Guan Yu leaves Xuchang with Cao Cao’s blessings. If only Cao Cao had bothered to tell the men guarding the checkpoints along the way ….

* Transcript (PDF)

* Map of Key Locations

* Graph of Key Characters and Relationships

Notes

* One of the checkpoints Guan Yu passes on his journey is Rongyang. I mistakenly pronounced it as Xingyang in this episode. Since I only mentioned it twice in the episode, I’ve decided to not redo the audio track. It is, however, correctly named in the map for this episode.

* I could not find the first checkpoint Guan Yu passes, Dongling Pass, on any of the reference maps I use, so I have left it out of the map for this episode.

* You might notice that Guan Yu seems to take a rather circuitous route toward his destination. Upon leaving Xuchang, he goes northwest for a good while before turning eastward. Various sources I have come across online have speculated that the origination point of the journey might have changed with the various versions of the story told through the centuries, and that Guan Yu actually set out from Changan, which was to the west and would have made for a much more logical route. Of course, there is no historical record of this journey, so it’s likely all just fiction, so nitpicking over the route of the journey is kind of a moot point anyway.