Records of The Grand Historian (90BCE)

Many may still remember the 2002 martial art film directed by Zhang Yimou and starring Jet Li. The name is Hero  and it is based on the historical event of Jing Ke’s assassination attempt on the first emperor of China, King of Qin in 227 BC. 

The original story is explicitly detailed in the Records of The Grand Historian, also known by its Chinese name Shiji(史記). A monumental history of ancient China and the world, it was completed around 94 BC by the Western Han Dynasty official Sima Qian after having been started by his father, Sima Tan, Grand Astrologer to the imperial court. 

In this episode, we will explore the historical as well as literary values of the Records of the Grand Historian, which is a foundational text in Eastern civilization. 

Readings:
Burton Waston, trans. Records of The Grand Historian
for aficionados in classical Chinese: Shiji(史記)
Nicola Di Cosmo, Ancient China and its Enemies: The Rise of Nomadic Power in East Asian History

This podcast is sponsored by Riverside, the most efficient platform for video recording and editing for podcasters.

Buzzsprout - Let's get your podcast launched!
Start for FREE

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

Transcript

Hello I’m claire hennessy. Many may still remember the 2002 martial art film directed by Zhang Yimou and Starring by Jet Li. The name is Hero, and it is based on the historical event of Jing Ke’s assassination attempt on the first emperor of China, King of Qin in 227 BC. 

The original story is explicitly detailed in the Records of The Grand Historian, also known by its Chinese name Shiji. A monumental history of ancient China and the world, it was completed around 94 BC by the Western Han Dynasty official Sima Qian after having been started by his father, Sima Tan, grand Astrologer to the imperial court. 

In this episode, we will explore the context and historical value of Shiji. 

Sima Qian is a significant figure in Chinese literary history. Two points can be summed up regarding his significance. The first is that he commands among readers of Chinese a respect and admiration comparable to that accorded Herodotus or Thucydides in the Western tradition. Shiji covers more than two thousand years beginning from the rise of the legendary Yellow Emperor and the formation of the first Chinese polity to the reigning sovereign of Sima Qian's time, Emperor Wu of Han. 

As the first universal history of the world as it was known to the ancient Chinese, it served as a model for official history-writing for subsequent Chinese dynasties and the Chinese cultural sphere (Korea, Vietnam, Japan) up until the 20th century. 

Second, Shiji also echoes the writer’s own story. Sima Qian's father Sima Tan (司馬談) first conceived of the ambitious project of writing a complete history of China, but had completed only some preparatory sketches at the time of his death. After inheriting his father's position as court historian to the imperial court, Sima Qian was determined to fulfill his father's dying wish of composing and putting together this epic work of history. 

However, a few years into compiling Shiji, in 99 BC, he fell victim to the Li Ling incident that drastically changed his course of life and shaped the ways in which the historian observed his world in Shiji. Below is a brief description of the incident given by Burton Watson, translator of Shiji to the Anglophone readers.

China at this time was frequently troubled by raids from the Xiongnu, a nomadic people living in the desert north of China. Emperor Wu, determined to put an end to the inclusions, repeatedly dispatched large military forces to the desert region in an attempt to capture the xiongnu ruler, known by the title of Shanyu, or at least force him to acknowledge fealty to the Han. during one such expedition in 99BC, a young military commander named Li Ling led a force of several thousand men in a daring raid deep into enemy territory, but after desperate fighting he was finally forced to surrender. Emperor Wu, who expected his military leaders to die in battle, was enraged when he learned of the surrender, and the other court officials united in condemnation of Li’s action. Only Sima Qian, who had known and admired Li Ling in the past, spoke out in his defense. For such temerity he was charged with attempting to deceive the ruler and handed over to the law officials for investigation, a process that involved imprisonment and torture. Eventually he was sentenced to undergo the penalty of castration.

At that time, execution could be commuted either by money or castration. Since Sima Qian did not have enough money to atone his "crime", he chose the latter and was then thrown into prison, where he endured three years. He described his pain thus: "When you see the jailer you abjectly touch the ground with your forehead. At the mere sight of his underlings you are seized with terror ... Such ignominy can never be wiped away." Sima Qian called his castration "the worst of all punishments".

