The Shiji (), also known as Records of the Grand Historian or The Grand Scribe's Records (), is a Chinese historical text that is the first of the Twenty-Four Histories of imperial China. It was written during the late 2nd and early 1st centuries BC by the early Han dynasty historian Sima Qian, building upon work begun by his father Sima Tan. The work covers a 2,500-year period from the age of the legendary Yellow Emperor to the reign of Emperor Wu of Han in the author's own time, and describes the world as it was known to the Chinese of the Western Han dynasty.
The Shiji has been called a "foundational text in Chinese civilization". Following Confucius and Qin Shi Huang, "Sima Qian was one of the creators of Imperial China; by providing definitive biographies, he effectively shaped the enduring images of these two earlier figures." The Shiji set the model for all subsequent dynastic histories of China. In contrast to Western historiographical conventions, the Shiji does not treat history as "a continuous, sweeping narrative", but rather breaks it up into smaller, overlapping units dealing with famous leaders, individuals, and major topics of significance.
History Title The original title of the work, as given by the author in the postscript, is Taishigongshu (), or Records of the Grand Historian. However, the book 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 title is variously translated as Records of the Grand Historian, Historical Records, The Grand Scribe's Records, or Records of the Historian, although other titles are sometimes used.
Textual history
The work that became the Shiji was begun by Sima Tan, who was Grand Historian ( , also translated "Grand Scribe") of the Han dynasty court during the late 2nd 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 Sima's death in the Shiji 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 completion of the is unknown. It is certain that Sima Qian completed it before which was approximately the year he died, with one copy residing in the imperial capital of Chang'an (present-day Xi'an) and the other copy probably being stored in Sima's home.
Little is known about the early reception and circulation of the Shiji. Several 1st-century BC authors, such as the scholar Chu Shaosun (; 32–7 BC), added interpolations to it. Ten of the Shiji original 130 chapters were lost in the Eastern Han period (AD 25–220) and seem to have been reconstructed later.
The first commentaries to the Shiji date from the Northern and Southern dynasties (420–589) and the early Tang dynasty (618–907). Most historical editions of the Shiji included the commentaries of Pei Yin (, 5th century), Sima Zhen (early 8th century), and Zhang Shoujie (early 8th century).; . The primary modern edition of the Shiji is the ten-volume Zhonghua Book Company edition published in 1959 (revised in 1982), which is based on an edition created in the early 1930s by the Chinese historian Gu Jiegang.
Manuscripts Only two fragments of pre-Tang dynasty Shiji manuscripts have survived to the present, and both are held by the Ishiyama-dera temple in Ōtsu, Japan. Portions of 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. Several woodblock printed editions of the Shiji survive, the earliest of which date to the Song dynasty (9601279).
Contents
The Shiji is around 526,500 Chinese characters in length, making it four times longer than Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War and longer than the Hebrew Bible. 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 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 the Shiji into five categories, which each comprise a section of the book.
"Basic Annals" The "Basic Annals" (běnjì ) make up the first 12 chapters of the Shiji, and are largely similar to records from the ancient Chinese court chronicle tradition, such as the Spring and Autumn Annals. The first five cover either periods, such as the Five Emperors, or individual dynasties, such as the Xia, Shang, and Zhou dynasties. The last seven cover individual rulers, starting with the First Emperor of Qin and progressing through the first emperors of the Han dynasty. In this section, Sima chose to also include de facto rulers of China, such as Xiang Yu and Empress Dowager Lü, while excluding rulers who never held any real power, such as Emperor Yi of Chu and Emperor Hui of Han.
"Tables" Chapters 13 to 22 are the "Tables" (biǎo ), which comprise one genealogical table and nine other chronological tables. They show reigns, important events, and royal lineages in table form, which Sima Qian stated that he did because "the chronologies are difficult to follow when different genealogical lines exist at the same time."Shiji 130: 3319, cited in . Each table except the last one begins with an introduction to the period it covers.
"Treatises" The "Treatises" (shū , sometimes called "Monographs") is the shortest of the five Shiji sections, and contains eight chapters (23–30) on the historical evolution of ritual, music, pitch pipes, the calendar, astronomy, sacrifices, rivers and waterways, and financial administration.
"Hereditary Houses" The "Hereditary Houses" (shìjiā ) is the second largest of the five Shiji sections, and spans chapters 31 to 60. Within this section, the earlier chapters are very different in nature than the later chapters. Many of the earlier chapters are chronicle-like accounts of the leading states of the Zhou dynasty, such as the states of Qin and Lu, and two of the chapters go back as far as the Shang dynasty. The later chapters, which cover the Han dynasty, contain biographies.
"Ranked Biographies" The "Ranked Biographies" (lièzhuàn , usually shortened to "Biographies") is the largest of the five Shiji sections, covering chapters 61 to 130, and accounts for 42% of the entire work. The 69 "Biographies" chapters mostly contain biographical profiles of about 130 outstanding ancient Chinese men, ranging from the moral paragon Boyi from the end of the Shang dynasty, to the legendary founder of Taoism, Laozi, to some of Sima Qian's near contemporaries. About 40 of the chapters are dedicated to one particular man, but some are about two related figures, while others cover small groups of figures who shared certain roles, such as assassins, caring officials, or Confucian scholars. Unlike most modern biographies, the accounts in the "Biographies" give profiles using anecdotes to depict morals and character, with "unforgettably lively impressions of people of many different kinds and of the age in which they lived." The "Biographies" have been popular throughout Chinese history, and have provided a large number of set phrases, or chengyu, still used in modern Chinese.
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 (later Emperor Gaozu of Han), in a desperate attempt to escape in a chase from Xiang Yu's men, pushed his own children off his carriage to lighten it, is 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 points out at the end that, despite whatever her personal life may have been, her rule brought peace and prosperity to the country.
The vivid accounts of historical events recorded in the Shiji have made it a widely admired and frequently anthologized body of prose writing. Along with the Zuozhuan, the Shiji serves as a particularly rich source of chengyu (four-character idiomatic phrases used in modern Chinese prose and speech). The language of the Shiji, while broadly categorized as literary Chinese, is relatively accessible to contemporary students with only modest training in the literary language. In contrast to prose from later in the imperial period that utilize a fully fossilized literary standard modeled after the pre-Qin classics, the language of the Shiji still shows significant influences by the author's spoken language. This is evidenced by the appearance of certain grammatical innovations not found in pre-Qin writing and by the proliferation of disyllabic compounds. Disyllabic compounds became increasingly common in the spoken language of the Han dynasty and eventually replaced monosyllabic words as the most common form of vocabulary. In the opening sentence of the text (from the "Basic Annals of the Five Emperors"), for instance, Sima Qian uses the adjectives 敦敏 'sincere and astute' and 聰明 'intelligent' to describe the Yellow Emperor. Both of these disyllabic compounds remain in use in modern Chinese.
Source materials Sima's family were hereditary historians to the Han emperor. Sima Qian's father Sima Tan served as Grand Historian, and Sima Qian succeeded to his position. Thus he had access to the early Han dynasty archives, edicts, and records. Sima Qian was a methodical, skeptical historian who had access to ancient books, written on bamboo and wooden slips, from before the time of the Han dynasty. Many of the sources he used did not survive. He not only used archives and imperial records, but also interviewed people and traveled around China to verify information. In his first chapter, "Annals of the Five Emperors", he writes,