Talk:Guan Yu

message: In section 1 paragraph 1:
he fled to the northern frontier town of Zhuo, where he joined Liu Bei, a local notable.
What's a "notable"?  Is it supposed to be "noble"?  From what I understand, though Liu does trace his bloodlines to an already distant branch of the imperial family, the connection is so distant that he could hardly be considered nobility.  (Not to mention that he was described as a strawhatter in the RotTK -- albeit one that's literate.)
:Liu Bei was known in his commandery as a man of importance. He had a large group of followers and merchants were willing to offer him capital. Hence he is described as a "notable". --Yu Ninjie 14:36, 3 Jan 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Entitling 

message: Hi fellow editors. i've made several major changes to this article over the past few days. Among these were the movement of contents from Guan Gong to here, as well as rewriting of most stuffs originally here. The latter is a matter of style and up to individual liking, but i'd like to point out three factual corrections i had made.
*Firstly, the county in which Guan Yu was born is pronounced as "Xiè" and not "Jiě". And it is in Shanxi, not Shaanxi.
*Secondly, Guan Yu was not enfeoffed as Marquis of Hanshouting, but rather Marquis of Hanshou. "Tinghou" is the lowest rank of marquis at that time.
*Thirdly and most importantly, the killing of five officers to reconcile with Liu Bei did not happen in history. It was a romanticization in popular culture. Please let me know if i'm wrong about this.
That's all for now. i'd be doing more reorganizing for the remaining sections in the days to come. Hope you guys like it. :) --Plastictv 10:28, 12 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Revamp

message: This was added by an unregistered user (IP address: 165.21.154.10). It seems to be a quote by Guan Yu from a Buddhist scripture. i removed it because: 1. the information is not relevant; 2. it is not sourced; 3. it is not translated.
:帝君曰﹕人生在世﹐貴盡忠孝節義等事﹐方於人道無愧﹐可立於天地之間﹐若不盡忠孝節義等事﹐身雖在世﹐其心已死﹐是謂偷生﹐凡人心既神﹐神既心﹐無愧心﹐無愧神﹐若是欺心﹐便是欺神﹐故君子三畏四知﹐以慎其獨﹐勿謂暗室可欺﹐屋漏可愧﹐一動一靜﹐神明鑒察﹐十目十手﹐理所必至﹐況報應昭彰﹐不爽毫髮﹐淫為萬惡首﹐孝為百行先﹐但有逆理﹐於心有愧者﹐勿未有利而行之﹐凡有合理﹐於心無愧者﹐勿謂無利而不行﹐若負吾教﹐請試吾刀。 敬天地﹐禮神明﹐奉祖先﹐孝雙親﹐守王法﹐重師尊﹐愛兄弟﹐信朋友﹐睦宗族﹐和鄉鄰﹐敬夫婦﹐教子孫。
:時行方便﹐廣積陰功﹐救難濟急﹐恤孤憐貧﹐創修廟宇﹐印造經文﹐捨藥施茶﹐戒殺放生﹐造橋修路﹐矜寡拔困﹐重粟惜福﹐排難解紛﹐捐資成美﹐垂訓教人﹐冤讎解釋﹐斗秤公平﹐親近有德﹐遠避凶人﹐隱惡揚善﹐利物救民﹐回心向道﹐改過自新﹐滿腔仁慈﹐惡念不存﹐一切善事﹐信心奉行﹐人雖不見﹐神已早聞﹐加福增壽﹐添子益孫﹐災消病滅﹐禍患不侵﹐人物咸寧﹐吉星照臨。
:若存惡心﹐不行善事﹐淫人妻女﹐破人婚姻﹐壞人名節﹐妒人技能﹐謀人財產﹐唆人爭訟﹐損人利己﹐肥家潤身﹐恨天怨地﹐罵雨呵風﹐謗聖毀賢﹐滅像欺神﹐宰殺牛犬﹐穢溺宇紙﹐持勢欺善﹐倚富壓貧﹐離人骨肉﹐間人兄弟﹐不信正道﹐奸盜邪淫﹐好尚奢詐﹐不重勤儉﹐輕棄五轂﹐不報有恩﹐瞞心昧己﹐大斗小秤﹐假立邪教﹐引誘愚人﹐詭說昇天﹐斂物行淫﹐明瞞暗騙﹐橫言曲語﹐白日咒詛﹐背地謀害﹐不存天理﹐不順人心﹐不信報應﹐引人作惡﹐不修片善﹐行諸惡事﹐官詞口舌﹐水火盜賊﹐惡毒瘟疫﹐生敗產蠢﹐殺身亡家﹐男盜女淫﹐近報在身﹐遠報子孫﹐神明鑒察﹐毫髮不紊﹐善惡兩途﹐禍福攸分﹐行善福報﹐作惡禍臨﹐我作斯語﹐願人奉行﹐言雖淺近﹐大益身心﹐戲侮吾言﹐斬首分形﹐有能持誦﹐消凶聚慶﹐求子得子﹐求壽得壽﹐富貴功名﹐皆能有成﹐凡有所祈﹐如意而獲﹐萬禍雪消﹐千祥雲集﹐諸如此福﹐惟善可致﹐吾本無私﹐惟佑善人﹐眾善奉行﹐毋怠厥志
--Plastictv 11:57, 16 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Huh?

