Everything about Shiji totally explained
The
Records of the Grand Historian 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 impact, the work is comparable to
Herodotus and his
Histories.
The 130 volumes (for example scrolls, now usually called "chapters") of the text classify information into several categories:
- 12 volumes of Benji (本紀) or "Basic Annals", 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.
- 30 volumes of Shijia (世家) or "Hereditary Houses", 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 "Memoirs", contain biographies of important individual figures including Laozi, Mozi, Sunzi, and Jingke.
- 8 volumes of Shu (書) or "Essays", treat of economics and other topics of the time.
- 10 volumes of Biao (表)or "Chronologies", are timelines of events.
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 fact 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 first emperor of
China was 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 didn't receive a final editorial polish.
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