Records of the Grand Historian


The Records of the Grand Historian, also known by its Chinese name Shiji, is a monumental history of ancient China and the world finished around 94 BC by the Han dynasty official Sima Qian after having been started by his father, Sima Tan, Grand Astrologer to the imperial court. The work covers the world as it was then known to the Chinese and a 2500-year period from the age of the legendary Yellow Emperor to the reign of Emperor Wu of Han in the author's own time.
The Records has been called a "foundational text in Chinese civilization". After Confucius and the First Emperor of Qin, "Sima Qian was one of the creators of Imperial China, not least because by providing definitive biographies, he virtually created the two earlier figures." The Records set the model for the 24 subsequent dynastic histories of China. In contrast to Western historical works, the Records do not treat history as "a continuous, sweeping narrative", but rather break it up into smaller, overlapping units dealing with famous leaders, individuals, and major topics of significance.

History

The work that became Records of the Grand Historian was begun by Sima Tan, the Grand Astrologer of the Han dynasty court during the late 2nd century. Sima Tan drafted plans for the ambitious work and left behind some fragments and notes that may have been incorporated into the final text. After his death in 110, the project was continued and completed by his son and successor Sima Qian, who is generally credited as the work's author. The exact date of the Records completion is unknown, but it is certain that Sima Qian completed it before his death about 86, with one copy residing in the imperial capital of Chang'an and the other copy probably being stored in his home.
The original title of the work, as given by the author in the postface is Taishigongshu, or Records of the Grand Historian, although it was also known by a variety of other titles, including Taishigongji and Taishigongzhuan in ancient times. Eventually, Shiji, or Historical Records became the most commonly used title in Chinese. This title was originally used to refer to any general historical text, although after the Three Kingdoms period, Shiji gradually began to be used exclusively to refer to Sima Qian's work. In English, the original title, Records of the Grand Historian is in common use, although Historical Records, The Grand Scribe's Records, and Records of the Historian are also used.
Details of the Records early reception and circulation are not well known. A number of 1st century BC authors, such as the scholar Chu Shaosun, added interpolations to the Records, and may have had to reconstruct portions of it: ten of the original 130 chapters were lost in the Eastern Han period and seem to have been reconstructed later.
Beginning in the Northern and Southern dynasties and the Tang dynasty, a number of scholars wrote and edited commentaries to the Records. Most 2nd millennium editions of the Records include the commentaries of Pei Yin, Sima Zhen, and Zhang Shoujie. The combined commentaries of these three scholars is known as the Sanjiazhu. The primary modern edition of the Records is the ten-volume Zhonghua Book Company edition of 1959, and is based on an edition prepared by the Chinese historian Gu Jiegang in the early 1930s and includes the Sanjiazhu.

Manuscripts

There are two known surviving fragments of Records manuscripts from before the Tang dynasty, both of which are preserved in the Ishiyama-dera temple in Ōtsu, Japan. Portions of at least nine Tang dynasty manuscripts survive: three fragments discovered among the Dunhuang manuscripts in the early 20th century, and six manuscripts preserved in Japanese temples and museums, such as the Kōzan-ji temple in Kyoto and the Tōyō Bunko museum in Tokyo. A number of woodblock printed editions of the Records survive, the earliest of which date to the Song dynasty.

Contents

In all, the Records is about 526,500 Chinese characters long, making it four times longer than Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War and longer than the Old Testament.
Sima Qian conceived and composed his work in self-contained units, with a good deal of repetition between them. His manuscript was written on bamboo slips with about 24 to 36 characters each, and assembled into bundles of around 30 slips. Even after the manuscript was allowed to circulate or be copied, the work would have circulated as bundles of bamboo slips or small groups. Endymion Wilkinson calculates that there were probably between 466 and 700 bundles, whose total weight would have been, which would have been difficult to access and hard to transport. Later copies on silk would have been much lighter, but also expensive and rare. Until the work was transferred to paper many centuries later, circulation would have been difficult and piecemeal, which accounts for many of the errors and variations in the text.
Sima Qian organized the chapters of Records of the Grand Historian into five categories, which each comprise a section of the book.
; Basic Annals
; Tables
; Treatises
; Hereditary Houses
; Ranked Biographies

Style

Unlike subsequent official historical texts that adopted Confucian doctrine, proclaimed the divine rights of the emperors, and degraded any failed claimant to the throne, Sima Qian's more liberal and objective prose has been renowned and followed by poets and novelists. Most volumes of Liezhuan are vivid descriptions of events and persons. Sima Qian sought out stories from those who might have closer knowledge of certain historical events, using them as sources to balance the reliability and accuracy of historical records. For instance, the material on Jing Ke's attempt at assassinating the King of Qin incorporates an eye-witness account by Xia Wuju, a physician to the king of Qin who happened to be attending the diplomatic ceremony for Jing Ke, and this account was passed on to Sima Qian by those who knew Xia.
It has been observed that the diplomatic Sima Qian has a way of accentuating the positive in his treatment of rulers in the Basic Annals, but slipping negative information into other chapters, and so his work must be read as a whole to obtain full information. For example, the information that Liu Bang, in a desperate attempt to escape in a chase from Xiang Yu's men, pushed his own children off his carriage to lighten it, was not given in the emperor's biography, but in the biography of Xiang Yu. He is also careful to balance the negative with the positive, for example, in the biography of Empress Dowager Lu which contains startling accounts of her cruelty, he pointed out at the end that, despite whatever her personal life may have been, her rule brought peace and prosperity to the country.