message: i've roughly completed my work on Guan Yu. However, it is still far below satisfactory. i'd like to add more info on Guan Yu worship as well as Guan Yu in operas but the issues are complex and my knowledge in these areas is utterly hopeless. Anyone who is an expert in this please help? i'd also like to make the article more concise without losing important details but didn't seem able to do so... --Plastictv 05:26, 20 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Further improvements

message: The reason why Guan Yu as Sangharama wields a sword is that guandao did not exist at the time Guan Yu was deified in Buddhism. The idea of guandao probably came much later in Yuan Dynasty or even Ming Dynasty, appearing in operas and, of course, the Romance of the Three Kingdoms. i also put "Sangharama Bodhisattva" in parenthesis because it is not Guan Yu Buddhists are worshipping, but rather Sangharama (just like a monk adopts a faith name and abandons his mortal name when he enters the faith).
It is also arguable whether we should transliterate his famous weapon as Guan Dao, Guan Dao, guandao or perhaps something else. i'd support guandao, though. --Plastictv 15:36, 25 July 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Sounds like a Chicken and Egg problem.  After the egg is hatched, should you call it an egg or chicken?  Likewise, if you are describing how the egg is laid, you wouldn't call it a Chicken, would you.  :-)  Kowloonese 01:48, 9 March 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Actually it's not a "chicken and egg problem." Guan at least used a spear, which was placed inside his tomb... but, Guan had 3 tombs built by Cao Cao, Sun Quan, and Liu Bei respectively, and I don't know if there's a sword or knife inside his other 2 tombs, so I can only say Guan probably had a spear as his weapon...EkmanLi (talk) 13:27, 24 October 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: Sword or guandao

message: i removed the following text addded by the previous editor because it gives a fictional account of Guan Yu's departure from Cao Cao, which is already covered in the "Guan Yu in Romance of the Three Kingdoms" section. There is a difference between historical record and historical novel.
:However, under the prompting of some of his subordinates, Cao soon realised what a threat Guan presented if he should unite with Liu Bei. Many generals, some acting under Cao's instructions and some on their own accord, pursued Guan as he passed through the gates. Some were slain in the process and eventually Cao personally endorsed the departure of Guan.
Hopefully with this explanation, nobody gets offended by the removal. :) --Plastictv 15:07, 29 August 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Fact and fiction

message: User 69.231.246.224 changed the text "Green Dragon Crescent Blade" to "Blue Moon Dragon". I posted the following on their talk page:
:Hi there. :-) I note that you've replaced all references to "Green Dragon Crescent Blade" with "Blue Dragon" (specifically on pages Guan Yu, Green Dragon Crescent Blade, and Guan dao). I wondered what your motivation is for this? I ask this in particular since the page Green Dragon Crescent Blade does reference the alternative name in the second paragraph: "It is also sometimes referred to as Blue Dragon...". Further the Chinese characters "青龍偃月刀" mentioned in the Guan dao article (in the first paragraph of the History section) do actually mean "Green Dragon Crescent Blade". Finally, in replacing the name with "Blue Dragon" you have removed all of the links to the page Green Dragon Crescent Blade. I thought I'd ask you first rather than undoing your changes without talking to you.
:Stelio 23:12, 2 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Green Dragon Crescent Blade

message: I have absolutely nothing negative to say about this article. It is long, detailed, and thorough, and even includes a good number of pictures. I especially like the top one, which is of great quality and clarity, and of a good, impressive size, without infringing upon the text at all. The article treats not only the historical Guan Yu, but also the fictional Guan Yu from the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, along with the portrayal of Guan Yu in gaming, and the worship of him in various places and faiths. I am nominating this for "Good Article" status, and, I don't see why not, for A-class status as well. If there is anything to be improved here, it is the general clean-up and maintenance that any article requires - nothing's 100% perfect. LordAmeth 01:41, 9 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: WP:MilHist Assessment

message: This is not a good article. Work on including footnotes. If you have no footnotes, do not bother nominating it as a  Good Article. --GoOdCoNtEnT 06:58, 10 August 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: An article should not need in-line footnotes as long as the content is good and references are listed. As I said above, this article has excellent length, detail, and choice of content, as well as some very nice pictures. LordAmeth 11:20, 10 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Good Article=

