Diaochan was one of the Four Beauties of ancient China. Although based on a minor historical personage, she is mostly a fictional character. She is best known for her role in the 14th-century historical novel "Romance of the Three Kingdoms", which romanticises the events in the late Eastern Han dynasty and the Three Kingdoms period. In the novel, she has a romance with the warrior Lü Bu and causes him to betray and kill his foster father, the tyrannical warlord Dong Zhuo. She was praised in tales as woman of uneven beauty who did what no other hero in China was able to accomplish, put an end to Dong Zhuo's regime of terror and the eventual end of Lu Bu; triggering the events that would lead to the formation of the Three kingdoms: Cao Wei, Eastern Wu and Shu Han.