How the world works
Records of the Grand Historian
A record with a verdict
Records of the Grand Historian (Western Han · 104–91 BC) — A record with a verdict.
What actually happened?
The clearest sign of what kind of book it is sits in the table of contents. The Basic Annals are the section reserved for those who held the empire, and Sima Qian put Xiang Yu in it — a man who lost, who founded no dynasty, and who had been the enemy of the house then on the throne. Further down there is a chapter for merchants, in an age whose official line was that commerce should be suppressed; one for assassins; and one for men who kept their word outside the law. Nobody had ordered any of it.
The Grand Historian says
Every chapter closes with a paragraph of first-person judgement. He sympathises with losers, criticises power obliquely, defends merchants, dignifies assassins. These are positions, not the neutral voice of an official history — and he took them while serving the emperor he was quietly criticising.
History is written by the winners, except here. Xiang Yu, who lost everything, sits in the section reserved for rulers, because the weight of that life was judged to deserve the format.
Failure carries more information
The best portraits in the book are of the defeated: Xiang Yu, Han Xin, Wu Zixu. Success has complicated causes and a great deal of survivorship inside it. The ways of failing are fewer, more general, and easier to put to use.
Two thousand years before anyone wrote about survivorship bias, he had assembled a working catalogue of the ways a competent person comes apart.
The chapter on the money-makers
He was the first Chinese historian to write merchants into the record, in an era whose official position was that farming should be encouraged and trade held down. He treats economic activity as the base the society runs on, and the pursuit of wealth as a legitimate human motive.
He sets down how Fan Li and Zigong actually operated, treating the question of how money is made as a subject worth serious record.
No empty praise, nothing concealed
Ban Gu's six-character verdict a century later became the standard for the form: straight writing, checked facts, no flattery, no covering up. The hard half is the second one — the flaws of the people he admired, and the failures of his own side.
He gives Li Guang the line about the path that wears itself smooth beneath the tree, and also the eight hundred men who had surrendered and were put to death.
A judgement of one's own
His stated aim was to examine all that concerns heaven and man, to penetrate the changes of past and present, and to complete the work of one family. Not to record but to understand, not to repeat but to judge, and openly the view of one house rather than a pretence of neutrality.
A report that says plainly whose reading this is, and on what evidence, is more usable than one performing an objectivity it does not have.
How do I use it today?
When you want to understand a historical figure, go to the moment they failed first — the most valuable material in the Records is usually the Grand Historian's analysis of a loser. Success copies badly; how someone came apart is the part worth studying. And when you write up anything yourself, include the paragraph that says what you think, signed.
Deep read
Read alongside
Further
Lines to keep
I find myself in much perplexity. Is this so-called Way of Heaven right, or wrong?