The Records of the Three Kingdoms, is a Chinese imperial history that covers the end of the Han dynasty and the following Three Kingdoms period (220–280 CE). It is widely regarded as the official and authoritative source text for these periods. Written by Chen Shou after the Jin dynasty reunited China in the third century, the work compiles the political, social, and military events within rival states Cao Wei, Shu Han and Eastern Wu into a single text organized by individual biography.

The Chinese classics or canonical texts are the works of Chinese literature authored prior to the establishment of the imperial Qin dynasty in 221 BC. Prominent examples include the Four Books and Five Classics in the Neo-Confucian tradition, themselves an abridgment of the Thirteen Classics. The Chinese classics used a form of written Chinese consciously imitated by later authors, now known as Classical Chinese. A common Chinese word for "classic" literally means 'warp thread', in reference to the techniques by which works of this period were bound into volumes.