SOURCE: Cohen, Alvin P. “Avenging Ghosts and Moral Judgement in Ancient Chinese Historiography: Three Examples from Shih-chi.” In Legend, Lore, and Religion in China: Essays in Honor of Wolfram Eberhard on His Seventieth Birthday, edited by Sarah Allan and Alvin P. Cohen, pp. 97-108. San Francisco: Chinese Materials Center, 1979.

In the following essay, Cohen analyzes three instances of the avenging ghost motif in the Shih chi, positing that these episodes show the historian's desire for justice.

The compilation of the Spring and Autumn Annals in the fifth century b.c.e. changed the motivations for writing history in ancient China through the development of an important new concern. Besides such matters as the desire to make an accurate account of past events or to record the great deeds of men, there arose a strong impulse to compose a record of events that would be instructive to posterity, a...