Sima Qian

Sima Qian was an official of the Han dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE) who lived during the long reign of Emperor Wu, one of the most powerful rulers in Chinese history. He is remembered for one book, the Shiji, which he completed around 91 BCE. It was the first history to try to cover the entire known past of the Chinese world in one work.

His title, taishi ling, is often translated as "Grand Historian", but it could equally be rendered "Grand Astrologer" or "Grand Scribe". The office was responsible for astronomy, the calendar, omens and the keeping of documents. Writing a comprehensive history was not strictly part of the job; it was a personal project begun by his father, Sima Tan, who held the same post.

Sima Qian is famous not only for what he wrote but for the price he paid to write it. After defending a disgraced general in 99 BCE, he was condemned and chose to undergo castration rather than die, so that he could finish his work. His reflections on this choice, especially in his Letter to Ren An, have made him a symbol of integrity and endurance in East Asian culture.

Sima Qian was born in Xiayang, near the Longmen ("Dragon Gate") gorge of the Yellow River. His birth year is uncertain: scholars have argued for about 145 BCE or about 135 BCE, based on differing early commentaries. His family claimed descent from ancient court historians. His father, Sima Tan, was appointed Grand Astrologer in Chang'an and wrote a short essay comparing the "Six Schools" of thought, which praised Daoism.

Sima Qian received a classical education and, according to his own postface, could read old-style scripts by the age of ten. At about twenty he set out on long journeys: south to the Yangzi and the Huai, to Mount Kuaiji where the flood-tamer Yu was said to be buried, and to Qufu, the home of Confucius, where he watched students practise the old rituals. Later he became a palace attendant (langzhong) and, around 111 BCE, was sent on an official mission to the newly conquered south-west.

In 110 BCE Emperor Wu performed the great feng and shan sacrifices at Mount Tai, the most solemn rites of kingship. Sima Tan fell ill and was not able to take part, which he felt as a disaster. On his deathbed he took his son's hand, wept, and asked him to complete the history he had begun, so that the deeds of worthy rulers, loyal ministers and righteous men would not be forgotten. Sima Qian promised to do so.

About two years later Sima Qian succeeded his father as Grand Astrologer, gaining access to the imperial library and archives. In 104 BCE he took part in the reform of the calendar that produced the Taichu ("Grand Beginning") calendar, and around this time he began writing in earnest.

In 99 BCE the general Li Ling led a small force of infantry deep into the steppe against the Xiongnu, the nomadic confederation that was Han China's greatest rival. After fierce fighting against a much larger army he was surrounded and surrendered. At court, officials who had praised him now condemned him. Sima Qian, who barely knew Li Ling, spoke in his defence, pointing to his past loyalty and suggesting that he might have surrendered in order to repay the emperor later.

Emperor Wu took this as an attack on the commander of the main campaign, Li Guangli, the brother of the emperor's favourite consort. Sima Qian was charged and sentenced to death. Under Han law the sentence could be commuted by a large payment or by castration. He could not pay, and, as he later wrote, no friend spoke for him. He chose castration, a punishment considered so humiliating that a gentleman was expected to take his own life instead.

Sima Qian explained his choice in a letter to his friend Ren An, who was facing execution after the political upheaval of 91 BCE. In it he wrote that every man must die, but a death may be "weightier than Mount Tai or lighter than a goose feather". He had endured disgrace, he said, because his work was unfinished: he wished to "investigate the boundary between heaven and humanity, understand the changes of past and present, and complete the words of one school". The letter, preserved in Ban Gu's Book of Han, became one of the most famous prose texts in Chinese literature.

After his punishment Sima Qian served as zhongshu ling, a palace secretary post normally held by eunuchs, which kept him close to the emperor. The Letter to Ren An is the last clear record of his life. Nobody knows when or how he died; he may have died around the same time as Emperor Wu, in 87 or 86 BCE.

The Shiji has 130 chapters (juan) in five parts. The Basic Annals (benji, 12 chapters) trace the main ruling houses and rulers in chronological order, from the Yellow Emperor through the Xia, Shang and Zhou dynasties, the Qin, and the Han up to Emperor Wu. The Tables (biao, 10 chapters) are grids that line up the chronologies of different states and noble families, allowing readers to compare events at a glance.

