Trivia / Romance of the Three Kingdoms (1994)

• Ensemble Dark Horse: Cao Cao, helped greatly by Bao Guo'an's performance, which won him two Best Actor awards. The show was among the first adaptations to portray him more sympathetically, rather than an outright Evil Chancellor. The show's writers even wrote in some scenes of Cao Cao reciting some of his historical counterpart's poems to give him a more nuanced and cultured side.
• Irony as She Is Cast:
  • Liu Bei is played by Sun Yanjun, an actor with a similar surname to the Sun family, to whom Liu Bei was related to by way of marrying Sun Ren (aka Sun Xiangshang). The Suns would eventually betray Liu Bei, which would in turn lead to the deaths of both Guan Yu and Zhang Fei.
    • To top this all off, the trio would reunite in 1997's Sun Wu, a biographical series based on the life of Sun Tzu... to whom the Sun clan claimed descent from — and Sun Yanjun was the title character! In other words, Liu Bei is played by a man who shares a name with his traitorous in-laws who killed his oathsworn and caused him to die of grief (in the novel anyway), and later got to play the (claimed) ancestor of said in-laws.
  • Cao Cao was Bao Guo'an's third historical character role. His second, similar to Cao Cao, was Wei Zhang, the title character in 1991's The Great Prime Minister of Tang. His first? The rebellious bandit leader turned general and government official Song Jiang in 1984's adaptation of the The Water Margin. This becomes even more ironic since the former character shared a name with Cao Cao's kingdom of Wei, and was also a bandit before he became prime minister.
• Special Effects Failure: Most of the suits of armor used were actually reused from productions set in the Song Dynasty.
• Typecasting: Bao Guo'an swore off acting in any more historical dramas after this series wrapped up production... but then found himself accepting more historical character roles as his career went on.

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