message: On the Guan Yu page it says:
"In 199 Liu Bei assassinated the Governor of Xu Zhou appointed by the rising warlord Cao Cao"
It is barely of any concern for the reputation of Guan Yu at first glance. But there is no indication from either the Romance or the Chronicle that the method of Che Zhou's demise was assassination, which implies unhonorable behavior on the assassin's part. Seeing how the Romance tells of Guan Yu meeting Che Zhou in broad daylight, fighting for a short while, then killing him as Che Zhou tried to run away, I think it is rather important that we discuss the legitimacy of Liu Bei's claim to the rulership of Xuzhou so that Guan Yu would not be accused of murdering an Imperial government official.
--64.180.11.169 05:48, 11 May 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: You're right. Chronicles says "先主之袭杀徐州刺史车胄", which doesn't imply assassination. My bad. --Plastictv 07:01, 11 May 2007 (UTC)

text: i cannot remember exactly why i chose "assassinated" when i wrote the article, maybe from impression i got from another section in Chronicles. i have no way of verifying that right now as i'm overseas, but i will soon be back and will do a thorough check then. And of course i'm aware that 刺史 is the governer's title. :) --Plastictv 00:14, 13 May 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Choice of wording 

message: On the Guan Yu page it says:
"that the surrender was to the Han emperor and not Cao Cao"
So how come the section title is still called "Surrender to Cao Cao"? If Guan Yu had surrendered to Cao Cao, he would most definitely have not been deified and revered as a household god. The technicality of this surrender is very very crucial to his reputation. Guan Yu understood, Zhang Liao understood, Cao Cao understood. Surrendering to Cao Cao is an act of defection. Surrender to Han is acceptable because both Cao Cao and Liu Bei were holding offices under the Han regime. --64.180.11.169 05:00, 12 May 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: You made a good point. How do you suggest we make it better? In fact, you seem to have a good understanding of these topics. Why don't you register? It's fast and free and makes editing and interacting much easier. :) --Plastictv 00:37, 13 May 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I think the corresponding title under the historical section is very impartial and quite appropriate for the Romance section. --64.180.233.181 06:30, 14 May 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Done! --Plastictv 07:20, 14 May 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Surrender to Cao Cao 

message: The page has been vandalized by some idiots who posted "roflmao" or something like that.  Request that a moderator locks this article and use a designated editor.(Psychoneko 17:21, 7 September 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Page Vandalism 

message: Being a very popular deity, I am surprised that there has been no joint effort to improve the scholarly level of this article up to FA status. I personally don't know enough about the subject, otherwise I would do it myself. I actually copied this articles layout--"History", then "Fiction"--for my Zhou Tong (archer) page. Now I know if I can get Zhou Tong to FA status, someone should surely be able to do it to this one. 
The one major problem I see is that many editors have a hard time distinguishing between history and fiction, despite there being an obvious split in the formatting. They believe what they read in Romance of the Three Kingdoms to be true history and consequently try to edit the "history" section as such. Then it gets reverted. I'm sure there are some scholarly books and papers out there that would greatly help improve upon this article and help broaden the line between history and fact. I would like to see a scholar's take on how Guan Yu's part in Romance has influenced Chinese society. I know he was one of Song Dynasty General Yue Fei's idols. I need to add that bit to the page.
Anyway, I hope to see this on the main page someday. --Ghostexorcist (talk) 17:33, 22 February 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Featured article 

message: I find that Guan Yu's fictional biography in Romance of the Three Kingdoms is far too detailed compared to his historical biography. I've attempted summarising and reorganising it but I'm rather confused on what should be excluded or included. I've removed some additional information which is not part of the biography, such as how the oath is linked to modern secret societies and so on. Also, I find that the biography is written in a biased tone so I've also attempted to make it sound as "neutral" as possible, although the fictional biography need not necessarily sound "neutral". Hopefully my efforts bring the article closer to FA status. Please discuss on how to improve on writing Guan Yu's fictional biography. I'm considering having a separate page for it, if it's going to be very long. Lonelydarksky (talk) 13:08, 26 March 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: The "In Romance of the Three Kingdoms" section shouldn't be a fictional biography, it is only supposed to detail significant differences and additions from the historical records. In Guan Yu's case, however, there are simply too many fictional stories and most if not all of them are important in constructing the Guan Yu people celebrate today. Perhaps the significant episodes (千里走單騎 comes to mind) can be made into a new article. There is also the List of fictitious stories in Romance of the Three Kingdoms. _dk (talk) 17:17, 26 March 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Fictional biography of Guan Yu 

