Records of the grand historian Han dynasty I

346 Pages·1993·1.355 MB·English

by  Watson, Burton;Sima, Qian

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Table of Contents
Title Page
Introduction
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE ON THE TEXT
SHI JI 5: THE BASIC ANNALS OF QIN
SHI JI 6: THE BASIC ANNALS OF THE FIRST
EMPEROR OF THE QIN
SHI JI 15: REFLECTIONS ON THE RISE OF THE QIN
SHI JI 68: THE BIOGRAPHY OF LORD SHANG
SHI JI 71: THE BIOGRAPHIES OF SHULI ZI AND GAN
MOU
SHULI ZI
GAN MOU
GAN LUO
SHI JI 72: THE BIOGRAPHY OF THE MARQUIS OF
RANG
SHI JI 73: THE BIOGRAPHIES OF BAI QI AND WANG
JIAN
BAI QI
WANG JIAN
SHI JI 79: THE BIOGRAPHIES OF FAN JU AND CAI
ZE
CAI ZE
SHI JI 85: THE BIOGRAPHY OF LÜ BUWEI
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SHI JI 86: THE BIOGRAPHIES OF THE
ASSASSIN-RETAINERS (EXCERPT)
SHI JI 87: THE BIOGRAPHY OF LI SI
SHI JI 88: THE BIOGRAPHY OF MENG TIAN
SHI JI 126: THE BIOGRAPHIES OF WITS AND
HUMORISTS (EXCERPT)
ACTOR ZHAN
Appendix One - SHI JI 48: THE HEREDITARY HOUSE
OF CHEN SHE
Appendix Two - SIMA QIAN’S LETTER TO REN AN
INDEX
Copyright Page
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INTRODUCTION
The Chinese, with their veneration of ancestors and
reverence for the rites and practices of the past, have
from early times been indefatigable keepers of
historical records. It is not surprising, therefore, that
works of history should occupy a place of particular
importance in their literature. The text from which the
chapters translated here are drawn, the Shi ji, Records
of the Grand Historian — or Historical Records, as the
title is sometimes translated — is in fact one of the
most widely read and influential of all works of early
Chinese literature, and its author, Sima Qian
(145?–89? BC), commands among readers of Chinese a
respect and admiration comparable to that accorded
Herodotus or Thucydides in the Western tradition.
The Shi Ji was planned, and perhaps written in part,
by Sima Qian’s father, Sima Tan (d. 110 BC), an
official who held the title of Taishi, or Grand Historian,
at the court of Emperor Wu of the Han dynasty but
whose actual duties pertained more to astronomy and
the regulation of the calendar. Sima Qian succeeded to
his father’s post and title and, obedient to his father’s
dying request, set about bringing the proposed work
of history to completion. After some seven years of
labor, however, his efforts were unexpectedly
interrupted by a tragic turn of events.
China at this time was frequently troubled by raids
from the Xiongnu, a nomadic people living in the
desert north of China. Emperor Wu, determined to put
an end to the incursions, repeatedly dispatched large
military forces to the desert region in an attempt to
capture the Xiongnu ruler, known by the title of
Shanyu, or at least force him to acknowledge fealty to
the Han. During one such expedition in 99 BC, a young
military commander named Li Ling led a force of
several thousand men in a daring raid deep into enemy
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territory, but after desperate fighting he was finally
forced to surrender. Emperor Wu, who expected his
military leaders to die in battle, was enraged when he
learned of the surrender, and the other court officials
united in condemnation of Li’s action. Only Sima Qian,
who had known and admired Li Ling in the past, spoke
out in his defense. For such temerity he was charged
with attempting to deceive the ruler and handed over
to the law officials for investigation, a process that
involved imprisonment and torture. Eventually he was
sentenced to undergo the penalty of castration.
Customarily, a man of honor would commit suicide
before submitting to such disgrace. But, as Qian
explains in a letter to a friend translated in appendix 2
of this volume, he chose to suffer the shame of
mutilation in order that he might finish the writing of
his history. This price of completion, ghastly as it was,
has assured him a place of honor among the world’s
great historians.
The Shi ji is monumental in scope and aim, running
to 130 chapters and covering the entire known history
of the Chinese people from its beginnings down to the
time of the historian, a period of well over two
thousand years. In addition, it includes chapters
describing the lands and peoples of the areas of
central Asia, Korea, and Vietnam that border China. It
is thus in effect a history of the entire world as known
to the Chinese of this early period.
To impose order on this vast array of material, Sima
Qian devised an entirely new historiographical form.
He divided his history into five large sections,
arranging his material by subject and suggesting by
the section in which he placed it something of its
importance and relative reliability. His work opens
with twelve chapters entitled benji, or “Basic Annals,”
which deal with the early dynasties of Chinese history
or, in the case of the Han dynasty, with the reigns of
individual rulers. Next come ten “Chronological
Tables” that list in graph form the important events of
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the past with their dates. These are followed by eight
“Treatises” on such subjects as rites, music,
astronomy, religious affairs, water control, and
economics. Thirty chapters entitled “Hereditary
Houses” come next, dealing for the most part with the
histories of the various feudal states of ancient China.
The work concludes with seventy chapters entitled
liezhuan, “Biographies” or “Accounts” devoted to the
lives of famous personages or to the foreign lands with
which China had contact.
These five large divisions of the history support and
supplement one another in various ways, the different
chapters pertaining to a single event or personage
often varying subtly in treatment and angle of
approach. Thus, although there is a certain degree of
cross-referencing, one must take care to read all
pertinent sections of the work in order to gain a full
picture of any given subject. This type of formal
arrangement, known as the “annal and biography
form,” was adopted in later dynastic histories
compiled under official auspices, and it exercised a
great influence on the development of Korean and
Japanese historiography.
In two earlier volumes of translations from the Shi ji
published in 1961 and reissued in slightly revised form
in 1993, I presented material dealing with the
founding and early years of the Han, the dynasty
under which the historian lived and worked. In the
present volume I have moved backward in time
somewhat to focus on the chapters of Sima Qian’s
