Hi,
I was reading Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and it came to my attention that the characters from the province of Xiliang in north China have cannabalistic tendencies; they eat their enemies' flesh, skin them, and drink their blood mixed with wine. So I'm wondering how historically accurate this is, as the novel is known for being biased in several ways and isn't a reliable account of the period.
Was cannibalism common in ancient China as a means to desecrate your foes after their death? If so, in what context(s) was it practiced, and by what people?
Off the top of my head, I don't recall the novel describing Xiliang as mass cannibals, which chapter was this?
In three kingdoms china, when cannibalism happened it meant something had gone wrong, Liu Bei's troops after losing Xu and the Wei officer Wang Zhong two such known examples of such desperation. That ability for people to feed themselves had, thanks to famine and war, broken down completely and it was an ugly necessity in such a times.
It wasn't used for desecration nor something expected to be done outside such an emergency, I'm certainly unaware of such any examples of deliberate use from the SGZ or the bits of ZZTJ covering that period.