Three Kingdoms' Kong Rong: I Interpret the Confucian Classics

The story opens with one hundred thousand Yellow Turban rebels besieging the city of Beihai. In that desperate hour, Kong Rong awakens to memories of a previous life—and with them, a vision far grander than mere survival. He recruits the warrior Taishi Ci, negotiates the surrender of the Green and Xu province Yellow Turbans, and builds a benevolent kingdom of the Way on the eastern slopes of Mount Tai. While Cao Cao schemes for power, Liu Bei parades virtue, and Sun Ce carves out Jiangdong, Kong Rong sits calmly reciting the Confucian scriptures. But while others fight over the empire, he fights for something else: the right to interpret the classics themselves. He champions the doctrine that parents owe their children no debt of gratitude, and he vows to spread this radical teaching across every corner of the realm. In the turbulent intellectual ferment of the late Han and Wei-Jin era, where eccentric iconoclasts abound and debates rage between Confucianism and Legalism, between morality and utility, Kong Rong has no interest in dynastic conquest. His ambition is to "establish the heart for heaven and earth, to ordain the mandate for the common people, to carry on the lost learning of the sages, and to open peace for ten thousand generations." Yet he sees the ancient tales—Yao imprisoned, Shun dying in the wild, the sage-kings’ divine deeds—as nothing but lies that have deceived countless generations. The ideal of selecting the worthy and capable, of a world held in common, was a fiction woven by Confucius himself. Kong Rong intends to make that fiction reality.