The Records of the Grand Historian, also known in English by the Chinese name Shiji (史記), written from 109 BC to 91 BC, was the magnum opus of Sima Qian, in which he recounted Chinese history from the time of the Yellow Emperor until his own time. (The Yellow Emperor, traditionally dated ca. 2600 BC, is the first ruler whom Sima Qian considers sufficiently established as historical to appear in the Records.) As the first systematic Chinese historical text, the Records profoundly influenced Chinese historiography and prose. In its effect, the work is comparable to Herodotus and his Histories.

Layout

The 130 volumes (i.e. scrolls, now usually called "chapters") of the text classify information into several categories:

• 12 volumes of Benji (本紀) or "Imperial Biographies", contain the biographies of all prominent rulers from the Yellow Emperor to Qin Shihuang and the kings of Xia, Shang, and Zhou dynasties. The biographies of four emperors and one empress dowager of the Western Han before his age are also included. In addition, though Xiang Yu never actually ruled all the country, his biography was contained in this class.

• 10 volumes of Biao (表) or "Tables", are timelines of events.

• 8 volumes of Shu (書) or "Treatises", treat of economics and other topics of the time.

• 30 volumes of Shijia (世家) or "Biographies of the Feudal Houses and Eminent Persons", contain biographies of notable rulers, nobility and bureaucrats mostly from the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods.

• 70 volumes of Liezhuan (列傳) or "Biographies and Collective Biographies", contain biographies of important individual figures including Laozi, Mozi, Sunzi, and Jingke.

The Shiji is sometimes bundled with a prologue written by Sima Zhen during the Tang dynasty, some eight centuries later. It records rulers that existed before the Yellow Emperor that Sima Qian omitted because of the lack of reliable sources.

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. This has been attributed to the belief that the author critically used stories passed on from antiquity as part of his sources, balancing reliability and accuracy of the records. For instance, the material on Jing Ke's attempt at assassinating the first emperor of China was allegedly an eye-witness story passed on by the great-grandfather of his father's friend, who served as a low-ranking bureaucrat at court of Qin and happened to be attending the diplomatic ceremony for Jing Ke. 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. There are also discrepancies of fact between various portions of the work, probably reflecting Sima Qian's use of different source texts; from these it appears that his great work did not receive a final editorial revision.

Reliability

Joseph Needham wrote in 1954 that there were scholars doubting that Sima's Records of the Grand Historian had contained accurate information about such distant history, including the thirty kings of the Shang Dynasty (c. 1600–c. 1050 BC). While many scholars argued that Sima could not possibly have had access to written materials which detailed history a millennium before his age, Needham has another conclusion. Actually, the discovery of oracle bones at an excavation of the Shang Dynasty capital at Anyang (Yinxu) matched twenty-three of the thirty Shang kings that Sima listed. Needham writes that this remarkable archaeological find proves that Sima Qian "did have fairly reliable materials at his disposal—a fact which underlines once more the deep historical-mindedness of the Chinese."Needham, Joseph. (1972). Science and Civilization in China: Volume 1, Introductory Orientations. Richmond: Kingprint Ltd., reprinted by permission of the Cambridge University Press with first publication in 1954. ISBN 052105799X. Page 88, see: .
In The Terracotta Warriors by John Man, the bias in Sima Qian's epic is deconstructed. Man argues that, due to personal circumstances, including his own punishment by castration, Sima wrote favorably about the preceding emperors in order to discredit the contemporary emperor, and to make that emperor's reforms seem incompetent.

Contents

Annals

Benji (本紀, annals), 12 juan. Royal biographies in strict annalistic form that offer an overview of the most important events, especially from the time of the Zhou dynasty to that of the emperor of the Han dynasty.

Tables

Biao (表, tables), 10 tables: overview of the reigns of the successive lords of the feudal states from the time of the Zhou dynasty till that of the early Han. At the same time the most important events of their reigns are mentioned.

Essays

Shu (書, treatises), 8 juan. Each essay describes an area of state interest.

Genealogies

Shijia (世家, genealogies), 30 juan. Descriptions in chronicle form of the events of the states from the time of the Zhou dynasty until the early Han and eminent people.

Biographies

Liezhuan (列傳, exemplary lives, often called biographies), 70 juan. Biographies of important people. The biographies are limited to the description of the events that show the exemplary character of the subject, but in the Shiji is often supplemented with legends. One biography can treat two or more people if they are considered to belong to the same type. The last biographies describe the relations between the Chinese and the neighboring peoples.

Afterword

The last important section features an afterword (xu) that includes an autobiography by Sima Qian. He explains in it why and under what circumstances he wrote the Shiji.

See also

• Twenty-Four Histories