Sima Qian organized the Records of the Grand Historian through basic annals, tables, treatises, hereditary houses, and biographies. Emperors, institutions, and many kinds of people entered the same historical work.

The book covers political events as well as groups such as merchants and wandering knights. Its biographical approach influenced later historiography and literature.

Textual history

The work that became the Shiji was begun by Sima Tan, who was Grand Historian (Tàishǐ, also translated "Grand Scribe") of the Han dynasty court during the late 2nd century BC. Sima Tan drafted plans for the ambitious work and left behind some fragments and notes that may have been incorporated into the final text. After Sima's death in 110 BC, the Shiji was continued and completed by his son and successor Sima Qian, who is generally credited as the work's author. The exact date of the completion of the Shiji is unknown. It is certain that Sima Qian completed it before 86 BC, which was approximately the year he died, with one copy residing in the imperial capital of Chang'an (present-day Xi'an) and the other copy probably being stored in Sima's home.

Little is known about the early reception and circulation of the Shiji. Several 1st-century BC authors, such as the scholar Chu Shaosun (fl. 32–7 BC), added interpolations to it. Ten of the Shiji's original 130 chapters were lost in the Eastern Han period (AD 25–220) and seem to have been reconstructed later.

The first commentaries to the Shiji date from the Northern and Southern dynasties (420–589) and the early Tang dynasty (618–907). Most historical editions of the Shiji included the commentaries of Pei Yin (5th century), Sima Zhen (early 8th century), and Zhang Shoujie (early 8th century). The primary modern edition of the Shiji is the ten-volume Zhonghua Book Company edition published in 1959 (revised in 1982), which is based on an edition created in the early 1930s by the Chinese historian Gu Jiegang.

Contents

The Shiji is around 526,500 Chinese characters in length, making it four times longer than Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War and longer than the Hebrew Bible. Sima Qian conceived and composed his work in self-contained units, with a good deal of repetition between them. His manuscript was written on bamboo slips, with 24 to 36 characters each, and assembled into bundles of around 30 slips. Even after the manuscript was allowed to circulate or be copied, the work would have circulated as bundles of bamboo slips or small groups. Endymion Wilkinson calculates that there were probably between 466 and 700 bundles, whose total weight would have been 88–132 pounds (40–60 kg), which would have been difficult to access and hard to transport. Later copies on silk would have been much lighter, but also expensive and rare.

Until the work was transferred to paper many centuries later, circulation would have been difficult and piecemeal, which accounts for many of the errors and variations in the text.

Sima Qian organized the chapters of the Shiji into five categories, which each comprise a section of the book.

Reliability and accuracy

Scholars have questioned the historicity of legendary kings of the ancient periods given by Sima Qian. Sima Qian began the Shiji with an account of the five rulers of supreme virtue, the Five Emperors, who modern scholars, such as those from the Doubting Antiquity School, believe to be originally local deities of the peoples of ancient China. Sima Qian sifted out elements of the supernatural and fantastic which seemed to contradict their existence as actual human monarchs, and was therefore criticized for turning myths and folklore into sober history.

It was commonly maintained that Ssuma Chhien could not have adequate historical materials for his account of what had happened more than a thousand years earlier. One may judge of the astonishment of many, therefore, when it appeared that no less than twenty-three of the thirty rulers' names were to be clearly found on the indisputably genuine Anyang bones. It must be, therefore, that did have fairly reliable materials at his disposal—a fact which underlines once more the deep historical-mindedness of the Chinese—and that the Shang dynasty is perfectly acceptable.