Shiji

Author: (Chinese) Si Hanzhuan; Revised by Yi Xing, Sun Jiazheng
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2008-05-01
Features: The Records of the Grand Historian (Shiji) holds the top position among the "Twenty-Four Histories" and is China's first comprehensive historical record in the biographical style, a timeless masterpiece of both history and literature. The author, Sima Qian, inherited the task of writing Shiji from his father. Despite offending Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty, leading to imprisonment and torture, he remained undeterred and ultimately achieved great success, becoming one of China's greatest thinkers, historians, and writers. Shiji records approximately three thousand years of Chinese history, from the Yellow Emperor to Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty during the Taichu period (104–101 BC), and is divided into twelve chronicles, ten tables, eight treatises, thirty family histories, and seventy biographies, totaling one hundred and thirty chapters. For the following two thousand years in the feudal society, historians widely adopted the biographical style pioneered by this book to compile historical works. The renowned writer Lu Xun once highly praised Shiji, calling it "the peerless chronicles of historians, an unrhymed Laozi."