the wine is still warm" and "Three Heroes Fighting Lu Bu"—never actually happened in recorded history. Why was Sun Jian, the true hero who defeated Dong Zhuo and slew Hua Xiong, stripped of his spotlight in the novel? Luo Guanzhong’s deliberate design of these fictional battles was no mere act of shuffling historical figures; it was an attempt to force a "ruler" into the reader's mind to measure every warrior in the book. By using the duration of "wine cooling" to illustrate a crushing dimension-reduction attack, and the grueling "three-man coordinated assault" to set the ceiling for martial prowess, the author established a lasting power hierarchy. This episode deconstructs the "narrative hegemony" behind the novel: when readers are conditioned to judge victory by the number of rounds in a duel, the reality of warfare—logistics, troop numbers, and systemic collapse—is erased. The function of narrative is never to reconstruct history, but to establish an unquestionable order in your mind—and make you forget that this order was manufactured.