In 96 BC, upon his release from prison, Sima Qian chose to live on as a palace eunuch to complete his histories, rather than commit suicide as was expected of a gentleman-scholar who had been disgraced by being castrated.As Sima Qian himself explained in his Letter to Ren An translated by Watson :

Therefore, the Li Ling incident not only changed Sima Qian’s course of life, but also affected his expression towards the violent nature of emperor Wu’s policies of the Han dynasty. So we can say that Shiji, especially in its relentless criticism towards first Emperor of China or 秦始皇, is a defacto criticism towards emperor Wu that was reminiscent of the first emperor of Qin, and therefore Shiji is in a way not just a story about the entire Asia at the time, but also a story of the writer himself, just as our title for today’s episode implicates, it is actually his story as well.

So what kind of genre or format should we call Shiji? Unlike its predecessors who follow a chronological order in their compositions, Sima Qian devised a new form of writing history. And this form is called  jizhuanti which refers to the organization of the work into the following subcategories: they are 'basic annals' containing the biographies of the sovereigns,  'ordered biographies' containing the biographies of influential non-nobles; the third category is called 'tables', containing graphical chronologies of royalty and nobility, and the fourth is 'treatises', consisting of essays giving a historical perspective on various topics like music, ritual, or economics. And last but not least, 'house chronicles', documenting important events in the histories of the rulers of each of the quasi-independent states of the Zhou dynasty as well as the histories of contemporary aristocratic houses established during the Han dynasty.

In all, shiji consists of 12 Basic Annals, 10 Tables, 8 Treatises, 30 House Chronicles, and 70 Ordered Biographies. 

Why shiji marks a significant shift in historiography as well as literary narratology? Even though Sima Qian carried the Confucian tradition, he is highly innovative in the following few aspects. To begin with, Sima's work was concerned with the history of the known world.Previous Chinese historians had focused on only one dynasty and/or region. Sima's history of 130 chapters began with the legendary Yellow Emperor and extended to his own time, and covered not only China, but also neighboring nations like Korea and Vietnam. In this regard, he is truly significant as the first Chinese historian to treat the peoples living to the north of the Great Wall like the Xiongnu as human beings who were implicitly the equals of the Middle Kingdom, instead of the traditional approach which had portrayed the Xiongnu as savages who had the appearance of humans, but the minds of animals.

As many scholars  such as Tamara Chin and Nicholas Di Cosmo agree, that In his comments about the Xiongnu, Sima refrained from evoking claims about the innate moral superiority of the Han over the "northern barbarians" that were the standard rhetorical tropes of Chinese historians in this period.

Sima also broke new ground by using more sources like interviewing witnesses, visiting places where historical occurrences had happened, and examining documents from different regions and/or times.Before Chinese historians had tended to use only reign histories as their sources.The Shiji was further very novel in Chinese historiography by examining historical events outside of the courts, providing a broader history than the traditional court-based histories had done.Unlike traditional Chinese historians, Sima went beyond the androcentric, nobility-focused histories by dealing with the lives of women and men such as poets, bureaucrats, merchants, comedians/jesters, assassins, and philosophers.The treatises section, the biographies sections and the annals section relating to the Qin dynasty (as a former dynasty, there was more freedom to write about the Qin than there was about the reigning Han dynasty) that make up 40% of the Shiji have aroused the most interest from historians and are the only parts of the Shiji that have been translated into English.

Placing his subjects was often his way of expressing obliquely moral judgements. Empress Lü and Xiang Yu were the effective rulers of China during reigns Hui of the Han and Yi of Chu respectively, so Sima placed both their lives in the basic annals.Likewise, Confucius is included in the fourth section rather the fifth where he properly belonged as a way of showing his eminent virtue. The structure of the Shiji allowed Sima to tell the same stories in different ways, which allowed him to pass his moral judgements.For example, in the basic annals section, the Emperor Gaozu is portrayed as a good leader whereas in the section dealing with his rival Xiang Yu, the Emperor is portrayed unflatteringly.At the end of most of the chapters, Sima usually wrote a commentary in which he judged how the individual lived up to traditional Chinese values like filial piety, humility, self-discipline, hard work and concern for the less fortunate.

 Sima Qian intended to discover the patterns and principles of the development of human history. He emphasized, for the first time in Chinese history, the role of individual men in affecting the historical development of China and his historical perception that a country cannot escape from the fate of growth and decay.

