China's first great history weighed up to sixty kilograms in bamboo
Sima Qian's Records of the Grand Historian runs to roughly 526,500 characters, longer than the Hebrew Bible. Written on bamboo slips bundled in groups of about thirty, the original may have filled up to 700 bundles and weighed 40 to 60 kg, a library you could barely lift, let alone carry to a reader.
The Shiji was a family project. Sima Tan, Grand Historian at the Han court in the late 2nd century BC, planned it and left notes; after he died in 110 BC his son and successor Sima Qian took over and finished it before his own death around 86 BC. Their hereditary post opened the imperial archives to them, but Sima Qian also travelled across China and interviewed people to check his material. His span was enormous, some 2,500 years from the legendary Yellow Emperor to Emperor Wu, under whom he lived.
Rather than one flowing narrative, he broke the past into five overlapping kinds of chapter: basic annals of rulers, chronological tables, treatises on subjects such as music, astronomy and waterways, hereditary houses of great families, and biographies. The biographies make up 42 percent of the whole and sketch around 130 figures, from Laozi to assassins and Confucian scholars, through telling anecdotes. For the failed attempt on the King of Qin's life, he drew on the account of a court physician who had actually been present.
Careful readers learn to read across chapters. Sima Qian tended to keep a ruler's own annals flattering and tuck unflattering details elsewhere. The story of the future Emperor Gaozu pushing his own children off his carriage to escape pursuers appears not in his biography but in that of his rival, Xiang Yu. Conversely, a chapter full of Empress Dowager Lü's cruelty ends by crediting her reign with peace and prosperity.
The text set the template for every later dynastic history and became the first of the Twenty-Four Histories. Ten of its 130 chapters vanished in the Eastern Han period and were later reconstructed. Its lively prose is still anthologised and is a rich source of four-character idioms, and its language, shaped by Han speech, remains fairly approachable. The oldest surviving manuscript fragments are kept at a Japanese temple in Ōtsu.
Source: Shiji
