Three Kingdoms: Selling Chili Sauce in the Late Han Dynasty to Recruit Famous Generals

Wang Jianguo, 42, from Henan, drives a small blue truck delivering produce to supermarkets.

During a delivery in a torrential rainstorm, he swerves to avoid falling rocks and crashes into a mountainside cave, truck and all. When he opens his eyes again, he has transmigrated to the year 184, in Runan Commandery at the end of the Han dynasty.

He has half a tank of gas, no phone signal, and a truck loaded with a thousand kilograms of apples, 250 kilograms of sweet potatoes, 50 kilograms of bird's eye chilies, three boxes of instant noodles, two bottles of liquor, a bag of compound fertilizer, plus woven sacks, plastic sheeting, flashlights, a radio, solar panels...

These things are worth next to nothing in the modern world, but in this era of chaos, where corpses litter the land, they are his lifeline.

He trades a sack of sweet potatoes for his first wife, A Xiu, builds his first greenhouse with plastic sheeting, grows out-of-season peppers, and earns his first fortune selling chili sauce.

He wins over the food-loving generals Dian Wei and Xu Chu with liquor, chili sauce, and braised pork. He uses a folding bicycle to lure the young Zhao Yun into joining him, and tricks 15-year-old Zhuge Liang into volunteering as his strategist with a solar-powered flashlight and a radio.

From a small farmer in Runan Commandery to buying a hundred mu of land and building Jianguo Farmstead, then defending a city with homemade bombs during the Yellow Turban Rebellion and being appointed Governor of Runan, he is propelled forward step by step by the times.

He's afraid of dying, talkative, greedy, and scared of his wife. His catchphrase is, "Oh, my goodness!" When danger strikes, his first thought is, "Can I get compensation?" But when it really matters, he protects everyone around him.

In the end, pressured by the generals in a coup, he is forced to don the imperial robes and become a great emperor