Unlike the Book of Han, which was written under the supervision of the imperial dynasty, Shiji was a privately written history since he refused to write Shiji as an official history covering only those of high rank. The work also covers people of the lower classes and is therefore considered a "veritable record" of the darker side of the dynasty. In Sima's time, literature and history were not seen as separate disciplines as they are now, and Sima wrote his magnum opus in a very literary style, making extensive use of irony, sarcasm, juxtaposition of events, characterization, direct speech and invented speeches, which led the American historian Jennifer Jay to describe parts of the Shiji as reading more like a historical novel than a work of history.

Sima has often been criticized for "historizing" myths and legends as he assigned dates to mythical and legendary figures from ancient Chinese history together with what appears to be suspiciously precise genealogies of leading families over the course of several millennia (including his own where he traces the descent of the Sima family from legendary emperors in the distant past).However, archaeological discoveries in recent decades have confirmed aspects of the Shiji, and suggested that even if the sections of the Shiji dealing with the ancient past are not totally true, at least Sima wrote down what he believed to be true. In particular, archeological finds have confirmed the basic accuracy of the Shiji including the reigns and locations of tombs of ancient rulers.

The Italian historian Nicola Di Cosmo devoted a chapter on Shiji’s historical values in his monograph Ancient China and its Enemies: The Rise of Nomadic Power in East Asian History. 

 Di Cosmo emphasizes two distinctive strains in shiji, one is empirical, descriptive, and data oriented, the other normative ideological and influenced by currents of contemporary thought. Both orientations were consistent not only with the declared goals of the historian but also with the general thinking of an age, the early Han, inclined to the construction of universal cosmological paradigms and unified historical patterns. These two narrative strands not only apply to Sima Qian’s description on Xiong-nu, but also in almost every narratives that he created, including those that are absent or far from being consistent historical narratives. And it is often the latter, ideological or moral strain of Sima Qian’s writing that have often been overlooked.

 Di Cosmo elaborates on the empirical nature of Shiji, compared with its predecessors and contemporaries worldwide. Tracing the etymological origin of the classical chinese word  tai shi, i.e.Grand Historian, the author reveals that among almost everything that a grand historian had to take down, a modern day de-facto recorder or transcript software, the function and training as an astrologer plays a critical role in Shiji’s construction of a unitarian vision of the cosmos and of the principle regulating it.  Therefore, the dual function of the shih as recorder of both heavenly and human events make sense of human experiences. The astrological knowledge is drawn from the Huang-Lao tradition and the cosmological elements of Han Confucianism, in particular those linked to the yin-yang theory but not resistant against other schools of thought. The writing style is no doubt a palimpsest of ZuoZhuan and Chunqiu, which for sure establish Sshiji’s didactic nature. The presence of elements belonging to different philosophical traditions and the syncretic tendencies detectable in the Shiji are supported by Sima Qian himself, who declared, in his famous letter to Jen An, that he wanted to form a single thought of thought ( 成一家之言). 

