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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 ...
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.
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 Han dynasty official Sima Qian established many of the conventions of the genre, but the form was not fixed until much later. Starting with the Tang dynasty , each dynasty established an official office to write the history of its predecessor using official court records, partly in order to establish its own link to the earliest times.
The Book of Han and Records of the Three Kingdoms join the original Han-era universal history Records of the Grand Historian to constitute the first three entries in the Twenty-Four Histories canon, with each work cementing the new genre's literary and historiographical qualities as established by Sima Qian.
A traditional source for this period is the Records of the Grand Historian by Sima Qian. Its autobiographical section describes several schools of thought. Its autobiographical section describes several schools of thought.
Sima Qian's Shiji (or Records of the Grand Historian, completed around 94 BC) was the first work to turn these fragments of myths into a systematic and consistent narrative of the Yellow Emperor's "career". [61] The Shiji ' s account was extremely influential in shaping how the Chinese viewed the origin of their history. [62]