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The Shiji, also known as Records of the Grand Historian or The Grand Scribe's Records, is a Chinese historical text that is the first of the Twenty-Four Histories of imperial China. It was written during the late 2nd and early 1st centuries BC by the Han dynasty historian Sima Qian , building upon work begun by his father Sima Tan .
It is considered one of the most important sources on Chinese history and culture. [1] The title Twenty-Four Histories dates from 1775, which was the 40th year in the reign of the Qianlong Emperor. This was when the last volume, the History of Ming, was reworked and a complete set of the histories was produced.
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.
The Mongol Yuan dynasty became the first conquest dynasty in Chinese history to rule the entirety of China proper and its population as an ethnic minority. The dynasty also directly controlled the Mongol heartland and other regions, inheriting the largest share of territory of the eastern Mongol empire , which roughly coincided with the modern ...
The Shizi has had a long and dynamic history. The twenty-chapter text was written around 330 BCE, became a famous classic of philosophical Eclecticism, had sections repeatedly lost and recovered from political and military destruction, until only one original chapter existed around 1060 CE, and later scholars partially reconstructed the text from quotes in over seventy Chinese classics.
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 ( zh:封禅 ) by Emperor Han Wudi , for which the emperor appointed another person to the rank of fangshi ...
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. [14] Lastly, Sima broke with the traditional chronological structure of Chinese history.
The Historical Records of the Five Dynasties (Wudai Shiji) is a Chinese history book on the Five Dynasties period (907–960), written by the Song dynasty official Ouyang Xiu in private. It was drafted during Ouyang's exile from 1036 to 1039 but not published until 1073, a year after his death. [ 2 ]