Sima Qian Writes Records of the Grand Historian

Sima Qian (c. 145–c. 86 BC), courtesy name Zichang, a native of Xiayang (present-day Hancheng, Shaanxi), was a great historian and writer of ancient China. His father Sima Tan served under Emperor Wu as Grand Historian, in charge of astronomy, the calendar and the state's records. He read ancient texts at ten and from twenty traveled to famous mountains and rivers gathering material. On his deathbed his father charged him with completing a history; after succeeding as Grand Historian, Sima Qian could read the court's vast collection of records. In 99 BC he angered Emperor Wu by defending Li Ling, who had surrendered to the Xiongnu, and was imprisoned and castrated, suffering terribly in body and spirit. Yet, holding to the thought that “death comes to all, but may be weightier than Mount Tai or lighter than a feather,” he endured the shame and wrote on, completing around 91 BC the great work Records of the Grand Historian (Shiji). It covers about 3,000 years from the legendary Yellow Emperor to the Taichu era of Emperor Wu, in 130 chapters of roughly 520,000 characters: 12 basic annals, 10 tables, 8 treatises, 30 hereditary houses and 70 biographies. It created the biographical form centered on people, later followed by the dynastic “standard histories,” and is China's first universal history in that form and the first of the Twenty-Four Histories. Sima Qian wrote without flattery or concealment; he wrote not only of emperors and ministers but also of knights-errant, merchants and assassins, and placed Chen Sheng among the hereditary houses and Xiang Yu among the basic annals. Vividly written, with sharply drawn figures, it is also a fine work of literature; Lu Xun called it “the historians' unrivaled song, a Lisao without rhyme.”