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Reading group: Sima Qian’s postface and his letter to Ren An

Lin Pei-shan Fellow
· 5 replies
HistoryChineseJapanese & KoreanConfucianismConfuciusSima Qian#filial-duty#historiography#shiji#sima-qian
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My students meet Sima Qian as a name in a list of Han dynasty achievements. I would like to read him properly, as someone who thought hard about what a historian is for.

The plan, three weeks:

  • Week 1. The postface to the Shiji (the last chapter, the Grand Historian's own account). Sima Qian tells his family history, his father Sima Tan's dying charge to complete the history, and how he understands the whole project.
  • Week 2. The letter to Ren An, preserved in the Han shu. He explains why, after being condemned for defending the general Li Ling, he accepted castration rather than death: the work was not finished.
  • Week 3. The biography of Bo Yi and Shu Qi, which opens the series of biographies, plus one more of your choice. In the Bo Yi chapter he openly doubts that Heaven rewards the good.

Translation. Burton Watson's Records of the Grand Historian is the most available in English; the letter appears in several anthologies. If you read classical Chinese, please bring the original for the passages you post about.

A question to carry through: what makes this a method and not just a long chronicle? Look at how he handles conflicting sources, his travels to the places he describes, and the way he marks his own judgements off from the narrative with “the Grand Historian remarks.”

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5 replies

  1. Ji-woo Ryu

    Fellow

    Week 1. What struck me is that the whole project begins as a son's duty. Sima Tan weeps and makes him promise, and the promise is framed in terms of filial piety and of continuing Confucius's work on the Spring and Autumn Annals. For my Korean students this will feel familiar: the Samguk sagi, compiled in the twelfth century, borrowed the Shiji's basic form of annals and biographies. The form travelled, and so did the idea that recording the past is an obligation.

    Helpful · 1
  2. Chen Yuting

    Fellow

    Also week 1. I think the formal separation of the “Grand Historian remarks” passages from the narrative is the methodologically important thing. It is an early, explicit distinction between what the record says and what the historian judges. Modern historians argue about whether such a separation can ever be clean, but he at least marks where he is speaking.

    Helpful · 2
  3. Liu Mingqiao

    Fellow

    Week 2. I am seventy and I read the letter twice. He chose a humiliation his whole culture regarded as worse than death, so that the book would exist. I don't have much to add philosophically, except that I now read the rest of the Shiji differently. Every chapter was paid for.

    Helpful · 3
  4. Lin Pei-shan

    Fellow

    Week 3, Bo Yi. Two brothers starve rather than serve a conquering dynasty, and Sima Qian asks: if the virtuous starve and the robber lives long, what is this “Way of Heaven”? His answer, as I read it, is that the historian can do what Heaven does not. He can keep their names. History as a kind of justice for the forgotten. That is a very different purpose from Ibn Khaldun's science of society, and I think my students will find it more moving.

  5. Youssef Berrada

    Fellow

    Coming from Ibn Khaldun, I was surprised how much they share in practice: both complain about credulous predecessors, both travelled and drew on what they had seen, both note when sources disagree. But Lin is right about the difference in purpose. Ibn Khaldun wants laws of social change. Sima Qian wants to remember people correctly. I'm not sure a history can do both at once.

    Helpful · 1