Shu were established. Although they proved unsuccessful and ended up as a stalemate, the expeditions have become some of the best-known conflicts of the Three Kingdoms period and one of its few battles during which each side (Shu and Wei) fought with hundreds of thousands of troops, as opposed to other battles in which one side had a huge numerical advantage.

The expeditions are dramatised and romanticised in the 14th-century historical novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms, which includes