Reliability and accuracy

Scholars have questioned the historicity of legendary kings of the ancient periods given by Sima Qian. Sima Qian began the Shiji with an account of the five rulers of supreme virtue, the Five Emperors, who modern scholars, such as those from the Doubting Antiquity School, believe to be originally local deities of the peoples of ancient China. Sima Qian sifted out the elements of the supernatural and fantastic which seemed to contradict their existence as actual human monarchs, and was therefore criticized for turning myths and folklore into sober history.
However, according to Joseph Needham, who wrote in 1954 on Sima Qian's accounts of the kings of the Shang dynasty :
While some aspects of Sima Qian's history of the Shang dynasty are supported by inscriptions on the oracle bones, there is, as yet, no clear corroborating evidence from archaeology on Sima Qian's history of the Xia dynasty.
There are also discrepancies of fact such as dates between various portions of the work. This may be a result of Sima Qian's use of different source texts.

Transmission and supplementation by other writers

After ca. 91 BC, the more-or-less completed manuscript was hidden in the residence of the author's daughter, Sima Ying, to avoid destruction under Emperor Wu and his immediate successor Emperor Zhao. The Shiji was finally disseminated during the reign of Emperor Xuan by Sima Qian's grandson, Yang Yun, after a hiatus of around twenty years.
The changes in the manuscript of the Shiji during this hiatus have always been disputed among scholars. That the text was more or less complete by ca. 91 BC is established in the Letter to Ren'an, composed in the Zhenghe era of Emperor Wu's reign. In this letter, Sima Qian describes his work as "spanning from the time of the Yellow Emperor to the present age and consisting of ten tables, twelve basic annals, eight treatises, thirty chapters on hereditary houses, and seventy biographies, together totaling 130 chapters." These numbers are likewise given in the postface to Shiji.
After his death, few people had the opportunity to see the whole work. However, various additions were still made to it. The historian Liu Zhiji reported the names of a total of fifteen scholars supposed to have added material to the Shiji during the period after the death of Sima Qian. Only the additions by Chu Shaosun are clearly indicated by adding "Mr Chu said,". Already in the first century AD, Ban Biao and Ban Gu claimed that ten chapters in Records of the Grand Historian were lacking. A large number of chapters dealing with the first century of the Han dynasty correspond exactly to the relevant chapters from the Book of Han. It is unclear whether those chapters initially came from the Shiji or from the Hanshu. Researchers Yves Hervouet and A.F.P. Hulsewé argued that the originals of those chapters of the Shiji were lost and they were later reconstructed using the corresponding chapters from the Hanshu.

Editions

The earliest extant copy of Records of the Grand Historian, handwritten, was made during the Southern and Northern Dynasties period. The earliest printed edition, called Shiji jijie, was published during the Northern Song dynasty. Huang Shanfu's edition, printed under the Southern Song dynasty, is the earliest collection of the Sanjiazhu commentaries on Records of the Grand Historian.
In modern times, the Zhonghua Book Company in Beijing has published the book in both simplified Chinese for mass consumption and traditional Chinese for scholarly study. The 1959 Sanjiazhu edition in traditional Chinese contains commentaries interspersed among the main text and is considered to be an authoritative modern edition.
The most well known editions of the Shiji are:
YearPublisherPrinting techniqueNotes
Southern Song dynasty Huang ShanfuBlock-printedAbbreviated as the Huang Shanfu edition
Ming dynasty, between the times of the Jiajing and Wanli Emperors The Northern and Southern Imperial AcademyBlock-printedpublished in 21 Shi. Abbreviated as the Jian edition
Ming dynastyPublisher: the bibliophile Mao Jin and his studio Ji Gu Ge Block-printedPublished in 17 Shi. Abbreviated as the Mao Ke edition or the Ji Gu Ge edition
Qing dynasty, in the time of the Qianlong Emperor Wu YingdianBlock-printedPublished in the Twenty-Four Histories, abbreviated as the Wu Yingdian edition
Qing dynasty, in the time of the Tongzhi Emperor Jinling Publishing House Block-printedProofreading and copy editing done by Zhang Wenhu. Published with the Sanjiazhu commentaries, 130 volumes in total. Abbreviated as the Jinling Ju or Jinling Publishing edition

Notable translations

English

Works cited

*