The Treatises (shu, 8 chapters) deal with institutions and knowledge: rites, music, pitch-pipes, the calendar, astronomy, the feng and shan sacrifices, rivers and canals, and economics. The Hereditary Houses (shijia, 30 chapters) tell the histories of the feudal states of the Zhou period and of great families of the early Han.

The Arrayed Traditions or Biographies (liezhuan, 70 chapters) make up more than half the book. They include single and group biographies of statesmen, generals, philosophers and poets, as well as chapters on groups such as assassins, wandering knights, harsh officials, money-makers, diviners and jesters, and accounts of foreign peoples such as the Xiongnu, the peoples of the south-west, and Chaoxian (Joseon) in the Korean peninsula. The last chapter is Sima Qian's own postface, which tells his family history and the purpose of the book.

Many chapters end with a short comment beginning "The Grand Scribe says" (Taishigong yue), in which the author gives personal judgements, adds information from his travels, or expresses sympathy. This mixture of structured record and personal voice is one of the Shiji's most distinctive features.

The Shiji is admired as literature as much as history. Sima Qian wrote dramatic scenes full of dialogue: the Banquet at Hongmen, where the future founder of the Han, Liu Bang, narrowly escapes assassination by his rival Xiang Yu; the assassin Jing Ke's attempt on the life of the king of Qin, the future First Emperor; and Xiang Yu's last stand, surrounded and singing a farewell song to his consort.

His choices were bold. He placed Xiang Yu, who never ruled a unified empire, and the Empress Dowager Lü, a woman who dominated the early Han court, among the Basic Annals, because in practice they held supreme power. He placed Confucius, who never ruled a state, among the Hereditary Houses, and Chen She, a peasant who led the first revolt against Qin, there too. These decisions show that he classified people by their historical importance, not only by formal rank.

He also showed interest in people outside the elite. Chapters on merchants and money-makers treat commerce seriously, and the chapter on wandering knights praises men who kept their word even when they broke the law. His biography of the Qin First Emperor describes the unification of China, the burning of books and the building of the emperor's tomb with rivers of mercury, details that continue to guide archaeologists at the site of the Terracotta Army.

At the same time, the Shiji is critical of power, including power in his own day. His accounts of Emperor Wu's costly wars, harsh officials and pursuit of immortality have often been read as quiet criticism of the emperor who punished him. Whether and how far he let personal resentment shape his history is still debated.

Sima Qian drew on a wide range of materials: the Confucian classics such as the Book of Documents and the Spring and Autumn Annals with its commentaries; the Discourses of the States and the Intrigues of the Warring States; genealogies; Qin and Han court documents in the imperial archives; the writings of philosophers; and oral traditions he collected in his travels. Where sources disagreed, he sometimes recorded more than one version, or said that he could not decide.

He was aware of the problem of legend. In the Basic Annals of the Five Emperors he notes that stories about the Yellow Emperor are often "not refined or proper", and that he chose what seemed most reliable after comparing texts with what elders told him in different regions. This is an early example of source criticism, although by modern standards he also accepted much that is legendary.

His reliability in some areas has been dramatically confirmed. In 1917 the scholar Wang Guowei showed that the list of Shang kings in the Shiji closely matches the names recorded on oracle bones excavated at Anyang, the Shang capital, which had been rediscovered only at the end of the 19th century. This showed that Sima Qian had access to genuine, very old records for the Shang dynasty. Excavated bamboo and silk manuscripts of the Warring States and Han periods have since both confirmed and complicated other parts of his account.

According to his postface, Sima Qian made two copies of his book: one to be stored "in a famous mountain", that is, kept safe, and one in the capital. The work seems not to have circulated widely in his lifetime. It became better known through his grandson Yang Yun, the son of his daughter, during the reign of Emperor Xuan (74–48 BCE).

By the Eastern Han period, ten chapters were reported missing. Some were filled in by later writers; the scholar Chu Shaosun, active in the late first century BCE, added passages that are marked with his name. Which chapters are later reconstructions, and how much of the transmitted text reflects Sima Qian's own words, are still discussed.

In the medieval period three commentaries became standard and are printed with the text: by Pei Yin (5th century), Sima Zhen and Zhang Shoujie (both 8th century). The modern standard edition was published by the Zhonghua Book Company in Beijing in 1959. The Shiji has been translated fully or partly into many languages, including Édouard Chavannes's French translation (from 1895), Burton Watson's English selections, and the multi-volume English translation led by William H. Nienhauser Jr.; there are also complete translations into Korean and Japanese.

