SOURCE: Allen, Joseph Roe, III. “Records of the Historian.” In Masterworks of Asian Literature in Comparative Perspective: A Guide for Teaching, edited by Barbara Stoler Miller, pp. 259-71. Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1994.

In the following essay, Allen credits Qian with shaping how the Chinese view both their history and themselves.

The Records of the Historian (Shi ji [Shih chi]) is the most important historiographic work in the Chinese tradition, which has always placed a great deal of value on such writing. But the influence of this text is not merely historiographic: it is profoundly literary and broadly cultural as well. The Records is arguably the best-known and most revered prose work written in classical Chinese, an assessment that is modern as well as traditional. It is also the primary text defining our understanding of classical and early imperial China. Moreover, its author, Sima Qian ([Ssu-ma Ch'ien...