Sima Qian and his records
The primary historian during Han times was Sima Qian who lived from 145 to 86 BCE and was the son of the grand historian to Emperor Wu, Sima Tan (Lewis, 2007) .During the beginning of his career Sima Qian made a major political mistake of defending a general who had lost in battle and surrended to his opponent (Lewis, 2007; Ebrey, 1996).Sima was given the choice of being sentenced to death or being castrated which was considered very humiliating at the time (Lewis, 2007; Ebrey, 1996).Sima evidently chose castration, admitting to his peers that he would rather live in disgrace “because I have things in my heart that I have not been able to express fully…and thus complete the words of a single school family” proving that he was very dedicated to his workings (Lewis, 2007; Ebrey, 1996). Due to the suffering Sima Qian was put through he was not inclined to pity those in power, instead being very critical of their ruling in turn making some of his writings quite biased against the people in power (Lewis, 2007; Ebrey, 1996).He did however commonly praise those who showed courage and loyalty and yet were not acknowledged (Ebrey, 1996) . Sima Qian wrote purely on what he thought was fact based which lead to the writing of the Historical Records that was studied throughout schools (Ebrey, 1996) .This book included information about political events, biographies of important people, narratives of the other dynasties, famous poets and more, racking up a momentous 130 chapters (Ebrey, 1996) . Sima quoted directly from documents when possible and selected events that previewed consistency in a person’s character as well as how people performed in a role rather than turning points in the person’s life which provided a new perspectives and added reliability to his information due to his form of corroboration (Ebrey, 1996).
|