The Grand Scribe's Records, Volume XI: The Memoirs of Han China, Part IV

by Sima Qian, William Nienhauser Jr (Editor), Guilia Baccini (Translation)

The Grand Scribe's Records, Volume XI presents the final nine memoirs of Ssu-ma Ch'ien's history, continuing the series of collective biographies with seven more prosopographies on the ruthless officials, the wandering gallants, the artful favorites, those who discern auspicious days, turtle and stalk diviners, and those whose goods increase, punctuated by the final account of Emperor Wu's wars against neighboring peoples and concluded with Ssu-ma Ch'ien's postface containing a history of his family and himself.

Genres: History, China

360 pages, Hardcover

Published July 31, 2019

About the author

Sima Qian (Szu-ma Chien; 司馬遷 c. 145 or 135 BC – 86 BC) was a Chinese historian of the Han dynasty. He is considered the father of Chinese historiography for his work, the Records of the Grand Historian, a Jizhuanti-style (纪传体) general history of China, covering more than two thousand years from the Yellow Emperor to his time, during the reign of Emperor Wu of Han. Although he worked as the Court Astrologer (Chinese: 太史令; Tàishǐ Lìng), later generations refer to him as the Grand Historian (Chinese: 太史公; taishigong or tai-shih-kung) for his monumental work. (Wikipedia)

Reviews

[James · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a scholarly work 2/3rds or more is footnotes and explanations, the short biographies and other bits may be of use to those writing about rulers and empires. I liked the Wandering Gallants section the most, The short bios read more like an RPG character at times than the scholarly treatment used nowadays. It's a short read for the most part, I was a bit slow with this because I dislike reading books on my PC. It's an unindexed e-book, hence the page numbers.

Useful bits:
Page
21 Weights and Measures
25 Ruthless Officials
52 Ta Yuan - life with the Hsuing-nu
72 Wandering Gallants - characters who are outside the law
89 Artful Favorites
96 Witty Courtiers
119 Diviners 1
129 Diviners 2
149 Those Whose G0ods Increase
203 Han Official Titles - an insanely long list of court officials