Gods, monkeys, generals and demons from two thousand years of Chinese stories meet on one battlefield, and fight for the Mandate of Heaven.
For three thousand years Chinese rulers claimed to govern by tianming, the Mandate of Heaven. Heaven gave it to the worthy and took it from the unjust, and whoever held it held the realm.
The First Emperor had a seal carved from the famous Heshi jade, inscribed: Having received the Mandate from Heaven, may the reign be long and prosperous. For a thousand years whoever held it claimed the Mandate. It disappeared in the 10th century and has never been found.
In Heavenly Mandate the Mandate is never settled for long. It passes to whoever holds the valley until spring.
On the last night of the year the mountains are quiet.
Something old walks out of the snow, hungry, and the villages hold their breath.
A child hangs red paper on the door. Her grandfather lights the bamboo.
Crack, like thunder. The beast stops at the red door.
The year turns. The Mandate passes to whoever holds the valley until spring.
In Chinese myth, the world is three realms: Heaven above, the mortal world, and the world below. In the game, Three Realms is the full war: three lanes, a jungle of monsters, river bosses and the Kunpeng.
The jade-green side of every battle. Jade marks your allies: their team rings, health bars and dots on the minimap.
The crimson side. Crimson marks the enemy, whatever skin an immortal wears, so you can read a fight in half a second.
Each court guards a Heart of Heaven at the end of the lanes, behind three pagoda towers and a Seal in every lane and the two guardian pagodas. Break the enemy Heart and the match is won. In Siege of Heaven, you hold your own Heart against twenty waves of demons.
Every battlefield is a real place, a painting or a festival from Chinese culture.
The valley of jade green is every spring landscape of the Chinese painters at once: pines on the ridges, bamboo by the water, cherry and peach blossom on the slopes and a clear river through the middle. Landscape painting was called shanshui, “mountain and water”, and the mountain and the water are where the immortals live.
Shanshui painting, from Jing Hao and Fan Kuan in the 10th–11th centuries.
Kunlun was the axis of the world, a mountain that joined earth to Heaven, where the Queen Mother of the West kept her palace, her Jade Pool and her peach garden. The real Kunlun range runs for three thousand kilometres across the north of the Tibetan Plateau, and the Yellow River was once believed to rise there.
Classic of Mountains and Seas; Huainanzi, “Terrestrial Forms” (Dixing).
In Journey to the West the pilgrims reach mountains of fire eight hundred li across that no one can cross. Sun Wukong has to trick the Princess Iron Fan three times into lending him her palm-leaf fan, which puts the fire out. The real Flaming Mountains rise near Turpan in Xinjiang, red sandstone cliffs that shimmer at over 50 °C in summer.
Journey to the West, chapters 59–61.
“I stop my carriage, for I love the maple wood at dusk; frost-touched leaves are redder than the flowers of spring.” Du Mu's little poem made the autumn maple one of the best loved sights in China. On the Double Ninth Festival people climb the hills to see the colours.
Du Mu, “Mountain Walk” (Shanxing), 9th century.
On the fifteenth night of the first month, the first full moon of the year, the curfew of the old capitals was lifted and the whole city came out among the lanterns: lanterns shaped like fish, dragons and rabbits, lantern riddles to guess, and sweet rice balls, yuanxiao, to eat.
The Lantern Festival is recorded from the Han dynasty; the Tang lifted the curfew for three nights.
An oasis town on the Silk Road between China and Central Asia, beside the Crescent Moon Spring and the singing sand dunes. In the cliffs nearby, monks and merchants carved and painted the Mogao Caves over a thousand years: nearly five hundred shrines. In 1900 a hidden library of fifty thousand manuscripts was found in one of them.
The Mogao Caves were begun in 366 CE; a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1987.
The Heavenly Palace is the court of the Jade Emperor above the clouds, where gods and immortals hold office like ministers in an earthly capital. Journey to the West opens here: Sun Wukong is given a lowly post minding the heavenly horses, steals the Peaches of Immortality and the elixir of Laozi, and fights his way through the Southern Gate, Nantianmen, until the Buddha traps him beneath a mountain.
Journey to the West (Wu Cheng'en, 16th century), chapters 4 to 7.
The monsters you hunt between the lanes come out of the old bestiaries.
A horned beast that comes out of the mountains or the sea on New Year's Eve to eat crops, cattle and children. An old man discovered that it fears three things: the colour red, fire and loud noise. So at New Year people paste red couplets on their doors, light lanterns and set off firecrackers. Getting through the night is still called guonian, “passing the Nian”.
A folk tale first written down in the 20th century; the customs it explains are far older.
Guardian of the north, of winter and of water: a tortoise with a snake coiled around it. With the Azure Dragon, the White Tiger and the Vermilion Bird it is one of the Four Symbols that divide the sky. Later Taoists made it a god, Zhenwu, the Perfected Warrior, worshipped on Mount Wudang.
The Four Symbols appear on tombs and mirrors from the Han dynasty on.
A gentle beast with a dragon's head, a deer's body and hooves that do not crush the grass. It appears only when a sage is born or a wise ruler sits on the throne. A qilin was said to have appeared before Confucius was born, and when one was killed in his old age he took it as a sign that his time was over.
Spring and Autumn Annals and the Gongyang commentary: the qilin captured in 481 BCE.
Many items in the Celestial Market are treasures from the legends.
The peaches of the Queen Mother of the West: the small ones ripen every three thousand years and make the eater light and healthy; the great ones, every nine thousand years, and make the eater as old as heaven and earth.
Journey to the West, chapter 5.
The palm-leaf fan of the Princess Iron Fan: one wave puts out the Flaming Mountains, two bring wind, three bring rain. Waved at a person, it blows them fifty thousand li away.
Journey to the West, chapters 59–61.
Taishang Laojun, Laozi as a god, keeps his elixir pills in gourds. In the stories, gourds hold medicine, wine, whole armies and even, in one tale, a captured Monkey King.
Journey to the West, chapters 5 and 33–35.
A mirror framed by the eight trigrams of the Book of Changes. Hung over a doorway, it turns evil back on itself; Taoist priests use them to show demons their true faces.
The eight trigrams of the Yijing; demon-revealing mirrors appear in tales from the Jin dynasty on.
Every immortal’s story in the game’s Codex is written fresh from the classical sources, and names them.
In the game: Sun Wukong, Zhu Bajie, Bull Demon King, Bai Gujing, Erlang Shen, Ao Guang
In the game: Nezha, Jiang Ziya, Erlang Shen, Ao Guang
In the game: Guan Yu, Zhuge Liang
In the game: Hou Yi, Chang'e
In the game: Hua Mulan
In the game: Bai Suzhen
In the game: Jiang Ziya
In the game: Mazu