The Shiji created the model for Chinese official history. Ban Gu's Book of Han (Hanshu), completed in the late first century CE, adapted Sima Qian's form to cover a single dynasty. After that, each dynasty's official history followed the annals-and-biographies (jizhuan) form, producing the series later known as the Twenty-Four Histories, with the Shiji at its head.

Ban Gu also criticized Sima Qian: for placing Daoism before the Confucian classics, for praising wandering knights and merchants, and for straying from strict orthodoxy. These criticisms shaped how the Shiji was read for centuries, even as its literary quality was universally admired. From the Tang dynasty, writers of the "ancient prose" (guwen) movement, such as Han Yu, took Sima Qian's style as a model of powerful, clear writing.

The form spread across East Asia. In Korea, Kim Busik's Samguk sagi (1145), the oldest surviving Korean history, uses annals, tables, treatises and biographies in the same way, as does the later Goryeosa. Japanese and Vietnamese court historians also knew and imitated the Shiji. The Shiji's chapter on Chaoxian is itself one of the key sources for early Korean history, recording the kingdom of Wiman Joseon and its conquest by Han in 108 BCE.

Sima Qian's personal story has also had lasting power. His phrase about deaths "weightier than Mount Tai or lighter than a goose feather" is still quoted, for example in Mao Zedong's 1944 speech "Serve the People". In Korea, Japan and China he is a model of the scholar who endures humiliation to fulfil a mission, and his hometown near Hancheng maintains a shrine and tomb in his honour.

Who wrote the Shiji? Sima Tan began the project, and scholars have long tried to identify which chapters or passages he wrote. Some "Grand Scribe says" comments may refer to Tan rather than Qian, since both held the title. Later additions by Chu Shaosun and others, and the loss of ten chapters, add further layers. Most scholars accept that Sima Qian was the main author and shaper of the whole, but the text should be understood as the product of a family project and a long transmission.

How subjective is the Shiji? Stephen Durrant's The Cloudy Mirror (1995) argued that tensions in Sima Qian's own life, especially his mutilation and his relationship to Confucius and to his father, shape the narrative, and that the book reflects both a drive for order and a sense of injustice. Grant Hardy's Worlds of Bronze and Bamboo (1999) argued instead that the Shiji's fragmented structure, with the same events told differently in different chapters, is a deliberate way of modelling a complex world, a kind of "microcosm" rather than a single linear narrative. Others emphasize the constraints of court service and the risk of open criticism.

Even the Letter to Ren An has come under scrutiny. A 2016 study by Stephen Durrant, Wai-yee Li, Michael Nylan and Hans van Ess examined its authenticity and its role in shaping the legend of Sima Qian as a suffering author. Some scholars suspect later editing or even composition by others; many others continue to accept it as genuine. The debate matters because much of what we believe about Sima Qian's motives comes from this single letter and from the postface.

Sima Qian is often compared to Herodotus, the Greek "father of history", who lived about three centuries earlier. Both travelled widely, collected oral traditions and wove together geography, ethnography and narrative. But the Shiji is shaped by different ideas: it is concerned with the rise and fall of dynasties, the moral lessons of history in the Confucian tradition, and the cosmological cycles studied by an astrologer. It also has a more systematic structure, combining annals, tables and treatises with biography.

Historians today use the Shiji carefully. For early periods such as the Xia dynasty it preserves traditions that cannot be confirmed by archaeology; for the Shang, parts are confirmed by oracle bones; for the Warring States, excavated texts such as bamboo annals sometimes contradict its chronology. For the Qin and early Han, it is often the only detailed narrative source, and modern scholars compare it with excavated legal and administrative documents to test its claims.

Scholars also debate how Sima Qian understood his task. The postface cites Confucius's Spring and Autumn Annals as a model of history that passes moral judgement, but Sima Qian modestly denies that he is equal to it. His aim, to "understand the changes of past and present", suggests an interest in patterns of change and causation, including the role of fate and heaven, which he questions openly in the biography of Bo Yi and Shu Qi: if heaven favours the good, why do good people suffer? This question, raised by a man who had suffered himself, gives the Shiji its enduring philosophical depth.