A reflection on this four-year ride, and a glimpse of things to come.

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Welcome to the Romance of the Three Kingdoms Podcast. This is episode 154.

So, here we are, the end of a journey that started on April 9, 2014, when I hit Publish on the first episode of this podcast — an episode that I foolishly numbered episode zero, creating all sorts of metadata annoyances for myself for the next 154 episodes). I had no idea what kind of audience would be out there for this project. Well, after 4 years, 1 month, 5 days; 175 total episodes; more than 81 hours of recordings; 700,000-plus words of scripts; 2 computers; 2 crashed hard drives; and one lightning strike; I have my answer, and it’s beyond anything I could have imagined. By industry standards, our numbers are by no means huge, but it’s definitely bigger than what I could have expected, and the enthusiasm I have seen from you is simply unparalleled. So before anything else, let me say once again: Thank you so much for checking out my little corner of the podcast universe and for dragging others into it. You guys are awesome.

Many of you have asked what I’m doing next, and I’ll get to that in a bit. But first, I want to do some reflection on the novel and the podcast. I explained in the first episode what the novel means to me. I see it as a quintessential part of Chinese culture, and I wanted to share it with people who may not have been familiar with it and might find it hard to get into due to the language barrier. Based on the enthusiasm I have seen in your emails and comments, I feel that goal has come to fruition. But more than that, I have found that in doing this podcast, I have greatly expanded my own understanding of the novel. When you are trying to not only recite a book, but also explain its many intricacies to an audience, you find yourself combing through its pages in a way you would not have done otherwise. Details that I had glossed over on previous readings and references that I only half-understood before now had to be explored and researched much more thoroughly so that I can explain it to you. And in that way, I have gained a whole new appreciation for the novel.

A listener asked why I think the novel has become so popular in China. I think there are many reasons for it. For one thing, the stories and characters of the novel are from more than 1,800 years ago, so they have had plenty of time to become ingrained in Chinese lore. The novel itself may have been written in the 14th century, but the historical text the Records of the Three Kingdoms was written during the Jin Dynasty, in the immediate aftermath of the Three Kingdoms era, and it’s safe to say that there were likely already stories being told about the people and events from the era during that time.

Second, I think anyone who grew up in Chinese culture could see various Chinese values illustrated in the novel. Every society and every culture likes to present some kind of mythical, idealized vision of what its values are, how it sees itself. For me, the Romance of the Three Kingdoms embodies many of the values that we Chinese like to hold up as our ideals, such as the honor of Guan Yu; the loyalty, dedication, and wisdom of Zhuge Liang; the valor of Zhao Yun ; or the unbending principles of every court official who dared to speak up against the next would-be usurper, even it meant losing their head.

Beyond those values, I think the novel is appealing to the Chinese sensibility because one of the things that we Chinese have been taught to take pride in is o...