Records of the Grand Historian

A history of China from legendary antiquity through the early Han dynasty, compiled by Sima Qian around the first century BCE. Its biographies, annals, tables, treatises, and hereditary houses shaped later Chinese historiography.

Sima Qian: A Han dynasty historian who compiled the Records of the Grand Historian after serving at the imperial court. He composed the work and framed its historical judgments through an unusually broad range of sources.
Hereditary Houses (Shiji): Narratives of regional states and ruling lineages in one of the Shiji’s five sections. They preserve political histories that do not fit neatly into a single imperial chronology.
Western Han dynasty: The first half of the Han dynasty, ruling China from 206 BCE to 9 CE. Sima Qian compiled his history within this empire’s court and political institutions.
The Biographies of the Assassins: A Shiji chapter recounting the lives and deeds of five assassins from early Chinese history. Its vivid portraits show Sima Qian treating failed political violence as worthy of historical memory.
Ban Gu: A Han dynasty historian who wrote the History of the Han, a major successor to Sima Qian’s work. His more court-centered history continued the Shiji’s model while criticizing some of its judgments.
Twenty-Four Histories: A traditional collection of official histories covering Chinese dynasties from antiquity through the Ming. The Records became the model and first work in this later canon of dynastic histories.
Tables (Shiji): Chronological charts in the Shiji that align rulers, states, and events across time. They make overlapping political timelines legible alongside the work’s prose accounts.
Han Wudi: The seventh emperor of the Han dynasty, who ruled from 141 to 87 BCE. Sima Qian served as court historian during his reign and experienced its harsh political authority.
The Biography of Xiang Yu: A Shiji narrative of Xiang Yu, the rival warlord defeated by Liu Bang in the struggle for empire. Sima Qian places the fallen rival among the work’s imperial annals, complicating the victors’ account.
Book of Han: A history of the Western Han dynasty compiled by Ban Gu and other members of his family. It adopted the Shiji’s sections while narrowing its scope to a single dynasty.

Linked from 45 pages