Sima Guang directed the compilation of the Comprehensive Mirror for Aid in Government, arranging people and events from different regions into a year-by-year history. Compilers had to compare dates and accounts in different sources. Its examination of conflicting records shows the importance historians placed on contradictions in evidence.
An imperial historical project
The Zizhi Tongjian is a chronicle published in 1084 during the Northern Song dynasty. It provides a record of Chinese history from 403 BC to 959 AD, covering 16 dynasties and spanning almost 1400 years. The main text is arranged into 294 scrolls, each equivalent to a chapter—totaling around 3 million Chinese characters.
Emperor Yingzong commissioned Sima Guang to lead the historical project and supplied funding and permission to appoint assistants. The work took years of collaboration and was presented to Emperor Shenzong in 1084. Its importance was not confined to its first imperial readership. Later scholars condensed, rearranged, annotated, and continued it, helping make its account of the past accessible to different audiences. Those adaptations are part of the book's history of influence, rather than evidence that the original compilation was a single unchanging object.
Chronology and source comparison
Sima Guang departed from the format used in traditional Chinese dynastic histories, consisting primarily of 'annals' (jì) of rulers and 'biographies' (zhuàn) of officials. Instead, Sima shifted from a 'biographical style' (jìzhuàntǐ) to a 'chronological style' (biānniántǐ).
Initially, Sima Guang hired Liu Shu and Zhao Junxi as his main assistants, but Zhao was soon replaced by Liu Ban, a Han history expert. In 1070 Emperor Shenzong approved Guang's request to add Fan Zuyu, a Tang history expert. Because the Zizhi Tongjian is a distillation from 322 disparate sources, the selection, drafting, and editing processes used in creating the work as well as potential political biases of Sima Guang, in particular, have been the subject of academic debate.
Sima Guang explained that an annals-and-biographies arrangement could make it difficult to follow events dispersed among many chapters. He wanted a chronological history that brought related developments together and supplied examples useful to rulers. This purpose helps explain both the book's title and its organization. The result drew on many earlier sources, while the compilers' selections and judgments remained important. Its chronological order made comparison easier, but did not remove the need to assess which account to accept when sources disagreed.
Later adaptations
In the 12th century, Zhu Xi produced a reworked, condensed version of the Zizhi Tongjian, known as the Zizhi Tongjian Gangmu. This version was itself later translated into Manchu as Tung giyan g'ang mu, upon the request of the Qing Kangxi Emperor. This Manchu version was itself translated into French by Jesuit missionary Joseph-Anne-Marie de Moyriac de Mailla. His 12-volume translation Histoire générale de la Chine, ou Annales de cet Empire; traduit du Tong-kien-kang-mou par de Mailla (1777–1783) was published posthumously in Paris. The condensed Zizhi Tongjian Gangmu was also the main source for Textes historiques, a political history of China from antiquity to 906, published in 1929 by the French Jesuit missionary Léon Wieger.
The Zhonghua Book Company edition contains textual criticism made by Yuan dynasty historian Hu Sanxing. The philosopher Wang Fuzhi also wrote a commentary on Tongjian, titled Comments After Reading the Tongjian (Du Tongjian Lun).
Historian Rafe de Crespigny has published annotated translations of chapters 44 to 69 in three successive works under the titles A Hundred Years of Han (2025), Emperor Huan and Emperor Ling (1989), and To Establish Peace (1996), altogether covering 57–220 AD, building upon the publication of Achilles Fang's 1952 annotated translation of the next ten chapters (70–79) covering up to 265 AD. There are also self-published translations into English of chapters 1–8, covering the years 403–207 BC and some additional sections pertaining to the Xiongnu people.