work that relate to the preceding Qin, or Ch’in,
dynasty, founded in 221 BC when the king of the state
of Qin brought all of China under his rule and assumed
the title of First Emperor of the Qin. The First
Emperor, long regarded as one of the most influential
and noteworthy of all Chinese rulers, has in recent
years become the center of particular interest because
of the spectacular life-size terracotta figures of Qin
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period warriors that were discovered in excavations
near his mausoleum in 1974.
Sima Qian began his history with a chapter entitled
“Basic Annals of the Five Emperors,” which describes
five legendary sages who were said to have ruled the
nation in the dawn of Chinese history. He followed this
with three chapters dealing respectively with the Xia,
Shang (or Yin), and Zhou dynasties, the Three
Dynasties of antiquity that ruled China in succession in
the early historical period. Sima Qian’s account of the
Xia and Shang dynasties need not concern us here, but
it should be noted that much of what he tells us about
the early centuries of the Zhou dynasty has been
confirmed or supplemented in recent years through
the results of archaeological research. Thus from the
late years of the Shang, and certainly from the Zhou
on, we are on firm historical ground, though dates in
this early period are uncertain.
The Zhou, which was probably founded around 1045
BC, appears to have exercised fairly effective control
over a wide area of northern China during the early
years of its rule. But later, particularly after its capital
was moved east to Luoyang in 770 BC, its power
rapidly waned, and China was thereafter ruled by a
number of feudal states that acknowledged nominal
fealty to the Zhou king but in fact behaved as virtually
independent political units.
The Zhou royal house, despite its political weakness,
continued in existence until its overthrow by the state
of Qin in 256 BC. Sima Qian might therefore have
begun his account of the Qin dynasty at that point and
still preserved chronological continuity in his
narrative. But, as he makes clear in his remarks on
Qin history, he was intensely interested in origins, in
the history of a state or ruling family not only in its
period of greatest glory but in the long centuries that
preceded that era of flowering, for in the actions of
those earlier years, he believed, lay the key to an
understanding of its later successes or failures. He
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therefore began his account of the Qin dynasty with a
“Basic Annals of Qin” chapter that in chronological
terms runs parallel to his account of the Zhou dynasty
and traces the beginnings of the Qin ruling family back
to the age of the mythic Five Emperors. The chapter
then describes the history of the state of Qin from its
start as a tiny feudal domain on the far northwestern
border of the Chinese cultural sphere, down through
its subsequent stages of growth until the moment
when, having gradually amassed power over the
centuries, it was able to swallow up its rivals and unite
China under a single rule.
Sima Qian then added a second chapter in annals
form in order to present a greatly expanded account of
the momentous reign of the First Emperor, and that of
his successor, the Second Emperor, when the dynasty
was swiftly toppled by the rebellion that brought the
Han dynasty to power. The events in the close of this
chapter, therefore, dovetail with those described in
the opening pages of my earlier volumes on the Han.
Sima Qian’s dramatic portrait of the First Emperor
in this chapter is one of the highlights of his history,
skillfully juxtaposing examples of the grandiose
rhetoric employed by the monarch to celebrate his
achievements with grim accounts of the cruelty, folly,
and oppression of the populace for which he has been
remembered in later ages. But Sima Qian’s preceding
chapter, in part because of the scanty sources
available to him, is less colorful and at times consists
of little more than a dry recital of military actions and
steps in the slow process of territorial expansion.
To better understand the events briefly referred to
in the annals section of the Shi ji, one must always
turn to the relevant chapters of the liezhuan section of
Sima Qian’s history, which contains biographies of the
prominent statesmen, military leaders, and thinkers of
the period. I have accordingly followed my translations
of the two annals pertaining to the Qin with ten
chapters or excerpts from chapters dealing with the
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lives of men who played an important role in Qin
history.
In all these chapters on Qin history, and in particular
in the often seemingly disconnected welter of entries
in “The Basic Annals of Qin” chapter, there are three
overall processes that the reader will want to keep
close watch on. First, of course, is Qin’s slow but
virtually unceasing territorial expansion, a process
often described in traditional Chinese histories as
canshi , or “eating away in silkworm fashion.” Qin,
beginning as a tiny feudal domain situated on the Wei
River in present day Gansu Province, bit by bit
expanded to the east and south, gradually moving its
capital eastward until it had established it at Xianyang
near the modern city of Xi’an in Shaanxi. This is the
heart of the so-called “land within the passes,” a rich
agricultural area protected on the north and south by
mountain barriers and on the east by the Yellow River,
where it flows south from the Ordos region and then
turns abruptly east toward the sea.
At first Qin’s ambition seemed to be merely to
expand eastward as far as the Yellow River, thus
fulfilling an ancient prophecy that the descendants of
its ruling family would one day “water their horses at
the Yellow River.” In time, however, Qin crossed the
Yellow River to attack the states to the east,
continuing its seemingly inevitable expansion in that
direction, as well as southwest into the area of
present-day Sichuan and southward into the Yangtze
valley.
A second and closely related process is that by
which Qin incorporated newly acquired territory into
its administrative system in the form of xian, or
districts, and later in larger administrative units
known as jun, provinces or commanderies. The
junxian, or province and district system, as it came to
be known, apparently did not originate in Qin and was
employed in other feudal states of the period as well.
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