Sima Qian

Sima Qian was the court historian of the Han dynasty who wrote the Shiji, or Records of the Grand Historian, the first history to cover the whole known past of the Chinese world, from the legendary Yellow Emperor to his own day. He completed it after suffering castration as punishment for defending a disgraced general, and his book became the model for Chinese official histories for the next two thousand years.

Sima Qian was born near present-day Hancheng, in Shaanxi, probably around 145 BCE, though some sources place his birth about ten years later. His father, Sima Tan, became grand historian, or taishi, at the court of Emperor Wu around 136 BCE. The post combined the duties of astronomer, astrologer and keeper of records, and one of its main tasks was preparing the yearly calendar. By his own account the boy could read ancient texts by the age of ten, and he grew up steeped in the teachings of Confucius.

At about twenty, in 126 BCE, he set out on a long journey across the empire. He went south of the Yangtze to the river where the poet Qu Yuan was said to have drowned himself, sought the burial places of the legendary rulers Yu and Shun, and studied ritual at Qufu, the hometown of Confucius. He later became a palace attendant, travelling on inspection tours with the emperor, and in 110 BCE was sent west with a military expedition. That year his dying father charged him with completing a great history he had planned but barely begun. Three years later Sima Qian took over his father's office, and he helped create the Taichu calendar, introduced in 104 BCE.

In 99 BCE the general Li Ling was defeated and captured while campaigning against the Xiongnu, the nomadic power to the north. While other officials condemned him, Sima Qian alone spoke in his defence. Emperor Wu took this as an attack on his own brother-in-law, who had also led the campaign, and sentenced the historian to death. The sentence could be avoided by paying a fine or by accepting castration. Sima Qian could not pay, and rather than take the honourable path of suicide expected of a disgraced gentleman, he chose castration so that he could finish his work. He spent about three years in prison.

After his release he served as a palace archivist, a post open to eunuchs, and completed the Shiji, probably around 94 BCE. Its 130 chapters, over 500,000 characters in all, are arranged by type rather than strictly by date: basic annals of rulers, chronological tables, treatises on subjects such as music, astronomy, waterworks and economics, histories of ruling houses, and biographies. These biographies include not only nobles and officials but also merchants, assassins, jesters and philosophers. He drew on written sources, compared them with the classics, visited historical sites and questioned elderly people about what they remembered. He also wrote about neighbouring peoples, treating the Xiongnu with unusual seriousness, and scholars detect veiled criticism of Emperor Wu's costly wars against them.

His Letter to Ren An, written to an official apparently facing execution after a failed rebellion in 91 BCE, explains why he chose to live on in disgrace: he could not bear to leave his work unknown to later generations. It contains his famous line that a death may weigh as much as Mount Tai or as little as a goose feather. It is the last contemporary record of him. When he died is unknown; most historians think he retired from court and died around the same time as Emperor Wu, in 87 or 86 BCE.

His grandson Yang Yun later brought the hidden manuscript into circulation. The Shiji's structure was adapted by Ban Gu for the Book of Han and became the pattern for China's dynastic histories, and it influenced historians in Korea and Japan.

Our 100 BCE map shows the Han dynasty of Emperor Wu at the time Sima Qian was writing, bordered to the north by the Xiongnu, in a region now part of China.