2 Table of Contents Title Page Introduction TRANSLATOR’S NOTE ON THE TEXT SHI JI 5: THE BASIC ANNALS OF QIN SHI JI 6: THE BASIC ANNALS OF THE FIRST EMPEROR OF THE QIN SHI JI 15: REFLECTIONS ON THE RISE OF THE QIN SHI JI 68: THE BIOGRAPHY OF LORD SHANG SHI JI 71: THE BIOGRAPHIES OF SHULI ZI AND GAN MOU SHULI ZI GAN MOU GAN LUO SHI JI 72: THE BIOGRAPHY OF THE MARQUIS OF RANG SHI JI 73: THE BIOGRAPHIES OF BAI QI AND WANG JIAN BAI QI WANG JIAN SHI JI 79: THE BIOGRAPHIES OF FAN JU AND CAI ZE CAI ZE SHI JI 85: THE BIOGRAPHY OF LÜ BUWEI 3 SHI JI 86: THE BIOGRAPHIES OF THE ASSASSIN-RETAINERS (EXCERPT) SHI JI 87: THE BIOGRAPHY OF LI SI SHI JI 88: THE BIOGRAPHY OF MENG TIAN SHI JI 126: THE BIOGRAPHIES OF WITS AND HUMORISTS (EXCERPT) ACTOR ZHAN Appendix One - SHI JI 48: THE HEREDITARY HOUSE OF CHEN SHE Appendix Two - SIMA QIAN’S LETTER TO REN AN INDEX Copyright Page 4 INTRODUCTION The Chinese, with their veneration of ancestors and reverence for the rites and practices of the past, have from early times been indefatigable keepers of historical records. It is not surprising, therefore, that works of history should occupy a place of particular importance in their literature. The text from which the chapters translated here are drawn, the Shi ji, Records of the Grand Historian — or Historical Records, as the title is sometimes translated — is in fact one of the most widely read and influential of all works of early Chinese literature, and its author, Sima Qian (145?–89? BC), commands among readers of Chinese a respect and admiration comparable to that accorded Herodotus or Thucydides in the Western tradition. The Shi Ji was planned, and perhaps written in part, by Sima Qian’s father, Sima Tan (d. 110 BC), an official who held the title of Taishi, or Grand Historian, at the court of Emperor Wu of the Han dynasty but whose actual duties pertained more to astronomy and the regulation of the calendar. Sima Qian succeeded to his father’s post and title and, obedient to his father’s dying request, set about bringing the proposed work of history to completion. After some seven years of labor, however, his efforts were unexpectedly interrupted by a tragic turn of events. China at this time was frequently troubled by raids from the Xiongnu, a nomadic people living in the desert north of China. Emperor Wu, determined to put an end to the incursions, repeatedly dispatched large military forces to the desert region in an attempt to capture the Xiongnu ruler, known by the title of Shanyu, or at least force him to acknowledge fealty to the Han. During one such expedition in 99 BC, a young military commander named Li Ling led a force of several thousand men in a daring raid deep into enemy 5 territory, but after desperate fighting he was finally forced to surrender. Emperor Wu, who expected his military leaders to die in battle, was enraged when he learned of the surrender, and the other court officials united in condemnation of Li’s action. Only Sima Qian, who had known and admired Li Ling in the past, spoke out in his defense. For such temerity he was charged with attempting to deceive the ruler and handed over to the law officials for investigation, a process that involved imprisonment and torture. Eventually he was sentenced to undergo the penalty of castration. Customarily, a man of honor would commit suicide before submitting to such disgrace. But, as Qian explains in a letter to a friend translated in appendix 2 of this volume, he chose to suffer the shame of mutilation in order that he might finish the writing of his history. This price of completion, ghastly as it was, has assured him a place of honor among the world’s great historians. The Shi ji is monumental in scope and aim, running to 130 chapters and covering the entire known history of the Chinese people from its beginnings down to the time of the historian, a period of well over two thousand years. In addition, it includes chapters describing the lands and peoples of the areas of central Asia, Korea, and Vietnam that border China. It is thus in effect a history of the entire world as known to the Chinese of this early period. To impose order on this vast array of material, Sima Qian devised an entirely new historiographical form. He divided his history into five large sections, arranging his material by subject and suggesting by the section in which he placed it something of its importance and relative reliability. His work opens with twelve chapters entitled benji, or “Basic Annals,” which deal with the early dynasties of Chinese history or, in the case of the Han dynasty, with the reigns of individual rulers. Next come ten “Chronological Tables” that list in graph form the important events of 6 the past with their dates. These are followed by eight “Treatises” on such subjects as rites, music, astronomy, religious affairs, water control, and economics. Thirty chapters entitled “Hereditary Houses” come next, dealing for the most part with the histories of the various feudal states of ancient China. The work concludes with seventy chapters entitled liezhuan, “Biographies” or “Accounts” devoted to the lives of famous personages or to the foreign lands with which China had contact. These five large divisions of the history support and supplement one another in various ways, the different chapters pertaining to a single event or personage often varying subtly in treatment and angle of approach. Thus, although there is a certain degree of cross-referencing, one must take care to read all pertinent sections of the work in order to gain a full picture of any given subject. This type of formal arrangement, known as the “annal and biography form,” was adopted in later dynastic histories compiled under official auspices, and it exercised a great influence on the development of Korean and Japanese historiography. In two earlier volumes of translations from the Shi ji published in 1961 and reissued in slightly revised form in 1993, I presented material dealing with the founding and early years of the Han, the dynasty under which the historian lived and worked. In the present volume I have moved backward in time somewhat to focus on the chapters of Sima Qian’s work that relate to the preceding Qin, or Ch’in, dynasty, founded in 221 BC