Editing Three Kingdoms (section)

===Sources===
[[File:A Fragment of Biography of Bu Zhi History Books of Three Kingdoms 02 2012-12.JPG|thumb|A fragment of the biography of [[Bu Zhi]] from the ''Records of the Three Kingdoms'', part of the [[Dunhuang manuscripts]]]]The standard history of the period is the ''[[Records of the Three Kingdoms]]'', compiled by the [[Western Jin]] historian [[Chen Shou]] in the third century AD. The work synthesises the histories of the rival states of Cao Wei, Shu Han and Eastern Wu in the Three Kingdoms period into a single compiled text. An expanded version of the ''Records of the Three Kingdoms'' was published by the [[Liu Song]] historian [[Pei Songzhi]] in 429, whose ''[[Annotations to Records of the Three Kingdoms]]'' supplemented the original with sizeable excerpts of texts unused by Chen Shou and provided commentaries. The resulting work nearly doubled the size of the original ''Records'',{{sfn|Cutter|Crowell|1999|p=149}} and the composite work of Chen and Pei are canonised as [[official history]].{{sfn|McLaren|2006|p=294}}

In addition to the ''Records of the Three Kingdoms'', the years 189 to 220 are also covered by the previous standard history ''[[Book of the Later Han]]'' by [[Fan Ye (historian)|Fan Ye]] (a contemporary of Pei Songzhi), which mainly draws from documents of the Han court.{{sfn|de Crespigny|2020|p=xi}} For the later years, biographies of the Jin dynasty progenitors [[Sima Yi]], [[Sima Shi]], and [[Sima Zhao]] are only found in the following standard history ''[[Book of Jin]]'' by the [[Tang dynasty]] historian [[Fang Xuanling]].