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Chapter 1
— Three Heroes Swear Brotherhood In The Peach Garden; One Victory Shatters The Rebels In Battlegrounds.
Usurper between the Former and Latter Han; named in the opening frame setting up the dynasty's recurring instability.
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Chapter 6
— Burning The Capital, Dong Zhuo Commits An Atrocity; Hiding The Imperial Hereditary Seal, Sun Jian Breaks Faith.
Wang Mang; cited in the same historical-recap paragraph.
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Chapter 30
— Shunning Advice, Yuan Shao Loses Leaders and Granaries; Using Strategy, Cao Cao Scores Victory At Guandu.
The usurper Yuan Shao ranks Cao Cao beneath - 'worse than Wang Mang and Dong Zhuo' - in the parley of insults before Guandu.
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Chapter 37
— Sima Hui Recommends A Scholar To Liu Bei; Liu Bei Pays Three Visits To The Sleeping Dragon Ridge.
The pivot of Cui Zhouping's cycle - Wang Mang's rebellion turned two centuries of order back to chaos.
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Chapter 43
— Zhuge Liang Disputes With The Southern Scholars; Lu Su Denounces The Majority Opinion.
The tyrant whom the ode-writing Yang Xiong stooped to serve - Zhuge Liang's warning about mean scholars.
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Chapter 56
— Cao Cao Feasts In The Bronze Bird Tower; Zhuge Liang Provokes Zhou Yu A Third Time.
The poem's counter-example to Duke Zhou: had Wang Mang died while still famed for deference to the learned, his treachery would never have been known - judge no one before the end.