Sima Qian

Sima Qian was born around 145 BCE into the office he would make immortal: his father Sima Tan held the post of taishi at the Han court, Grand Historian, a position combining the keeping of records with astronomy and the calendar. The father conceived the project of a complete history of the known world from the Yellow Emperor to the present, and on his deathbed, by the son's own account, charged him to finish it. Sima Qian traveled widely in his youth, visiting the sites and gathering the local traditions he would later weave into the book, and succeeded to the office around 108 BCE.

In 99 BCE he ruined himself by speaking in defense of Li Ling, a general who had surrendered to the Xiongnu after a doomed campaign. Condemned to death, he accepted the alternative of castration, an option normally taken as more shameful than dying, and explained why in his letter to his friend Ren An: the Shiji was unfinished, and a death that left it incomplete would make his life weightless, while the book, once done, would be worth the disgrace. He finished it, roughly 130 chapters spanning dynastic annals, chronological tables, treatises on subjects from rites and music to the calendar and the Yellow River, hereditary houses and collected biographies, and died around 86 BCE. Every subsequent dynastic history in China took its structure from his.

The Shiji is not a religious text, and that is exactly its value: it is the observant record of a court insider describing what the religion of early imperial China actually was. Its treatise on the feng and shan sacrifices is the fullest early account of the supreme rites of the Chinese state, the emperor's offerings to Heaven and Earth on Mount Tai, which Emperor Wu revived in Sima Qian's own lifetime with the historian's father in attendance until, painfully, he was excluded from the climactic ceremony. Around that treatise the book documents the whole religious apparatus of the age: the official cults and their altars, the diviners and dream interpreters, and the fangshi, the masters of esoteric techniques who promised Emperor Wu contact with immortals and drugs of deathlessness, described by Sima Qian with an irony that still reads clearly.

The book's hereditary house chapter on Confucius is the earliest connected biography of the sage, the account from which two millennia of images of Confucius descend, and its biographies preserve much of what is known of early Daoist figures, including the famous notice of Laozi that already presents him as half legend. Later dynasties canonized the Shiji as the first of the standard histories. For the atlas it stands as the great early witness to Chinese religion as practiced, recorded by a historian who watched much of it from inside the court.