Three Visits to the Thatched Hut

The empire is coming apart. Warlords hold the provinces and fight each other over what is left, and the emperor is a boy in somebody else's hands.

Liu Bei (Liú Bèi) has courage, a thin claim of kinship with the imperial house, and two sworn brothers who would die for him: Guan Yu (Guān Yǔ), who thinks before he speaks, and Zhang Fei (Zhāng Fēi), who does not. What he has never had is land. Every town he has held he has been driven out of, and he is living now on another lord's charity with a few hundred men. What he lacks, an old scholar tells him, is not soldiers but a plan — and the man who could give him one is farming a hillside a day's ride away, at a place called Longzhong (Lóngzhōng). People there call him the Sleeping Dragon. His name is Zhuge Liang (Zhūgě Liàng).

There is a rule about men like that, and everyone in this story knows it except Zhang Fei: you do not send for such a man, you go to him — and how many times you are willing to go is the measure of how much you mean it. Liu Bei has the gifts packed and the horses ready. The trouble is that the man is not often at home.