message: I once heard a story that the idea of the red face came from a story where Guan was being chased and washed his face in a blood filled river. The blood stained his face red and meant his pursuers couldn't recognise him. Any info on this tale? (79.190.69.142 (talk) 21:52, 16 April 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Red Face

message: Guan Yu was said to have killed Lu Xiong at the age of 23 and 5 years later met Liu Bei and Zhang Fei. Now the Rebellion took place in 184AD so Guan Yu would have been 28 at the time he joined the volunteer force. going back 28 years would put Guan Yu's birth around 156AD, meaning Guan Yu was in fact older than Liu Bei which is quit the opposite to what Lu Guan Zhong has written in the novel "Romance of Three Kingdoms". Luo portrayes Liu Bei as the older brother. a debatable subject but it makes sense according to what this article page says about Guan Yu's early life.  —Preceding KingDavid47 comment added by 68.190.121.79 (talk) 12:59, 25 July 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: That's because ROTK is a fiction. You can't take Chinese fiction at face value. --Ghostexorcist (talk) 21:09, 25 July 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Guan Yu's Birth 

message: I think one of the very outstanding "features" of this article is that the fictional biography of Guan Yu is longer than the actual historical biography. Some of the events in the fictional biography have already been mentioned in List of fictitious stories in Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Adding them here again might seem repetitive. Why not just remove those "stories" and put a  tag there? _dk suggested above that we just highlight the differences between Guan Yu's fictional and historical biography in the fictional section. That's another way to do it, instead of writing an entire fictional biography. In terms of language, I think this article is generally fluent and free of grammatical or spelling errors. Another suggestion, how about splitting the worship of Guan Yu part into another separate article? Any ideas on how to promote this article to FA status? I think we should consolidate the ideas for improvements in this section instead of having them scattered all over the talk page. There are some good ideas above, such as this one by Ghostexorcist. _LDS (talk) 05:10, 26 November 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: How far away from Good Article... and Featured Article?

message: Is this article a biography about a historical figure, or a research of Guan Yuan's folklore and worship??? If someone answers both or finds the above question hard to answer, it's because the article involves much information without a coherent focus (resulting from the difference between a failed general in real-life and a perfect deity in folklore). Therefore, in order for this article to move towards the Good Article status, some aspects of it must be separated out to form another page. Also, by doing so I will be able to provide the cn in a "folklore page" of Guan (I am not going to give cn from an obscure origin, or even add folklore stuff in a historical page caz it's unpofessional and technically strange to do so). ----EkmanLi (talk) 10:45, 23 October 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: Is it really necessary to have one singular focus in an article? There are at least four aspects of the subject of Guan Yu: the historical biography; his depiction in the novel; his deification from folklore, opera, and the novel; and finally his modern image in popular culture based on all of the above. The current structure allows a narrative flow that leads the reader through the stages of the transformation of Guan Yu's image, and also present all aspect of "Guan Yu" in a neat package. Unless your proposed additions would greatly inflate the size of the article, my preference would be holding off the split until we have enough material to do so. _dk (talk) 12:14, 23 October 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: A coherent focus doesn't necessarily mean one singular focus, but I do agree that a single focus is highly priced. Let me clarify this, when I said earlier that "some aspects of the article could be split to form another page," I was thinking about moving the worship part out, caz that part can definitely be established on its own. There will not be a length concern for the worship article; if you just do copyedit, there're tons of researches done on very particular aspects of Guan's worship (virtually you can control the length very easily - even trivial things like Guan's role in Beijing opera can readily be translate-edited or copyedited into a dozen pages long if one wants to; though I personally think that would be boring). Since I avoid writing anything about religious stuff, I'm only proposing the idea; but I can give out links to some research papers (online edition) to copyedit upon, after 10/28, if anyone is interested to contribute to the issue. ----EkmanLi (talk) 12:49, 24 October 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: On second thought, splitting off the worship isn't such a bad idea. I only ask that if that happens, we leave a short summary of the worship on this page and give a link to the main article. The name of the new page can be something like Worship of Guan Yu or even Guan Di, hmm. _dk (talk) 06:31, 25 October 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: What's the nature of this article???

message: I thought a cattie is rounded to 1/2 kg, so Guan's sword of 82 cattie is about 40kg, and not 40lb. If no objections, then I'll change the number given in article. 213.1.15.144 (talk) 15:42, 5 December 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Cattie 

message: Maybe this huge statue in his birth city Yucheng should be mentioned: http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2014/05/landscapes-altered-by-the-worlds-largest-statues/ Lastdingo (talk) 03:29, 6 December 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  262 ft statue, 2010 

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Participate in the deletion discussion at the nomination page. —Community Tech bot (talk) 21:37, 20 February 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  A Commons file used on this page or its Wikidata item has been nominated for deletion