Sima Qian · Civilisations
How Sima Qian created the <em>Shiji</em> - a vast, comprehensive history of the entire Chinese world from its origins to his own day - and founded the Chinese historical tradition.
In the first century BCE, the court official Sima Qian completed the most ambitious work of history the world had yet seen: the Shiji, the ‘Records of the Grand Historian.’ It was a comprehensive history of the entire Chinese world - from the legendary Yellow Emperor of remote antiquity, through the rise and fall of dynasties, down to Sima Qian’s own time under the mighty Emperor Wu of the Han. In 130 chapters and over half a million characters, it aimed to record and make sense of the whole sweep of Chinese civilisation. With it, Sima Qian founded the tradition of Chinese historiography that would continue, in his template, for two thousand years.
The Shiji’s ambition was breathtakingly comprehensive. It covered not just political and military events but the whole texture of civilisation: the institutions of ritual and music, the calendar and the heavens, rivers and economics, the lives not only of emperors and ministers but of philosophers, poets, assassins, merchants, physicians, diviners, harsh officials, wandering knights, and rebels. It reached back to the mythic origins of the Chinese people and forward to the living present. And it extended beyond China proper to the surrounding peoples - the Xiongnu nomads of the steppe, the kingdoms of the south and west. Like the comprehensive histories of other founding historians, it took the entire human world of its civilisation as its subject.
The Shiji became the foundational model for the entire subsequent tradition of Chinese history-writing - one of the longest continuous historiographical traditions in the world. For the next two thousand years, each Chinese dynasty would commission an official history of its predecessor, following the structure and conventions Sima Qian established: the annals, tables, treatises, and especially the biographies. The ‘Twenty-Four Histories’ that record three millennia of Chinese civilisation all descend from Sima Qian’s template. No other historian has so completely founded and shaped a civilisation’s entire way of recording its past. The Shiji is at once the first masterpiece and the permanent model of Chinese historiography.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that Sima Qian’s Shiji created Chinese historiography with a comprehensive, multi-part structure. Explain its scope and form, and what was new about it, in your own words.
Leads to Herodotus.
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