Civilisations
145 to 86 BC, Han China
The grand historian and the shaping of Chinese memory.
Start learning Sima →How Sima Qian created the Shiji - a vast, comprehensive history of the entire Chinese world from its origins to his own day - and founded the Chinese historical tradition.
The terrible choice at the heart of Sima Qian’s life - to suffer castration and disgrace rather than die, so that he might live to complete his history.
How Sima Qian actually gathered and weighed his vast materials - travelling, comparing sources, exercising skepticism - within the Confucian ideal of transmitting the past rather than inventing it.
Sima Qian’s anguished question, born of his own undeserved suffering - why do the good so often suffer and the wicked prosper, and is Heaven’s justice real at all?
Sima Qian’s great innovation - making the biography of individuals the heart of history, and creating a gallery of human lives of every kind that brings the past vividly alive.
epoché — a humanities education that remembers you.