The Grand Scribes Records
VOLUME IX
The Memoirs of Han China, Part II
The Grand Scribes Records
VOLUME IX
The Memoirs of Han China, Part II
by Ssu-ma Chien
William H. Nienhauser, Jr.
Editor
J. Michael Farmer, Enno Giele, Christiane Haupt,
Li He, Elisabeth Hsu, William H. Nienhauser, Jr.,
Marc Nrnberger, and Ying Qin
Translators
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
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
2011 by William H. Nienhauser, Jr.
2019 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 SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Originally cataloged by the Library of Congress as
Ssu-ma Chien, ca. 145ca. 86 BC
[Shih chi. English]
The grand scribes records / Ssu-ma Chien William H. Nienhauser, Jr., editor Giulia Baccini [et al.], translators.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Contents: v. 1. The basic annals of pre-Han china
ISBN 0-253-34021-7
1. ChinaHistoryTo 221 BC 2. ChinaHistoryChin dynasty, 221207 BC. 3. ChinaHistoryHan dynasty 202 BC220 CE
I. Nienhauser, William H. II. Cheng, Tsai Fa. III. Title.
DS741.3.S6813 1994
931dc20 094-18408
ISBN 978-0-253-04609-3
1 2 3 4 5 24 23 22 21 20 19
THIS VOLUME IS DEDICATED TO
Alexander von Humboldt (17691859)
CONTENTS
(Lu Zongli)
(Elisabeth Hsu and William H. Nienhauser, Jr., translators)
(Marc Nrnberger, translator)
(William H. Nienhauser, Jr., translator)
(Li He and Ying Qin, translators)
(Enno Giele, translator)
(Enno Giele, translator)
(J. Michael Farmer, translator)
(Christiane Haupt, translator)
(Ho Tzu-chn and Sung Yn-pin)
Acknowledgments
Like most other volumes of this translation project, a substantial debt is owed to the Alexander-von-Humboldt Foundation for its continued support. Chapters 109, 110, and 112 were completed several years ago when our German Group was active in Munich supported in part by the Foundation. Chapter 106 and 107 were both partially completed with these funds. Moreover, the cooperation that the German Shih chi Group fostered has continued in various other forms. This volume is therefore dedicated to the great explorer and scholar Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859).
During the final several Humboldt sojourns our mentor in Germany was Hans van Ess. His role in helping to shape this volume and the preceding volume 8 has been vital. I should also like to thank the translators, who currently occupy posts from Arizona to Oxford and from Munich to Madison, for their skillful renditions and their practiced patience. Some of these manuscripts have waited nearly seven years to find their way into print.
This volume is published under sponsorship with the Council for Cultural Affairs, R.O.C., which came to our aid at a crucial point in the translation and editing of these chapters. The Councils funding also enabled us to employ the skills of an old friend and former key member of our Group, Scott W. Galer, who typeset everything between these covers and offered sagacious advice on preparing the final copy.
The Fifth International Workshop on the Shih chi, in part funded by a generous gift from Lena Dunn-Lo (in memory of Irving Yu-cheng Lo), took place in Madison from 22 to 24 August 2008. The guest-scholars were J. Michael Farmer, Enno Giele, Bruce Knickerbocker, Zongli L, and Marc Nrnberger, who respectively took the lead in discussing the draft translations of chapters 106, 107, 108, and 111.
As usual, the introductory pages were the last to be written. I am grateful to Barry Powell, who patiently lead me through Herodotus and offered numerous other sagacious suggestions on the comparison between the two great historians that opens the volume.
Once again, Teresa Nealon kept our finances, travels, workshops and spirits on track. On the home front another room has been donated to the Shih chi effortsthanks Judith!
William H. Nienhauser, Jr.
24 October 2009
Introduction
Herodotus and Ssu-ma Chien: A Preliminary Study of Styles and Sources in Their Early Chapters
No picture, then, and no history, can present us with the whole truth: but those are the best picture and the best historians which exhibit parts of the truth as most nearly produce the effects of the whole.
Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859)
It is funny, but it strikes me that a person without anecdotes that they nurse while they live, and that survive them, are more likely to be utterly lost not only to history but the family following them. Of course, this is the fate of most souls, reducing entire lives, no matter how vivid and wonderful, to those sad black names on withering family trees, with have a date dangling after and a question mark
Sebastian Barry, The Secret Scripture
I. Introduction
The two great historians of East and West, Herodotus (Hrdotos, ca. 484-ca. 425 B.C.) and Ssu-ma Chien (,145-ca. 86 B.C.), have been compared many times in the past. There are of course obvious differences: Herodotus focuses his Histories to the conflicts between the Greeks and the Persians, whereas Ssu-mas Grand Scribes Records (Shih chi )is an account of all known history up to his era. Moreover, their styles differ radically. Yet the similarities between them are striking. To begin with, their backgrounds are comparable. Herodotus hailed from Halicarnassus, on the coast of Asia Minor near the frontier with the Persians; Ssu-ma Chien was from Han-cheng , a provincial town near the border lands which the Hsiung-nu, the people just to the north of the Han-dynasty empire, often raided. Both men spent little time, however, in their hometowns, gathering much of their source material through conversations with people they met in their extensive travels. Each wrote only one major work and died shortly after completing it. Herodotus Histori (Inquiries) and the Shih chi (Records of the [Grand] Scribe) were the first complete histories in their respective cultures. Moreover, unlike the local character of most early histories in Greece (cities) and China (states), Herodotus and Ssu-ma Chien presented narrative accounts of their entire known world for the first time in their respective cultures.
Herodotus wove disparate materials into a single focusthe causes and effects of the wars with the Persians. Ssu-ma Chien took similarly diverse sources and shaped them into what some feel were reflections on the policies and politics of the single ruler under whom he spent most of his life, Han Wu-ti (r. 141-87 B.C.), focusing on those policies which dealt with the military methods the emperor employed against the Hsiung-nu.