excerpts of Di Cosmo's description of Xiongnu in Sima Qian's Shiji:
"To integrate the inner Asian nomads as with any other phenomenon that was truly anomalous and new in Chinese history within a unified historical frame, inner Asia had to be understood or rationalized to both according to the intellectual canons of his own age, and according to those principles of historical investigation, that Sima Qian set for himself. This rationalization of inner Asia require the seamless juncture of the history of the Xiongnu in the flow of Chinese history, following primarily the principle of comprehensiveness, which in Chinese is tong. In addition, the investigation of the relationship between heaven and man, where man obviously had to include all the terrestrial events worthy of being recorded, required that inner Asia be included, for the first time in Chinese historiography into the system of co-relations between celestial and human occurrences that formed a such an important pillar of Han thought.
In Zuo Zhuan as we have seen, there are passages that can be interpreted in the sense of a temporary opposition between two opposite principles, civilization and the lack of it. But those passages certainly do not articulate a vision of history, whereby the North and the central plain are turning to two metaphysical principles eternally at war with one another, placing the northern nomads within the realm of prescriptive history, where the shape and nature of change is sourced to the intricate web of correlations at the foundations of Yi and Yang and five phase thought, is evidence of a fuller appreciation of the role of inner Asia as a genuine part of the Chinese history. Indeed, this impression is further supported by the historical reconstruction of the genealogy of the Northern peoples as a principle antagonistic and yet, complementary to the Hua Xia civilization from its very origins, the notion of a Yin-Yang opposition of the two sides, the North and the South that pervades some of the passages concerning inner Asia appears to be a product of the Han period, although possibly as a development based on the concepts of antagonistic polarization inherited from an earlier time. the system of allocated fields Fen Ye, that is the partitioning of sky and earth stemming from the Cosmo political necessity of establishing correspondences between celestial zones and earthly regions had developed by the Warring States period into a set of correspondences between constellations, and specific Eastern Zhou states. The duty of the astronomers of the various states was to formulate prognostications relative to their kingdoms on the basis of the observation of the movements of planets and the portions of the sky, or lunar lodge assigned to each. Each lodge represented a political division of the earth. And the astrological prognostications referred to the state's includes corresponding lunar lodge astronomical phenomena were observed. However, during this period, inner Asian regions do not seem to have been included in these heavenly correspondences. Among the astrological manuscripts found at Ma Wang Tui, a silk  scroll book written according to some estimates between 403 and 206 BCE, illustrates a system of prognostications of human matters based on the shape and movement of comets. It is significant for our discussion that all the prognostications are co related to historical events, especially military ones concerning the Warring States. The space beyond the political boundaries of the Xia-zhou community was simply not included in the cosmological vision represented in this type of predictive astronomy. The author of the work did not seem to have believed that the inhabitants of those regions had any real bearings on the political vicissitudes of the central states. In the literature of the Han period, we find a contradictory evidence we may take into consideration for instance, the Huai Nan Zi, a text that that reflects beliefs and conceptions about geography and ethnography, that must have been current at the time of Sima Qian. 
In Section 6 of Chapter 4 of the Huai Nan Zi, When the region's beyond the nine provinces, which is beyond China are discussed, we find again a long list of fantastic beings and strange countries. As some critical points out, these strange lands must be treated with great care, for they belong to a type of literature in which terrestrial and mythical geography blend together. But the inclusion of inner Asian peoples in co related metaphysical systems was not uncommon during the Han. states men such as Zhao Zuo, who were actively engaged in foreign policy referred to the northern nomads within this framework. The territory of the Hu and Mo is a place of accumulated Yin which is very cold. The tree bark is three inches thick, and the thickness of faiz reaches as many as six feet, they eat meat and drink kumis, the people have a thick skin and the animals have much fur. So the nature of people and animals it's such that they are adapted to cold. The Yang and the Yue have little Yin and much Yang,their people have a thin skin, they're birds and animals have thin furs, and their nature is to withstand heat. In Sima Qian's time correlative correspondences could also inform the explanation of a given historical event. Even the pragmatic Zhao Zuo could reach the conclusion that the Qin Garrison soldiers being neither extremely Yin nor extremely Yang, were not accustomed to these climates. So the soldiers on duty died on the frontier, and those transported there died on the road.
This approach to historical causality was part of the intellectual climate in which Sima Qian lived. But in the Shiji this normative perspective is applied to to inner Asia, and to the Xiongnu in a more systematic fashion, to the point that the northern nomads, especially after they acquired a far more threatening Imperial dimension, became the true alter ego of China, a phenomenon that could not be ignored, but needed to be addressed and made into a coherent, fully investigated agent of history. Sima Qian's inclusion of the nomadic north in a set of astrological correlations was not aimed primarily at establishing some principle of causality that would concretely offer an explanation for a given historical event, but was a way of integrating the northern nomads within the rest of the Chinese history. By making the North subject to the same rules, patterns and laws that were thought to explain events in Chinese history, one of which was the dialectic relationship between heaven and man, he made the North be part of a universal and integrated division of history. Placing the shownotes in a genealogical relationship to Chinese history was probably even more important. The emergence of the Xiongnu phenomenon was explained in the context of a set of known historical categories. The various northern peoples of old and organized into an invented genealogy that would result in the construction of a fictitious ethnic tie with the past. With the exception of the ethnic genealogy of Xiongnu, whose appearance is clearly meant to show continuity between the present and the past. The normative passages on the northern nomads are not arranged in any systematic way. However patchy their distribution within the Shiji, there is nevertheless clear evidence of an effort to transform the North from a morally unsavory and historically amorphous place into an essential component of Chinese history. By assigning to inner Asia certain historical and cosmological values, the historian brought inner Asia into a wider rationalistic vision, according to which the ominous North could be explained and somehow controlled. This ideological operation, together with the empirical collection of data paved the way for the incorporation of the Northern peoples into the Chinese historiographical tradition from the Shiji onward. This historiographical tradition became the repository of both Chinese and inner Asian history."—Di Cosmo, Chapter 5 of Ancient China and Its Enemy.