Liu Bei assumes the imperial title south of Wudan
The Zizhi tongjian records Liu Bei, king of Hanzhong, assuming the imperial position south of Wudan.
What this does and does not establish
Wikisource revision 2457431; the preceding report that the Han emperor had been killed is explicitly presented as a rumor, not adopted here as fact. Sima Guang's ensuing discussion explains his use of Wei era dates without treating that convention as proof of exclusive legitimacy.
- Read through an AI working translation.
- Region
- East Asia
- Theme
- Politics and institutions
- Kind of record
- Placed in a year. A source places this in one year. It is listed under that year; no day precision is invented.
How it is dated
- Date reference
- Huangchu 2, lunar month 4, bingwu; inauguration of Zhangwu
- How we use it
- Year-level placement is limited to the dated source entry.
The date reference is this project’s reading of the source’s date. It may give an era name, a reign or a calendar in a normalised form rather than in the source’s own words; the dating notes say what the source prints.
Dating notes from the research record
Read zztj069.wikitext heading at row 75 and rows 77–89, including the accession and chronological explanation. Read sinica-221-01-08.html and sinica-221-12-27.html rows 31–32: 221-01-08 is Huangchu 1 gengzi 11/27; 221-12-27 is both Huangchu 2 and Zhangwu 1, xinchou, 11/26. Their year-end lunar dates agree across the Wei and Shu courts. The fourth month of xinchou is safely within civil AD 221. Original quotation begins at line 83, character 3996.
File names and line numbers in these notes, and in the limits above, refer to the project’s retained copies of the cited sources. Names such as calendar_headers are the project’s calendar look-ups, and “the investigator” is the research step that prepared the record.
Sources and quoted text
Line and character numbers under “Location” refer to the project’s retained copy of the source. For database rows, “Edition” names the batch of rows that was fetched together.
Source 1 · Supports the statement
Zizhi tongjian
Sima Guang and collaborators
Quoted text (Classical Chinese)
夏，四月，丙午，漢中王即皇帝位於武擔之南，AI working translation into English; not official or authoritative
In summer, in the fourth month, on bingwu, the king of Hanzhong assumed the imperial position south of Wudan,
Source credit and reuse conditions recorded for this source: Sima Guang et al., Zizhi tongjian, juan 69; Wikisource contributors, https://zh.wikisource.org/w/index.php?oldid=2457431; CC BY-SA 4.0; project English translations shared alike.
Exact source version
99a7e6e86e58d07e8d99cc9661bbf588c1d851ffbd960a661a03872897ec1a04Checks and changes
Source checked 2026-11-11. An independent AI evidence review supports this bounded, attributed wording. That review does not guarantee historical truth. How records are checked
No correction has been made to this record’s statement or limits.
Revision s201_zztj069_events_220_221_3
Exact revision fingerprint
53c6e09f5bd56d06458fc3486c9c0d7fa6dce3b85d6e01fe3b2d47ff771e3e02