The Grand Scribe's Records, vol. X: 10: Volume X: The Memoirs of Han China, Part III

379 Pages·2016·9.233 MB·English

by  Jr. William H. Nienhauser, Chiu Ming Chan, Hans van Ess, Thomas D. Noel, Marc Nürnberger, Jakob Pöllath, Andreas Siegl, Lianlian Wu

The Grand Scribe’s Records
VOLUME X
The Memoirs of Han China, Part III

The Grand Scribe’s Records
VOLUME X
The Memoirs of Han China, Part III
by Ssu-ma Ch’ien
William H. Nienhauser, Jr.
Editor
Chiu Ming Chan, Hans van Ess, William H. Nienhauser, Jr.,
Thomas D. Noel, Marc Nürnberger, Jakob Pöllath,
Andreas Siegl, and Lianlian Wu
Translators
IINNDDIIAANNAA UUNNIIVVEERRSSIITTYY PPRREESSSS

NANJING UNIVERSITY PRESS
This book is a copublication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
and
Nanjing University Press
22 Hankou Road
Nanjing, Jiangsu, China
© 2016 by William H. Nienhauser, Jr.
© 2020 by William H. Nienhauser, Jr.
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or
mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval
system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The paper used in this publication
meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information
Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Originally cataloged by the Library of Congress (and revised for volume 7 [1994]) as
Ssu-ma Ch’ien, ca. 145–ca. 86 B.C.
The grand scribe’s records.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Contents: v. 1. The basic annals of pre-Han China — v. 2. The basic annals
of Han China v. 7. The memoirs of pre-Han China.
1. China—History—To 221 B.C. 2. China—History—Ch’in dynasty, 221-
207 B.C. 3. China—History—Han dynasty 202 B.C.-220 A.D.
I. Nienhauser, William H. II. Cheng, Tsai Fa. III. Title.
DS741.3.S6813 1994
931—dc20 094-18408
ISBN 0-253-34021-7 (v. 1)
ISBN 0-253-34027-6 (v. 7)
ISBN 978-0-253-01931-8 (hdbk.)
ISBN 978-0-253-02069-7 (web PDF)
1 2 3 4 5 25 24 23 22 21 20
DEDICATED TO
THREE OF MY FIRST TEACHERS

Lillian Stolle Nienhauser,
Julie Harding Brown,
and Nancy Brown Nienhauser

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments ix
Introduction xiii
On Using This Book xvii
Weights and Measures (Lu Zongli) xix
List of Abbreviations xxiv

Memoir 53 “The Southern Yüeh (William H. Nienhauser, Jr., transl.) 1
Memoir 54 “The Eastern Yüeh” (William H. Nienhauser, Jr. transl.) 29
Memoir 55 “Ch’ao-hsien” (Chao Ming Chan and Nienhauser, transl.) 47
Memoir 56 “The Southwestern Barbarians”
(Thomas D. Noel and Lianlian Wu, transl.) 65
Memoir 57 “Ssu-ma Hsiang-ju” (Hans van Ess, transl.) 83
Memoir 58 “Huai-nan and Heng-shan” (Marc Nürnberger, transl.) 161
Memoir 59 “The Officials Who Follow Reason” (Nienhauser, transl.) 227
Memoir 60 “Chi and Cheng” (Jakob Pöllath and Andreas Siegl, transl.) 245
Memoir 61 “The Confucian Scholars” (Nienhauser et al. transl.) 267

Frequently Mentioned Commentators 313
Selected Recent Studies of the Shih chi 317
Index 321

vii

Acknowledgments

In the past nearly twenty-five years I’ve been reading the Shih chi with some
regularity, often with large groups of other students of the Shih chi. It has been a
memorable experience which has allowed me to meet with a number of scholars with
similar interests around the world. Strangely, as I read more of the text carefully, I
become less sure of things. This transformation made poignant recent comments by the
centarian M. H. Abrams:
The world of the prophet is a hot, intense world of total assurance that you have the
humanistic truth that you know what we must do to be saved‒and as such, it has
great contemporary appeal. In comparison with the hot world of prophecy, the
world of the liberal humanist is a cool world. What we need to get our students to
recognize is that the stance of the liberal humanist is a very difficult one, which
takes poise and courage to maintain.”1
The title for our translations could have been changed to Grand Scribes’ Records
[from Grand Scribe’s Records] to reflect evolving ideas about the authorship of the
Shih chi. This current assumption might be best summed up by citing Hans van Ess:
I am fully aware that his father Sima Tan must have written large parts of the Shiji .
. . There are good reasons to believe that some chapters of the Shiji as we have them
today go back to Sima Tan. . . .Yet I do not believe that is it possible to divide the
Shiji into one part that was written by Sima Qian and one that derives from the hand
of Sima Tan . . . I share Zhang Dake’s view (Shiji yanjiu ) . . . that the Shiji in the
end was finished by Sima Qian and that, should there really have been major
differences between his father’s views and his own, we cannot say very much about
them for sure today . . . For these reasons, whenever Sima Qian is mentioned . . . he
is seen as the final editor of the Shiji whose ideas we can analyze today.”2
The chapters in this volume have been produced and revised in various venues by
a host of scholars. I am grateful to all for their effort, their knowledge, and their

1 Cited from Vidyan Ravinthiran’s review of Abrams The Fourth Dimension of a Poem
(New York: Norton, 2012), Times Literary Supplement 24 May 2013: 12.
2 See van Ess, “Cosmological Speculations and the Notions of the Power of Heaven and
the Cyclical Movements of History in the Historiography of the Shiji,” BMFEA 78 (2006). 79
[79–107], n. 2. See also my own statements on the authorship question in Grand Scribes’
Records, 5.1 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), xviii–xix), Grand Scribes’
Records, 8 (2008), p. ix and n. 3, and especially “Sima Qian and the Shiji,” Oxford History of
Historical Writing, Volume I: Beginnings to AD 600. Grant Hardy and Andrew Feldherr, eds.
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 474.

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