List of fictitious stories in Romance of the Three Kingdoms

The following is a chronologically arranged list of apocryphal stories in the 14th century novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms (Sanguo Yanyi), one of the Four Great Classical Novels of Chinese literature. Although the novel is a romanticised and highly fictionalised retelling of the fall of the Eastern Han dynasty and subsequent Three Kingdoms period, due to its immense esteem and popularity, many people mistake it for an accurate historical account of the era. The primary historical sources for the Three Kingdoms period is Chen Shou's Records of the Three Kingdoms (Sanguozhi), which includes Annotations to Records of the Three Kingdoms by Pei Songzhi from other historical texts such as Yu Huan's Weilüe and the Jiang Biao Zhuan (江表傳). Other sources covering the history of that period include Fan Ye's Book of the Later Han (Houhanshu) and Fang Xuanling's Book of Jin (Jin Shu). Since Sanguo Yanyi is a historical novel, many stories in it are likely dramatised or fabricated, or based on folk tales and historical incidents that happened in other periods of Chinese history. What follows is an incomplete list of the better known of such stories in the novel, each with accompanying text that explains the differences between the story and historical accounts.