Sima Qian chose mutilation over death so he could finish China's first great history
In 99 BC the court historian Sima Qian defended a disgraced general and was sentenced to die. Too poor to buy his way out, he accepted castration instead, endured three years in prison, and lived on as a palace eunuch to complete the Shiji, a 130-chapter history spanning more than two millennia.
The project began with his father, Sima Tan, who became grand historian around 136 BC, a fairly junior post mainly concerned with drawing up the ritual calendar. Tan managed only an outline before he fell ill in 110 BC, reportedly distressed at being left out of a major imperial sacrifice, and called his son home to carry on. Sima Qian, born in Xiayang near present-day Hancheng, probably around 145 BC, took over the office three years later and helped reform the calendar in 105 BC.
He had prepared well. Around the age of 20 he toured the Han realm, visiting the river where the poet Qu Yuan was said to have drowned, the reputed resting places of the legendary rulers Yu and Shun, and Qufu, home town of Confucius. Those travels fed a history stretching from the Yellow Emperor to his own ruler, Emperor Wu.
The Li Ling affair upended everything. Li Ling, a general he respected but was not friends with, was captured after a failed campaign against the Xiongnu, and Sima alone spoke up for him. The emperor heard it as an attack on his own brother-in-law, who had also fought poorly. After release around 96 BC, Sima served as a well-paid court archivist, a post reserved for eunuchs. In his postface he likened himself to earlier authors whose masterpieces followed great misfortune; his Letter to Ren An of 91 BC is his last contemporary trace, and the date of his death is unknown.
The finished work runs to over 500,000 characters, split into basic annals of rulers, tables, treatises on subjects like music and economics, house chronicles of the Zhou states, and 70 biographies of notable people. Before him, Chinese histories covered single events or regions. His general history set the template that official dynastic histories across East Asia followed until the 20th century.
Source: Sima Qian
