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Sima Qian's father Sima Tan served as Grand Historian, and Sima Qian succeeded to his position. Thus he had access to the early Han dynasty archives, edicts, and records. Sima Qian was a methodical, skeptical historian who had access to ancient books, written on bamboo and wooden slips, from before the time of the Han dynasty. Many of the ...
Before compiling Shiji, Sima Qian was involved in the creation of the 104 BC Taichu Calendar 太初暦 (太初 became the new era name for Emperor Wu and means "supreme beginning"), a modification of the Qin calendar. This is the first Chinese calendar whose full method of calculation (暦法) has been preserved.
Although Sima Tan began writing the Records of the Grand Historian (Shiji), he died before it was finished; it was completed by his son, Sima Qian. The year of Sima Tan's death (110 BCE) was the year of the great imperial sacrifice fengshan by Emperor Han Wudi, for which the emperor appointed another person to the rank of fangshi, bypassing ...
The Shiji (Records of the Grand Historian), written by the Han dynasty historian Sima Qian, is about 526,000 Chinese characters long, making it four times longer than Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War, and longer than the Old Testament.
|comma=: when set to any value, will change the presentation of the author names from the default Sima Qian; Sima Tan to the Western-style comma-separated Sima, Qian; Sima, Tan. |sole= : removes Sima Tan from authorship credits, especially useful for parts of the book it is certain he had no involvement in.
Reading this name as "Sima Qian" appears to be profoundly odd to me, as I would have expected that his name be either "司马迁" (ie, "Si, MaQian", after the Chinese custom of spelling the surname first), or "迁司马" (ie, "Qian, SiMa", assuming that the English transscription correctly reflects the name, with the surname going last).
The historian Sima Qian included various biographical sketches in his Records of the Grand Historian, including the "A Biographical Sketch of Boyi". In this, he incorporates discussion of morality and Heaven from the perspective of Lao Zi. Sima addresses the question of whether there are consequences for choosing good or evil, by comparing Boyi ...
Chavannes' first scholarly publication, "Le Traité sur les sacrifices Fong et Chan de Se-ma Ts'ien, traduit en français" ("Sima Qian's Treatise on the Feng and Shan Sacrifices, Translated into French"), which was published in 1890 while he was in Beijing, inspired him to begin a translation of Sima Qian's Records of the Grand Historian, the first of China's dynastic histories. [9]