when the king of the state of Qin brought all of China under his rule and assumed the title of First Emperor of the Qin. The First Emperor, long regarded as one of the most influential and noteworthy of all Chinese rulers, has in recent years become the center of particular interest because of the spectacular life-size terracotta figures of Qin 7 period warriors that were discovered in excavations near his mausoleum in 1974. Sima Qian began his history with a chapter entitled “Basic Annals of the Five Emperors,” which describes five legendary sages who were said to have ruled the nation in the dawn of Chinese history. He followed this with three chapters dealing respectively with the Xia, Shang (or Yin), and Zhou dynasties, the Three Dynasties of antiquity that ruled China in succession in the early historical period. Sima Qian’s account of the Xia and Shang dynasties need not concern us here, but it should be noted that much of what he tells us about the early centuries of the Zhou dynasty has been confirmed or supplemented in recent years through the results of archaeological research. Thus from the late years of the Shang, and certainly from the Zhou on, we are on firm historical ground, though dates in this early period are uncertain. The Zhou, which was probably founded around 1045 BC, appears to have exercised fairly effective control over a wide area of northern China during the early years of its rule. But later, particularly after its capital was moved east to Luoyang in 770 BC, its power rapidly waned, and China was thereafter ruled by a number of feudal states that acknowledged nominal fealty to the Zhou king but in fact behaved as virtually independent political units. The Zhou royal house, despite its political weakness, continued in existence until its overthrow by the state of Qin in 256 BC. Sima Qian might therefore have begun his account of the Qin dynasty at that point and still preserved chronological continuity in his narrative. But, as he makes clear in his remarks on Qin history, he was intensely interested in origins, in the history of a state or ruling family not only in its period of greatest glory but in the long centuries that preceded that era of flowering, for in the actions of those earlier years, he believed, lay the key to an understanding of its later successes or failures. He 8 therefore began his account of the Qin dynasty with a “Basic Annals of Qin” chapter that in chronological terms runs parallel to his account of the Zhou dynasty and traces the beginnings of the Qin ruling family back to the age of the mythic Five Emperors. The chapter then describes the history of the state of Qin from its start as a tiny feudal domain on the far northwestern border of the Chinese cultural sphere, down through its subsequent stages of growth until the moment when, having gradually amassed power over the centuries, it was able to swallow up its rivals and unite China under a single rule. Sima Qian then added a second chapter in annals form in order to present a greatly expanded account of the momentous reign of the First Emperor, and that of his successor, the Second Emperor, when the dynasty was swiftly toppled by the rebellion that brought the Han dynasty to power. The events in the close of this chapter, therefore, dovetail with those described in the opening pages of my earlier volumes on the Han. Sima Qian’s dramatic portrait of the First Emperor in this chapter is one of the highlights of his history, skillfully juxtaposing examples of the grandiose rhetoric employed by the monarch to celebrate his achievements with grim accounts of the cruelty, folly, and oppression of the populace for which he has been remembered in later ages. But Sima Qian’s preceding chapter, in part because of the scanty sources available to him, is less colorful and at times consists of little more than a dry recital of military actions and steps in the slow process of territorial expansion. To better understand the events briefly referred to in the annals section of the Shi ji, one must always turn to the relevant chapters of the liezhuan section of Sima Qian’s history, which contains biographies of the prominent statesmen, military leaders, and thinkers of the period. I have accordingly followed my translations of the two annals pertaining to the Qin with ten chapters or excerpts from chapters dealing with the 9 lives of men who played an important role in Qin history. In all these chapters on Qin history, and in particular in the often seemingly disconnected welter of entries in “The Basic Annals of Qin” chapter, there are three overall processes that the reader will want to keep close watch on. First, of course, is Qin’s slow but virtually unceasing territorial expansion, a process often described in traditional Chinese histories as canshi , or “eating away in silkworm fashion.” Qin, beginning as a tiny feudal domain situated on the Wei River in present day Gansu Province, bit by bit expanded to the east and south, gradually moving its capital eastward until it had established it at Xianyang near the modern city of Xi’an in Shaanxi. This is the heart of the so-called “land within the passes,” a rich agricultural area protected on the north and south by mountain barriers and on the east by the Yellow River, where it flows south from the Ordos region and then turns abruptly east toward the sea. At first Qin’s ambition seemed to be merely to expand eastward as far as the Yellow River, thus fulfilling an ancient prophecy that the descendants of its ruling family would one day “water their horses at the Yellow River.” In time, however, Qin crossed the Yellow River to attack the states to the east, continuing its seemingly inevitable expansion in that direction, as well as southwest into the area of present-day Sichuan and southward into the Yangtze valley. A second and closely related process is that by which Qin incorporated newly acquired territory into its administrative system in the form of xian, or districts, and later in larger administrative units known as jun, provinces or commanderies. The junxian, or province and district system, as it came to be known, apparently did not originate in Qin and was employed in other feudal states of the period as well. 10