ABSTRACT
The illustrations in the novel the Romance of the Three Kingdoms are the earliest visual data available today. They provide later generations with abundant resources of images for art design and historical topics, such as architectural decoration, vessel design, Chinese New Year paintings, comic books, cartoons, computer games, TV series and movies. Besides minor differences, the embroidered portraits in existing versions of the story from Qing Dynasty are rather similar. What are the characteristics of these images? It is the focus of this study.
